Some Cut Sections of Lola (prescient Arnold sections?)
Hi you dedicated readers --
these sections were cut some time in the last two years. You'll see how Arnold, as Arx, the governor, used to be a figure in the novel. There were also a bunch of countercultural protestors marching to Old Parcel to release Vic. It was all a bit much, clearly. But if you like seeing extras, here they are:
THE GOVERNOR
Seventh of June, 2010
You were waiting a long time? he says to his mother.
Her hands patiently folded. Her stance indicates that long ago she has given up on his understanding of the value of her time. The white gloves with lace eyelets, the orange skirt-suit, her nylons. Always dress up when going to the doctor's, otherwise they don't treat you well. It goes beyond underwear, it's about class, especially if you're an immigrant. This had been one of her many lessons to him.
That she has refused to drive for years: she brooks no inquiries. Does she have a phobia? Apparently. Long ago, when his father had been alive, she had driven, because the son has evidence: a photo of her in a prim lipsticked smile above the oversize driver's wheel of a big cream sedan.
Her constraint now means he – or a requisitioned intern – must drive her everywhere. This driving phobia keeps her connected to people, that's what his aide thinks. Otherwise she'd drift away in a sea of slow deaths, special holiday lunches at the senior center and early-bird senior specials at the fish restaurant she favored, though it is not money she needs to hoard exactly. She'd glow dimly, holding onto the deepwater pearl chain on her reading eyeglasses, glasses glinting back at a circle of bluewash ladies, a circle prone to attrition, trying to show one another the grip on status or youth each could retain.
Her circle compiled a world of last things, speaking of lost things: This place is getting so crowded. Which meant an invasion by the young with their bad habit of bumping the elderly off into overcrowded cemeteries filled with old friends. I used to think it was old people who were the bad drivers which meant the younger team was resorting to sneaky tricks in order to once again shove elders off the road. Looking for a golf cart which implied a quest for a vaguely masculine, moneyed preserve governed by reason and luck in knowable, manicured quantities where youth, presbyopia or driving licenses mattered less.
He drives her to the appointment. They are not late, not late enough that they don't have to wait for the doctor in a sea of other people stewarded by those with a closer relation to vitality. When they finally get to see the doctor, ready to discuss the x-ray in a blue-lit sideroom marked EVENTS, the doctor's professional tone rewarded their long wait, striking notes of gravity and efficiency.
What looks like a fish is caught in her lungs. It will spread fast.
Couldn't it just get out? Maybe you swallowed a bone, mother, says Arx, a feeble joke-device to raise her spirits. Unsuccessful. How delicate are her actual bones, flesh draped like seaweed over them, how small she looks in that blued room, as if she could lift up off the rotating stool to float about. Her eyes so big and vulnerable, he wishes he could take back everything he'd ever done wrong. Her main sin in life being she'd loved her son too much when he'd been a child. Too much, she had kissed him too much. He'd been her favorite, he'd known it, he'd felt every quiver of that vain birdheart; the world could never compete with that degree of love.
But how hard to linger on her teetering edge of life when he so much preferred a jog on the beach, the cutting edge of the future. Loved to feel the threat of kids today, gameplayers today, multibillionaires shuffling money tomorrow. Virtual reality: he'd read about it, liked the idea of helping fund it, of moving into other spheres, however little his donors would back untested initiatives, however much California was known for change.
In his adolescence, given her frail grasp on life, his heart had grown stiff against his mother until the day that, faced with the prospect of graduating from college, he'd realized, hey, she's there for me. It was she who, all those years before, had driven him to all those swim team meets. She'd encouraged him to become the top-ranked swimmer in the state and an Olympic-team elect; had cheered him on through college, her lipstick prim, her perch forever awkward on the bleachers. Number one!
And if he hadn't had an elbow injury right before the 1984 Olympics: well, there were a thousand ways to finish the sentence, and he was living out one of them. Sidelined by genetics or overuse or chance, how could you tell? But regret wastes you, as his old coach used to say. It was while finishing his master's in Sports Psych, his plan B, that Arx had decided to move back in with his mother. He couldn't help it. Already, though he didn't know enough to name the phenomenon, his face had begun to dissolve and he needed the shoring-up. He'd sleep with a girl and then the next morning, or in the preferable sneaking-away hour, he'd try finding himself in her mirror. The high small eyes; all cheek, barely any mouth or ears. Lacking the usual pronouncement of orifice. His coach had marveled how well Arx had done for such a foreigner, and when Arx had tried finding himself in the mirror, he would think it was as if he had forcibly ingested America, so that even hearing his mother's slight Liechtensteinian accent could annoy him, could create enough of a field that he knew who he was. To strangers, he called her French. And this the case however much about her he loved, down to her insistence on placing white lace handkerchiefs over the top of every piece of furniture, even over plastic-covered pillows.
For her new condo, he'd bought seventies-style furniture because there'd never been a decade more suited to his bachelor temperament, though the eighties had served as a nice corrective, coincident with the augmentation of his spending power, an individual in free-society America. It didn't hurt, now in another century, to have seventies furniture with a spot of lace. Once he was elected—and what a grace that had been, old buddies from his swimming years coming forward from cracked-tile lives to testify about what a great mayor he'd been for the town of Carmel, all his buddies who'd helped swing voters – he had known that his entire life had led up to this glory. And still he didn't want to live in the governor's mansion, preferring to stay with Mom, though no television crews, that was the one rule, or else they'd discover that his separate quarters were in fact not so separate, that he and his mother supped together quite frequently and he could just imagine how that would go.
An infant as governor. But since when had motherlove become a crime? He felt so noble toward her. By dint of his brute maleness, he protected her, and imagined he might die for her cause if not for a more popular one.
On the ride back from the doctor she asks: What does the X-ray mean?
He is unable to stop the words before they slipped out of his mouth: Now they'll want to test you to death.
He was going for his usual late afternoon swim on the rooftop pool of the condo and, swim trunks in his hands, just before he'd entered the locker room, he'd noted an odd dirty clotting in the water. A young man in a porkpie hat passed him by quickly, going to the informal office he kept among young ladies in a poolside cabana.
Everyone in the pool looked impossibly young and long-limbed.
What's going on here? he asked one of the young gods lying nearby.
Toxic sludge but it's okay, the chlorine neutralizes it. The young god pounced up and tried to catch a football lobbed over the pool from the other side by one of his buddies.
Not toxic sludge. It binds with chlorine and makes chloroform, his female companion said to Arx.
He startled, seeing her in bikini. What was her name again? Maria, the night-guard's daughter. It came back to him. The science fair. Torremolinos. No one ever recognizes him: he is used to this, the effect of his facelessness. They recognize him behind a podium or on a screen but not many other places.
What are you doing here? he asked her.
Max lets me come here to swim, she said. Arx didn't know any Max, though maybe one of the young gods had this unlikely name.
Meanwhile, all smooth skin, impossible fruit.
You like to swim? she said, nonplussed.
Did she know who he was?
Today I'm not sure, he said. This was unusual. Usually he'd want to parade his limbs, show how well he'd kept himself up. Your dad's not really the guard, is he? he said, making conversation, strenuously avoiding her skin: it really couldn't be much barer. (Despite the little cloth triangles which, in a magic show, stayed adhered to her flesh.)
Just one of his jobs, she said. He moonlights.
Arx had to remind himself what moonlighting meant.
He also works at the prison.
Oh. What does he do there?
Um, the refectory? Brings food to guys on death row, you know? Her lilting speech emphasized her greater lease on life. The young god came back, panting; she blushed, pinched his waist. Already some sort of congress entitled them to be intimate. With the god she dove into the pool, awkward and adolescent, legs fanned into a back-flop, little triangles of cloth performing: she emerged with the triumph of laughter.
He was left, conversation cut off.
He thought he'd go down to the lower level where the big hot tub was. But when he made it out of the locker room in his briefs to enter the hot tub, it had already become dark. He usually liked eavesdropping on hot-tub conversation, but today some shadowed busybody narrated gubernatorial ups and downs. Facelessness a mixed karma; certain moments he would have liked to be recognized. Odd genetic fortune, good or bad, had gifted him with that small-featured American look, and to this destiny he'd been true: the swim-team player who stands in line at a cafeteria to get three glasses of kool-aid, a couple flanks of steak, mounds of breastlike mashed potatos.
ARX
Eighth of June, 2010
After a bad night, up the highway, the governor does a bit of the Russian Army calisthenics an uncle had taught him when he was a child. Bend at the knees, hands out parallel to the ground, jerk back up straight. He used to do this, privately, in the john before swim meets; the practice still helps clear the mind.
December eighth.
The governor.
He sometimes likes saying the title to himself.
When faced with conundra. It seems to help him choose what little is left him to choose, correctly, in accordance with past mandates and future campaigns.
Go-ver-nor.
Guh = a sound opened up, expansive like his childhood's first sight of California coastline, unlike the castle-turrets inserted within the Germanic phonemes of his childhood.
Ver = suggesting efficient systems for the manipulation of others.
Nor = suggesting signed, done deals.
= all of which equals legacy or, more blatantly, eternity.
Diese Neigung in den Jahren dawir alle Kinder waren viel allein zu sein war mild.
In Santa Barbara, mas o menos, the governor. Facing the usual three piles of documents on his desk that morning. He has asked his aide, a man whom he suspects may be gay but let everyone live their life -- away from the campaign trail who cares about that personal stuff?-- to organize his papers into three piles each morning: A, B, and C priorities, with A being simultaneously IMPORTANT AND URGENT, B being IMPORTANT BUT NOT URGENT, C being URGENT BUT NOT NECESSARILY IMPORTANT.
Part of a time management system Arx, as friends call him, had learned years ago in a weekend seminar.
In truth, Arx prefers the old-fashioned feel of paper curling toward him, bearing the lost imprint of someone else's hand, to this Node which they'd implanted, almost imperceptible, an encirclement of the forearm, pushed back from his signing wrist.
He can pull up his shirtsleeve and see it: small, waterproof, indestructible, with its blue glowing display screen. Often -- right now – can find himself warming to it, as it forms a part of his daily life, much as his shaving brush stands ready for him, or the three piles sit there, five days a week. The absolute constancy of the Node shocks him as much as how readily he took it on, such a show of hospitality for this little blue screen which he cannot remove until the moment he steps down from office. But he thinks of it as friendly, because the node tells him what masses of Californians, stationed up and down what he has begun to think of as his state, are voting for at that exact moment. Early birds. They perform their simple click of computer mice and percentages on his wrist change. Streams of people right now choosing to weigh in on, he checks the first topic, on whether or not Vic should fry, as the tabloids put it, a topic which has swallowed their attentions for much of this last month.
Displayed in Jack's ingenious code, the tail-end of number-crunching and statistics: 72.1% FOR VIC'S END his wrist reads before flickering, in a morning convulsion of dyspepsia, up to 72.4%.
Of course California would have been selected to take on this trial form of government, one that lets you abolish middlemen, allowing the vox populi to hold sway. Click click and thousands of people told him their opinions, weighing in on his wrist. Choice reigns.
If Arx looked back at his early life, his bookishness, lost in fantasy tales of cowboys and Indians in which he was always the Indian brave who could stand up to the cowboys, who would not be the one to sell his homeland over for a few shell necklaces, he remembered few other children. In a fog he seemed to have glided through elementary school, protected by amnesia and oblivion, at best a passable student. Yet the fog didn't preclude devotion to mama's rise and fall, the devotional hole she had given him that he had to fill, his mother's mood the only watermark that mattered. After school he'd hung out with no other kids. For such tightly domestic habits, the Old World doing its best to make sense of suburbia, he endured his share of mockery – FourEyes, what you staring at? wiener so small you can't find it on mousepoop — his head down as he passed, while inside that head there plotted fantasy tales of revenge in which all bowed as he stood, bare-chested and humongous, atop a mountain. After a struggle determining the fate of his people, he heaved aloft a lion's bloodied leg. He knew all the secret paths back to his house at 613 Sequoia Drive, and these became a friend: the dog that barked impotently from behind the tall wooden fence, the wing-shaped plum leaves, the secret ceramic cat hidden high in the crook of someone's tree.
A nonentity on the screen of so many. At the start of ninth grade he saw how some boys had already attained hero status among others: the vision singed. After the crack in his oblivion, he'd hurried home and in an uncharacteristic rush of self-disclosure had confided panic to his mother: I can't go through with it, he'd said about high school. Join a team, she'd said. I can't, he'd said, anyway, which? It doesn't matter, just join. A ray piercing out of her self-concern. Usually she stayed in a cloud: Which neighbor had slighted her? Was the family going to have baked salmon on Friday? Had the butcher overcharged for the lamb chops? Should she organize a ladies' card night? Did the gas company make a mistake on the bill? Should she decal her nails? Had her younger sister been too rushed on the phone? Had her best friend Sheryl purposely crimped her hair when giving her a permanent? Now she emerged enough so that for once she might actually give him advice that mattered.
He remembered it as an ascent, his name the last on the swim team, GUNTHER ARX. Escape from the stifling powdered afternoons with his mother, when the two sat on the pagoda-patterned couch before the television, his hand on the rim of the popcorn bowl, hers hovering never far from a Macedonian jeweled box of emery boards and lucent polishes. And still, after he learned he'd done okay in the try-outs, to this same mother he'd uttered a silent prayer of thanks, his mother who with latent Darwinism had enough decency to insist on swim lessons every summer. A path could twist out of isolation.
So swim team came to save him, swimming which some quirky genetic endowment, some barrel-rib fish genes on his father's side, must have uniquely outfitted him for. Swimming that lifted him out of the awkward popularity trial of early adolescence, handing him wholesale an unquestioned intimacy among boys. Scores, seasonal averages, back-claps of understanding, carb-loading the night before a meet, red-plate spaghetti dinners and bags of chocolates. You did your lengths, you perfected the butterfly, you remembered your line before a dive, and together you bumped against one another on the predawn bus as your team went national.
Once you got the hang of being a boy among other boys, a lesson which Arx had missed out on, once you learned to enjoy being teased, you had enough confidence to approach high-school girls, those who'd only recently shed poodle skirts and now wore t-shirts bearing slogans or did previously unheard-of things such as wear all white past Labor Day, girls shiny with blush and rose perfume and the secret of training bras, hair enticing down by their shoulders or pulled back, giggling in undulations along the party's wall, leaving in creamy gaggles to reapply peach elements to parts of their body, all while you were supposed to have magically instructed your left foot and right foot how to master the box step so you could lead with magisterial command. Don't be a 90-pound weakling! Kick sand on the beach bully!
When it had been proposed that California be the trial state for the Implanted Node experiment, as it was called, the friendly little blue screen on his wrist the tail end of sophisticated computers in a room somewhere, fiendishly crunching numbers, Arx had been struck for at least one crucial second by the way in which this question of the Node echoed that important transition from childhood disgrace, the moment he'd moved an inch toward salvation, the crack in which he'd made an important choice, when it had come as insight that he could plot his sense of worth by how many people cared about him. Numbers mattered. Numbers at a meet, numbers of teammates embracing you in a hug, numbers of those fearing you on other teams.
Later in life, constituents had voted for him. He had already been saved a few times by numbers. And so, in similar spirit – why not be the first governor to try a method that, as its inventor had explained, made useless that whole semi-outdated check-and-balance necessity of democracy? Checks and balances obviated by the actual, changing will of the people.
The Node's inventor being a slim, taut bald man with tattoos, lowset eyes and a lizard's smile, his handshake reptile-damp, his accent untraceable, his pride in his patent unmistakable. When the inventor, seated with Arx in the gubernatorial gazebo overlooking the Santa Barbara mountains, spoke off-record about the flickering will of the people, about the uncatchable modern stream of information, about how with the Node one always gets to make decisions based on that minute's most recent information – Arx had trembled. The cusp of the future!
And he had been for it immediately; especially what with Jack and others he respected cottoning to the proposal. Not hard to form a cabal of yes-men around the initiative. That Arx ended up being such a fervent Node proponent came from an old sense of himself: had he not formed this idea of himself as being for the new? (While his secret heart still loved the yellowed lace antimacassars of his mother's house). Out in the world he would always be for the chatterbox conviviality of the new, while at home he was for habits so encased and isolating, his life might have been built by layers of dried insect scat.
Seeing the glowing screen now, this Vic Mahler business, Arx marveled at how much this Mahler fellow had seized the popular imagination. Was it merely that this Mahler fellow had been a white professor? Or, as Jack had said, that Mahler had known his share of followers, dippy hippies as Arx thought of them (though Arx was not above generosity toward the dippy hippies). He was governor and could understand the dippies' quest: seeking a team to join, right?
Because he'd had a bad night, however, seeing the blue screen glow and glow again its obvious message – the end of Vic Mahler -- for the first time since its advent Arx wished to remove the Node. For the first time it appeared that this shackle would never let him go, the voice of the people a giant set of teeth, all the better to catch him. And did that clicking electorate know anything about Vic Mahler? Could they not turn such blood-thirst against Arx?
The Node had a trade name that no one had ever used, chosen by its quirky bald-lizard inventor. The Pied Piper, the inventor had said, and now Arx thinks he understands why: a bunch of mice chased the Pied Piper of the perfect choice.
Arx pulls down his sleeve, hurriedly, turns back to the three paper piles Jack has set forth before him. In each pile this morning, however, is mention of the Mahler case.
Is Jack slipping a bit?
In the A pile:
Two Groups Planning a Protest on Rancher's Land near Old Parcel prison down Highway Five.
In the B pile:
statutes related to Exemptions to the Death Penalty and Medical Assessments of the Old Parcel prisoner Mahler.
Also:
Special Permissions Granted the Governor to Strike Down Public Protests Held on Private Agricultural Lands.
In the C pile:
Multiple phone messages from a Los Angeles writer named Etta Seemans mentioning the Mahler case.
Also one phone message from golfing bud Graham.
Different angles but aren't they all on the same topic? Shouldn't Jack have just included them in one pile?
Is nothing going on with the state's debt reduction? Or what about the new education bill? What has happened to feedback loops, information? Has prisoner Mahler swallowed the other topics? Arx feels a dull vibration on his wrist but keeps his shirtsleeve down, does not check.
In truth, it is Arx's first term and he is still getting the hang of the job. Even had he lacked the spinball thrown by the Node, exact air-time ratios, contours and proportions would have defied him.
He tries reading more closely. From the skim, it looks like Mahler's case is coming up for review this week: the guy's appeals have run out. There must have been a slew of radio shows or articles whipping up the people, hence the repeated throb, urgent on his wrist, which won't quit until he consents to view the screen and press the VIEWED button.
Jack's yellow-flagged questions are these: did diagnosis of lung cancer for a murderer justify early medical release?
Pulse, pulse. VIEWED.
The case had gone federal when no one was watching. Now Arx has to weigh in. Given his openness to innovation, a backdoor exists, a not insignificant one. He could merely submit to the flickering will of the people, lay himself open like a gutted fish. The moment would go down in the recordbooks as:
STATUTE 2.4, DECEMBER 11, 2008, VOX POPULI EDICT, VICTOR MAHLER VS.THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA.
Or he could go the old-fashioned route, the old cowboy-pulling-the-reins model, exert gubernatorial control, levy the charge that the guy's appeals have run out. Pull the plug on his life, throw the electricity.
Sizzle: the word is awful.
As Arx reads on, the true question becomes: should the prisoner go to his end in ten days (electric calipers or venipuncture, another question being debated by top anaesthesiologists at that moment, as a few had backed out from service to the state and it had proven unseemly and difficult to find qualified replacements)?
Or should Vic be released, either to the outside world or at the very least, a min-security up north. Jack has written up what Arx liked to call the Daily Short-'n'-Maximum, the SM for short:
Arx –
two groups have moved in on the rancher's land.
Already set up a shantytown of tents, quarreling with each other. Women Against Violence, called WAVE, against the No Death Penalty (NoDope) people.
Freak splinter groups in both parties share the same opinion.
Mass of each arrayed against the other group.
WAVE ladies want the guy to stay on death row at the state's expense. "Mahler has committed a heinous crime against one of our own."
NoDope people want him released into either minimum-security or out into the world. NoDope has a group of Carmelite nuns on their side.
While Arx can follow most of that, he still thinks Jack must be some kind of frustrated writer – quarreled, okay, but arrayed? who still uses words like arrayed in a memo, for god's sake? -- but the Carmelite nuns throw Arx.
Any mention of religion makes a Catholic flicker rise in his gut and then dissipate. A momentary confusion. Carmelite. Carmela of Tiajuana saying Ay cabron!
He can't read anymore, heads turning into tails.
It always comes down to money and real estate, Arx tries reminding himself. This had helped greatly during his first California job, served as both dowsing rod and catechism. Money and real estate. Then the idea comes. Rifle through the files, look up the rancher. If private property rules allowed the rancher to rent to groups whose spectacle was about to muddy Arx's first term, maybe some provision could reverse the situation without anyone turning this into some kind of free-speech free-for-all.
As Jack would say, a quagmire, but he'd been born during Vietnam and doesn't own rights to use the word. Not that Arx does but at least in so many other ways he was entitled. Age does that to you. And not that Arx feels himself to be old, not at all, just that he isn't some puppy off the farm puling around using words like quagmire to get adult dogs to listen. You don't need anyone to listen once you're governor. In fact sometimes you want them to stop listening.
Jack's annotations say the rancher is absentee, living on an island off Santa Barbara, collecting a fee through some trustee for any group ready to pay for the use of his fallow land. Fallow?
Money and real estate. If no one were looking, the rancher probably would've rented to the Klan or some kind of terrorist cell ready to blow up everyone's idea of America.
Disgusted, Arx reads the memo of the phone message from Graham, his buddy who'd organized the big Golfing Society of America benefit, with its headquarters down in Laguna Beach and its beautiful stationery that shamed you, its ivory weave and Scottish heraldry and elegant letters a helpful reminder that certain lands must be kept in stewardship for one of the world's oldest ongoing recreational sports. A short handwritten note: Follow your principles on this one, guy, Graham had said, not being one of those guys who hid the message. Essentially, Arx gets it, Graham says he shouldn't forget the worldly offerings which had gone into the effort that had gotten him at his desk today. Arx could understand such principles. This was a backslap, reminding him of the old steroid days, when he'd been filled with such a constant need for human intercourse.
Come help me make sense of this messed-up prison stuff, Jack! Arx yells to his aide, leaning back in his ergonomic chair, having not intended the tinge to his voice: panic. Though he could have said get your butt in here, the words that had occurred to him.
His aide, in the other room, screws the top back on a thermos he keeps in his lower locked desk drawer. With equivalent frisk, he shouts back: Coming!
HOPE SPRINGS
Fifth of June, 2010
You can say we're farther from the original spirit which could make you sad but in another sense we're CLOSER to the end of the days, but that's a mystic CONCEPT. It is said in the book that all the EXTRANJEROS will return to their lands, and you can see in our new immigration laws that this has COME to pass, so it is not a bad thing, one just has to accept FATE.
A radio played its low buzz of oracle speech, a talk-radio tune. The young aspirants filed past, some awed, some terminally angry or searching for a father. Some already saved. No matter the banality of origins, they'd come to congregate in a circle. A teach-in, as they'd told one another, to be held upon the redwood platform.
Drawn by text messages (C U @ HOPE 12-08?) hinted at in certain exclusive blogs, whispered among hemp-tents at rainbow gatherings, chewed over by wearers of lip-rings, discussed among tattooed shirtless elite, mud-people at country fairs or at gatherings in honor of burning effigies. No matter. From sidewalk of town and burb, from lawn and forestbed, night crawlers, day-job-holders, welfare-check-signatees, as one they had arisen, come undercover to Hope Springs, each promised a fateful meeting in the gazebo at midnight.
Upon arrival at Hope, they'd heard that the famous Native American activist flown to meet them from a different desert altogether would prefer to convene out in the elements. Crowlike. It could have been guessed. At a redwood platform, up in the trees, the only witness to whiteness the activist and galaxies.
A bit windy up there on the platform but still.
The famous activist of course would have methods for the proto-kamikaze maneuver. Through his channels it had become clear that he had wished to enlist a special group of people, and those gathered from diverse habitats, shivering on the redwood platform, had self-identified as special. To put a microscope on it, some may have felt that specialness was killing them, specialness a sentence casting them into the ranks of the terminally unsatisfied, determined to make change. Wear specialness too long and it becomes your cross. Still, what made this meeting particularly special lay in how they had heard the word, the word coming at anointed moments – I was serving a wheatgrass smoothie, my customer mentioned it and I knew! Or I was cashing a check from my new pamphleteering job but when I heard, I had to drop everything.
Because this was to be a Maneuver as in the early-seventies days of Maneuvers: a Maneuver to end all others, like certain stunts the activist had mounted back before he'd had to go into hiding from the FBI, not long after the time of Baader-Meinhof. All details get buried in the sands of time, becoming older people's history, but was it not sort of cool to mention the FBI in the same breath as your summer plans? A cool calibrated to elicit panic in its listener – a listener, thus delegated, felt mostly fear for the fate of the future maneuverite – and this panic created community for people whose specialness had isolated them too long. The community being a loving audience, a mommy saying stop! Or don't go there, it's too dangerous! Join the Maneuver and you'd get to be part of by being apart from. Into your twenties, thirties, even forties and the unthinkable beyond, get to be an adolescent and infant at the same time! Being apart from helped express anger at all the absentee parents of the world, and there within your Maneuver you found presto new loving eyes and hands, comrades ready to share in caring, deep listening, or at least group back massage.
The most recent moment the activist was known for was his famous Utolab experiment, out in Arizona, back in the day. Utolab for which, from distinct if more handpicked habitats, the activist had convened twenty-one people diverse in age and ambition. For Utolab he'd canvassed. Choosing both those receiving welfare checks in ironcrud government housing and those receiving trust fund checks in well-armed Tudor mansions, mirrors posted at every curve of a twisting driveway. In Utolab, the activist had wished to pose a social question none too original but all too relevant, given America's troubled class and race history: could everyone just get along?
The implication being: if under the activist's tutelage this experiment didn't work, when would it?
Long before the rise of reality television, before desertbound festivals restituted one idea of anarchic creation, Utolab happened. A few who'd made it through had been the ones to go found the original burning-effigy festival, which made others feel they had missed out on yet another moment, as if every year you were doomed to arrive too late to Guy Fawkes day.
During Utolab, for five months, the residents weren't allowed to leave the precincts, a Bedouin tent city they'd erected. Volunteers brought in water and food for the human test subjects, shipped out waste, the rent on the land paid by liberal mommies and daddies.
Lore had it that, given the pressures of truly engaging with twenty other people, some participants went catatonic, while others felt that never before had they truly lived. Of course the underground publicity had set Dram up for a big fall if the whole thing had flopped, which it came close to doing. Had it not been for what saved him and Utolab: an out-of-print tract written by some white guy, Vic Mahler:
The Future of Love, a prescient work in which Mahler had worked in the interstices of game theory to lay out various rules for optimal coordination of social systems, surpassing those found in the scrambled forebrains of most people.
Before Dram had discovered the tract, Day 13 of Utolab, during morning circle Dram had seen that no one was speaking. The hostility so thick you could hear its buzz. At the back of his neck Dram intuited that a murder could happen, an instinct which never had failed. Words came to his tongue, evanesced before he could speak. Demoralized. How had they gotten to such a sad point?
To stop the spiral, one inspired guy had just begun reading forth some odd rules from a thumbed book. To Dram's amazement, a few people nodded, slowly. Later Dram would frame the moment for everyone: Mahler's hallowed tenets had helped the group come to recognize the truth of itself. A valiant struggle against the forces of anomie, apathy, and individualism that waged their own bloody wars outside Utolab.
To the assembled, the man read the entire set of rules. Finally, group dynamics worked in Dram's favor: as if one organism, one body with a single heart and brain, the twenty-one Utolab participants agreed to abide by the rules. A new covenant struck, thanks to Vic Mahler: the man had saved the day.
While Dram does not quite remember Mahlerian rules anymore, or scrambles them upon recall, he still feels he owes not just the revival of his present-day reputation but almost his entire life to them. Even if most of them had fallen away, he can remember, for instance BEGIN BY RESPECTING THE OTHER'S SUBJECTIVITY and the last two: ADMIT THAT YOU KNOW NOTHING and RETURN TO THE FIRST INSPIRED PRINCIPLE.
Having survived only barely, Utolab ended by spawning so much else that followed: and Dram returned to being a cult hero, as if the name Dram had never once been covered by desert sands.
So for this most recent crop of young activists – youth useful for its energy -- hearing they could work with Dram on a Maneuver was cousin to hearing you could spearhead the Free Speech Movement all over. Or that you could be the first to streak. Freed of jealousy about previous people who'd struck new ground with new freedoms, you could create your own moon craters, be part of living history and not like, say, some revolutionary doofus who every Sunday dresses in clothes meant to reference 1775 so as to buddy-fire muskets. You'd do something better because your act might come from now but definitely would influence later.
What the attendees understood about the methodology of this Maneuver was that they were to come separately to Hope Springs, not mentioning they formed part of any group. Among pools and gardens, they were to recognize the signal: a fist bumping off the other fist (under duress, an index finger bumping off the other) in order to know when the special meeting would take place. Fist bumps, you ask, they'd been told, which had already led to a laughable but bonding series of misunderstandings and also not wholly unwelcome beddings arising from incidents in warm and cold pool alike.
Those drawn to the Maneuver – already calling themselves Maneuverites -- knew they teetered on the brink of the historic, the kind of might-be to make a knife out of all previous stumbles. Plus, secrecy in a place of complete nakedness appealed, having everything sure to fire up youth: sex and the exclusive. Plus: a Native activist, flown in from the desert. How could this not speak to their terminally undergrad or drop-out whiteness, an unplanned element among the nascent Maneuverites, rendering them almost unspecial, the fact of whiteness something to resist. Yet for all the different tributaries by which they had come to Hope Springs, once they'd assembled for this first secret meeting, all too easy to note what a homogenous pool they created. Most bore a filial visual relation: in den and lair, Maneuverites had settled on an indie-rock, post-goth or back-to-the-land scruffbucket charisma, that conformism unique to anticonformists of all ilks, milking the elk! Only a few caramel-skinned people among them, usually older. Yet a we-shall-overcome unity sang their veins, this contingent which would honor all spirits beneath the land and do something meaningful and political, despite or in honor of the thirty-third birthday of this nutty Hope Springs spa.
With perfect timing, at the apex of the whispers, Dram came before his flock, stood before their circle. Moon upon his face, tall and strong in shades, but his hair – so famous in the old photos, long and bandanna'd, a raven's -- now long pigeon feathers. Yet in a cowboy shirt tucked into faded jeans, didn't he still suggest Colorado butte, wild horses, late nights of pipe-passing?
Next to Dram stood a round woman smiling, holding an unlit smudge stick, eyes blinking rapidly behind thick glasses. She could have been Native or a wannabe of Mediterranean stock, who could know? And did it matter? Because before them he stood, cocking an eye at their imperfect version of a circle.
There's more room there, Dram said and the group shuddered, aimed to create a closer approximation of the ideal.
He appeared ready to address them, finally beginning in oracular style: Now, said Dram, wind blows this way, right?
They shivered again, happy, in touch with a man who held out the promise of being able to mediate struggles between superego and libido by one means: he could bring them closer to the simplicity of nature. Mud-person or suburban person alike noted: the famous activist began by naming the direction of the wind!
The activist withdrew a pack of Marlboros from his chest pocket. Which means, he continued, that those of you too delicate can move behind me if you can't take the smoke. He waited. Any of you heard that the World Health Organization now says cigarettes are good for you? I say the U.S. government is the greatest killer. Many fatalities from the U.S. government. The whole country should be outlawed. Right?
A few heads nodded. This trickster schtick unsettled them, but didn't schtick form part of Dram's reputation?
Yuppies have a problem with smoking, but I have a problem with what yuppies have visited upon the world! continued Dram. As if invoking an ancient peasant curse, he spat out: Lattés!
The blinking woman next to him had brought out her own pack of cigarettes, withdrew one.
Thanks, Chouchou. So -- Dram exhaled a huge plume of smoke toward the majority of the Maneuverites, mainly health-conscious people trying to ensure a handicapped-horse course toward immortality and their own moral immunity. Yet as if on pain of death, no one coughed or shifted. Whiteys being hazed! Could they have loved it any more? Did it get any better? And sure, no one would wish to reveal any ancestry through any yuppie bloodline, except how could most of them have paid the day admission to Hope Springs, given low-rent income, if their lineage didn't include some semblance of yuppie or money?
I helped defend Leonard Peltier, said the Native activist, a little redundantly. Did they not know that? On the basis of this famous defense, plus Utolab, some had come to see the living legend. Hadn't he stood up to the U.S. government? To the FBI wanting to investigate the case, he had thumbed his nose, had said pooh-pooh to the tiger in the zoo, had been in hiding for years.
No undercover feds here, no narcs, right? said the famous activist.
More trembles.
Hey, we're at a nudie spa! he continued. I hear people are being asked to come up with some kind of appropriate celebration for this place but you know, I had another thing in mind.
The concept savored. Another thing in mind!
Here a robust girl in sundress and cowboy boots came up to the activist, bringing an ashtray. At which Dram did a doubletake, exaggerated, to register both his cognizance of her leadership skills in the arts of coquetry and also to establish that, should she approach him later, he wouldn't look askance at anything offered up on the cookie-tray of youth. She blushed and smiled at the doubletake, which meant a dialogue had begun, yet all with enough dignified minstrelsy that Dram could return to his more overt speech.
Down the road from you, okay, some hundred miles from here, you have someone who meant a lot to our people's self-respect. Vic Mahler.
The whiteys understood the majority of them were not being included in this Our People. This was okay. This was what they had come for. To be audience to exclusion, to be honorary exceptions, confidantes, inverted Pocahontas types.
An important man is being held on false murder charges!
(A tingle, an ecstasy.)
I'd like to mount a counterattack. Here's the Maneuver we're proposing. None of you are here for the Young Republicans' NRA meeting right?
Yeah! some overenthusiastic boy said, punching his fist high.
Thank you. So what we're doing is your old-fashioned freedom march. We're heading toward the prison. When we get there, we're hoisting Vic Mahler up and disappearing with him. I have special means. Not at liberty to divulge. Yet.
The group oohed. Did it get any more exciting? Most had not heard of Vic Mahler, but those who had tended to associate the Mahler name, vaguely, with passionate dorm bed kum-ba-ya philosopher types, or with crumb-covered interiors of vans parked outside shows led by musical troupes inspiring hallway antics, hallucinogenically aided Sufi spinning.
Dram went on: Hey. Things we're not aiming for. No prison riot. This is more full-on Coyote Disappearing Maneuver, got me? I need whitefolk not scared of their own skin to join up.
They'd joined, hadn't they, so no one really needed what happened which was this: some self-appointed advocate stood up, a semite in glasses.
Excuse me, Mister Dram, said the thin man – and Dram smirked broadly at the ridiculous salutation -- but with respect to your background and achievements, is it sort of gratuitous to bring up white this white that?
(One could feel the collective squirm of disapproval.)
I'm just asking – the thin guy continued on, his boldness making him unpopular, his unpopularity causing further boldness -- has anyone here heard about liberal masochism? Why do some people become the whipping boys for all history's excesses? I say, okay, good, do something, help change the world, but don't sit there being insulted! Being a whipping boy does nothing for the world.
Now the famous activist did another doubletake.
Friend, calling yourself some kind of honorary Injun here? Someone passed you the talking stick?
The semite had returned to merely shaking his head.
Maybe what he's calling masochism is necessary for our development, said the robust girl, trying to smooth things over. Of civil society, she added, a bit uncertain.
That may be, said the famous activist, but he might as well have said I'm a giant elephant smoothie ready to be sucked through a straw, because he shone his smile's full light upon her cookie-tray self. You could tell he'd do what was called for in bed, aim for robustness, turn generous, almost unsolipsistic, hips slim over her full ones in traditional initiation style.
these sections were cut some time in the last two years. You'll see how Arnold, as Arx, the governor, used to be a figure in the novel. There were also a bunch of countercultural protestors marching to Old Parcel to release Vic. It was all a bit much, clearly. But if you like seeing extras, here they are:
THE GOVERNOR
Seventh of June, 2010
You were waiting a long time? he says to his mother.
Her hands patiently folded. Her stance indicates that long ago she has given up on his understanding of the value of her time. The white gloves with lace eyelets, the orange skirt-suit, her nylons. Always dress up when going to the doctor's, otherwise they don't treat you well. It goes beyond underwear, it's about class, especially if you're an immigrant. This had been one of her many lessons to him.
That she has refused to drive for years: she brooks no inquiries. Does she have a phobia? Apparently. Long ago, when his father had been alive, she had driven, because the son has evidence: a photo of her in a prim lipsticked smile above the oversize driver's wheel of a big cream sedan.
Her constraint now means he – or a requisitioned intern – must drive her everywhere. This driving phobia keeps her connected to people, that's what his aide thinks. Otherwise she'd drift away in a sea of slow deaths, special holiday lunches at the senior center and early-bird senior specials at the fish restaurant she favored, though it is not money she needs to hoard exactly. She'd glow dimly, holding onto the deepwater pearl chain on her reading eyeglasses, glasses glinting back at a circle of bluewash ladies, a circle prone to attrition, trying to show one another the grip on status or youth each could retain.
Her circle compiled a world of last things, speaking of lost things: This place is getting so crowded. Which meant an invasion by the young with their bad habit of bumping the elderly off into overcrowded cemeteries filled with old friends. I used to think it was old people who were the bad drivers which meant the younger team was resorting to sneaky tricks in order to once again shove elders off the road. Looking for a golf cart which implied a quest for a vaguely masculine, moneyed preserve governed by reason and luck in knowable, manicured quantities where youth, presbyopia or driving licenses mattered less.
He drives her to the appointment. They are not late, not late enough that they don't have to wait for the doctor in a sea of other people stewarded by those with a closer relation to vitality. When they finally get to see the doctor, ready to discuss the x-ray in a blue-lit sideroom marked EVENTS, the doctor's professional tone rewarded their long wait, striking notes of gravity and efficiency.
What looks like a fish is caught in her lungs. It will spread fast.
Couldn't it just get out? Maybe you swallowed a bone, mother, says Arx, a feeble joke-device to raise her spirits. Unsuccessful. How delicate are her actual bones, flesh draped like seaweed over them, how small she looks in that blued room, as if she could lift up off the rotating stool to float about. Her eyes so big and vulnerable, he wishes he could take back everything he'd ever done wrong. Her main sin in life being she'd loved her son too much when he'd been a child. Too much, she had kissed him too much. He'd been her favorite, he'd known it, he'd felt every quiver of that vain birdheart; the world could never compete with that degree of love.
But how hard to linger on her teetering edge of life when he so much preferred a jog on the beach, the cutting edge of the future. Loved to feel the threat of kids today, gameplayers today, multibillionaires shuffling money tomorrow. Virtual reality: he'd read about it, liked the idea of helping fund it, of moving into other spheres, however little his donors would back untested initiatives, however much California was known for change.
In his adolescence, given her frail grasp on life, his heart had grown stiff against his mother until the day that, faced with the prospect of graduating from college, he'd realized, hey, she's there for me. It was she who, all those years before, had driven him to all those swim team meets. She'd encouraged him to become the top-ranked swimmer in the state and an Olympic-team elect; had cheered him on through college, her lipstick prim, her perch forever awkward on the bleachers. Number one!
And if he hadn't had an elbow injury right before the 1984 Olympics: well, there were a thousand ways to finish the sentence, and he was living out one of them. Sidelined by genetics or overuse or chance, how could you tell? But regret wastes you, as his old coach used to say. It was while finishing his master's in Sports Psych, his plan B, that Arx had decided to move back in with his mother. He couldn't help it. Already, though he didn't know enough to name the phenomenon, his face had begun to dissolve and he needed the shoring-up. He'd sleep with a girl and then the next morning, or in the preferable sneaking-away hour, he'd try finding himself in her mirror. The high small eyes; all cheek, barely any mouth or ears. Lacking the usual pronouncement of orifice. His coach had marveled how well Arx had done for such a foreigner, and when Arx had tried finding himself in the mirror, he would think it was as if he had forcibly ingested America, so that even hearing his mother's slight Liechtensteinian accent could annoy him, could create enough of a field that he knew who he was. To strangers, he called her French. And this the case however much about her he loved, down to her insistence on placing white lace handkerchiefs over the top of every piece of furniture, even over plastic-covered pillows.
For her new condo, he'd bought seventies-style furniture because there'd never been a decade more suited to his bachelor temperament, though the eighties had served as a nice corrective, coincident with the augmentation of his spending power, an individual in free-society America. It didn't hurt, now in another century, to have seventies furniture with a spot of lace. Once he was elected—and what a grace that had been, old buddies from his swimming years coming forward from cracked-tile lives to testify about what a great mayor he'd been for the town of Carmel, all his buddies who'd helped swing voters – he had known that his entire life had led up to this glory. And still he didn't want to live in the governor's mansion, preferring to stay with Mom, though no television crews, that was the one rule, or else they'd discover that his separate quarters were in fact not so separate, that he and his mother supped together quite frequently and he could just imagine how that would go.
An infant as governor. But since when had motherlove become a crime? He felt so noble toward her. By dint of his brute maleness, he protected her, and imagined he might die for her cause if not for a more popular one.
On the ride back from the doctor she asks: What does the X-ray mean?
He is unable to stop the words before they slipped out of his mouth: Now they'll want to test you to death.
He was going for his usual late afternoon swim on the rooftop pool of the condo and, swim trunks in his hands, just before he'd entered the locker room, he'd noted an odd dirty clotting in the water. A young man in a porkpie hat passed him by quickly, going to the informal office he kept among young ladies in a poolside cabana.
Everyone in the pool looked impossibly young and long-limbed.
What's going on here? he asked one of the young gods lying nearby.
Toxic sludge but it's okay, the chlorine neutralizes it. The young god pounced up and tried to catch a football lobbed over the pool from the other side by one of his buddies.
Not toxic sludge. It binds with chlorine and makes chloroform, his female companion said to Arx.
He startled, seeing her in bikini. What was her name again? Maria, the night-guard's daughter. It came back to him. The science fair. Torremolinos. No one ever recognizes him: he is used to this, the effect of his facelessness. They recognize him behind a podium or on a screen but not many other places.
What are you doing here? he asked her.
Max lets me come here to swim, she said. Arx didn't know any Max, though maybe one of the young gods had this unlikely name.
Meanwhile, all smooth skin, impossible fruit.
You like to swim? she said, nonplussed.
Did she know who he was?
Today I'm not sure, he said. This was unusual. Usually he'd want to parade his limbs, show how well he'd kept himself up. Your dad's not really the guard, is he? he said, making conversation, strenuously avoiding her skin: it really couldn't be much barer. (Despite the little cloth triangles which, in a magic show, stayed adhered to her flesh.)
Just one of his jobs, she said. He moonlights.
Arx had to remind himself what moonlighting meant.
He also works at the prison.
Oh. What does he do there?
Um, the refectory? Brings food to guys on death row, you know? Her lilting speech emphasized her greater lease on life. The young god came back, panting; she blushed, pinched his waist. Already some sort of congress entitled them to be intimate. With the god she dove into the pool, awkward and adolescent, legs fanned into a back-flop, little triangles of cloth performing: she emerged with the triumph of laughter.
He was left, conversation cut off.
He thought he'd go down to the lower level where the big hot tub was. But when he made it out of the locker room in his briefs to enter the hot tub, it had already become dark. He usually liked eavesdropping on hot-tub conversation, but today some shadowed busybody narrated gubernatorial ups and downs. Facelessness a mixed karma; certain moments he would have liked to be recognized. Odd genetic fortune, good or bad, had gifted him with that small-featured American look, and to this destiny he'd been true: the swim-team player who stands in line at a cafeteria to get three glasses of kool-aid, a couple flanks of steak, mounds of breastlike mashed potatos.
ARX
Eighth of June, 2010
After a bad night, up the highway, the governor does a bit of the Russian Army calisthenics an uncle had taught him when he was a child. Bend at the knees, hands out parallel to the ground, jerk back up straight. He used to do this, privately, in the john before swim meets; the practice still helps clear the mind.
December eighth.
The governor.
He sometimes likes saying the title to himself.
When faced with conundra. It seems to help him choose what little is left him to choose, correctly, in accordance with past mandates and future campaigns.
Go-ver-nor.
Guh = a sound opened up, expansive like his childhood's first sight of California coastline, unlike the castle-turrets inserted within the Germanic phonemes of his childhood.
Ver = suggesting efficient systems for the manipulation of others.
Nor = suggesting signed, done deals.
= all of which equals legacy or, more blatantly, eternity.
Diese Neigung in den Jahren dawir alle Kinder waren viel allein zu sein war mild.
In Santa Barbara, mas o menos, the governor. Facing the usual three piles of documents on his desk that morning. He has asked his aide, a man whom he suspects may be gay but let everyone live their life -- away from the campaign trail who cares about that personal stuff?-- to organize his papers into three piles each morning: A, B, and C priorities, with A being simultaneously IMPORTANT AND URGENT, B being IMPORTANT BUT NOT URGENT, C being URGENT BUT NOT NECESSARILY IMPORTANT.
Part of a time management system Arx, as friends call him, had learned years ago in a weekend seminar.
In truth, Arx prefers the old-fashioned feel of paper curling toward him, bearing the lost imprint of someone else's hand, to this Node which they'd implanted, almost imperceptible, an encirclement of the forearm, pushed back from his signing wrist.
He can pull up his shirtsleeve and see it: small, waterproof, indestructible, with its blue glowing display screen. Often -- right now – can find himself warming to it, as it forms a part of his daily life, much as his shaving brush stands ready for him, or the three piles sit there, five days a week. The absolute constancy of the Node shocks him as much as how readily he took it on, such a show of hospitality for this little blue screen which he cannot remove until the moment he steps down from office. But he thinks of it as friendly, because the node tells him what masses of Californians, stationed up and down what he has begun to think of as his state, are voting for at that exact moment. Early birds. They perform their simple click of computer mice and percentages on his wrist change. Streams of people right now choosing to weigh in on, he checks the first topic, on whether or not Vic should fry, as the tabloids put it, a topic which has swallowed their attentions for much of this last month.
Displayed in Jack's ingenious code, the tail-end of number-crunching and statistics: 72.1% FOR VIC'S END his wrist reads before flickering, in a morning convulsion of dyspepsia, up to 72.4%.
Of course California would have been selected to take on this trial form of government, one that lets you abolish middlemen, allowing the vox populi to hold sway. Click click and thousands of people told him their opinions, weighing in on his wrist. Choice reigns.
If Arx looked back at his early life, his bookishness, lost in fantasy tales of cowboys and Indians in which he was always the Indian brave who could stand up to the cowboys, who would not be the one to sell his homeland over for a few shell necklaces, he remembered few other children. In a fog he seemed to have glided through elementary school, protected by amnesia and oblivion, at best a passable student. Yet the fog didn't preclude devotion to mama's rise and fall, the devotional hole she had given him that he had to fill, his mother's mood the only watermark that mattered. After school he'd hung out with no other kids. For such tightly domestic habits, the Old World doing its best to make sense of suburbia, he endured his share of mockery – FourEyes, what you staring at? wiener so small you can't find it on mousepoop — his head down as he passed, while inside that head there plotted fantasy tales of revenge in which all bowed as he stood, bare-chested and humongous, atop a mountain. After a struggle determining the fate of his people, he heaved aloft a lion's bloodied leg. He knew all the secret paths back to his house at 613 Sequoia Drive, and these became a friend: the dog that barked impotently from behind the tall wooden fence, the wing-shaped plum leaves, the secret ceramic cat hidden high in the crook of someone's tree.
A nonentity on the screen of so many. At the start of ninth grade he saw how some boys had already attained hero status among others: the vision singed. After the crack in his oblivion, he'd hurried home and in an uncharacteristic rush of self-disclosure had confided panic to his mother: I can't go through with it, he'd said about high school. Join a team, she'd said. I can't, he'd said, anyway, which? It doesn't matter, just join. A ray piercing out of her self-concern. Usually she stayed in a cloud: Which neighbor had slighted her? Was the family going to have baked salmon on Friday? Had the butcher overcharged for the lamb chops? Should she organize a ladies' card night? Did the gas company make a mistake on the bill? Should she decal her nails? Had her younger sister been too rushed on the phone? Had her best friend Sheryl purposely crimped her hair when giving her a permanent? Now she emerged enough so that for once she might actually give him advice that mattered.
He remembered it as an ascent, his name the last on the swim team, GUNTHER ARX. Escape from the stifling powdered afternoons with his mother, when the two sat on the pagoda-patterned couch before the television, his hand on the rim of the popcorn bowl, hers hovering never far from a Macedonian jeweled box of emery boards and lucent polishes. And still, after he learned he'd done okay in the try-outs, to this same mother he'd uttered a silent prayer of thanks, his mother who with latent Darwinism had enough decency to insist on swim lessons every summer. A path could twist out of isolation.
So swim team came to save him, swimming which some quirky genetic endowment, some barrel-rib fish genes on his father's side, must have uniquely outfitted him for. Swimming that lifted him out of the awkward popularity trial of early adolescence, handing him wholesale an unquestioned intimacy among boys. Scores, seasonal averages, back-claps of understanding, carb-loading the night before a meet, red-plate spaghetti dinners and bags of chocolates. You did your lengths, you perfected the butterfly, you remembered your line before a dive, and together you bumped against one another on the predawn bus as your team went national.
Once you got the hang of being a boy among other boys, a lesson which Arx had missed out on, once you learned to enjoy being teased, you had enough confidence to approach high-school girls, those who'd only recently shed poodle skirts and now wore t-shirts bearing slogans or did previously unheard-of things such as wear all white past Labor Day, girls shiny with blush and rose perfume and the secret of training bras, hair enticing down by their shoulders or pulled back, giggling in undulations along the party's wall, leaving in creamy gaggles to reapply peach elements to parts of their body, all while you were supposed to have magically instructed your left foot and right foot how to master the box step so you could lead with magisterial command. Don't be a 90-pound weakling! Kick sand on the beach bully!
When it had been proposed that California be the trial state for the Implanted Node experiment, as it was called, the friendly little blue screen on his wrist the tail end of sophisticated computers in a room somewhere, fiendishly crunching numbers, Arx had been struck for at least one crucial second by the way in which this question of the Node echoed that important transition from childhood disgrace, the moment he'd moved an inch toward salvation, the crack in which he'd made an important choice, when it had come as insight that he could plot his sense of worth by how many people cared about him. Numbers mattered. Numbers at a meet, numbers of teammates embracing you in a hug, numbers of those fearing you on other teams.
Later in life, constituents had voted for him. He had already been saved a few times by numbers. And so, in similar spirit – why not be the first governor to try a method that, as its inventor had explained, made useless that whole semi-outdated check-and-balance necessity of democracy? Checks and balances obviated by the actual, changing will of the people.
The Node's inventor being a slim, taut bald man with tattoos, lowset eyes and a lizard's smile, his handshake reptile-damp, his accent untraceable, his pride in his patent unmistakable. When the inventor, seated with Arx in the gubernatorial gazebo overlooking the Santa Barbara mountains, spoke off-record about the flickering will of the people, about the uncatchable modern stream of information, about how with the Node one always gets to make decisions based on that minute's most recent information – Arx had trembled. The cusp of the future!
And he had been for it immediately; especially what with Jack and others he respected cottoning to the proposal. Not hard to form a cabal of yes-men around the initiative. That Arx ended up being such a fervent Node proponent came from an old sense of himself: had he not formed this idea of himself as being for the new? (While his secret heart still loved the yellowed lace antimacassars of his mother's house). Out in the world he would always be for the chatterbox conviviality of the new, while at home he was for habits so encased and isolating, his life might have been built by layers of dried insect scat.
Seeing the glowing screen now, this Vic Mahler business, Arx marveled at how much this Mahler fellow had seized the popular imagination. Was it merely that this Mahler fellow had been a white professor? Or, as Jack had said, that Mahler had known his share of followers, dippy hippies as Arx thought of them (though Arx was not above generosity toward the dippy hippies). He was governor and could understand the dippies' quest: seeking a team to join, right?
Because he'd had a bad night, however, seeing the blue screen glow and glow again its obvious message – the end of Vic Mahler -- for the first time since its advent Arx wished to remove the Node. For the first time it appeared that this shackle would never let him go, the voice of the people a giant set of teeth, all the better to catch him. And did that clicking electorate know anything about Vic Mahler? Could they not turn such blood-thirst against Arx?
The Node had a trade name that no one had ever used, chosen by its quirky bald-lizard inventor. The Pied Piper, the inventor had said, and now Arx thinks he understands why: a bunch of mice chased the Pied Piper of the perfect choice.
Arx pulls down his sleeve, hurriedly, turns back to the three paper piles Jack has set forth before him. In each pile this morning, however, is mention of the Mahler case.
Is Jack slipping a bit?
In the A pile:
Two Groups Planning a Protest on Rancher's Land near Old Parcel prison down Highway Five.
In the B pile:
statutes related to Exemptions to the Death Penalty and Medical Assessments of the Old Parcel prisoner Mahler.
Also:
Special Permissions Granted the Governor to Strike Down Public Protests Held on Private Agricultural Lands.
In the C pile:
Multiple phone messages from a Los Angeles writer named Etta Seemans mentioning the Mahler case.
Also one phone message from golfing bud Graham.
Different angles but aren't they all on the same topic? Shouldn't Jack have just included them in one pile?
Is nothing going on with the state's debt reduction? Or what about the new education bill? What has happened to feedback loops, information? Has prisoner Mahler swallowed the other topics? Arx feels a dull vibration on his wrist but keeps his shirtsleeve down, does not check.
In truth, it is Arx's first term and he is still getting the hang of the job. Even had he lacked the spinball thrown by the Node, exact air-time ratios, contours and proportions would have defied him.
He tries reading more closely. From the skim, it looks like Mahler's case is coming up for review this week: the guy's appeals have run out. There must have been a slew of radio shows or articles whipping up the people, hence the repeated throb, urgent on his wrist, which won't quit until he consents to view the screen and press the VIEWED button.
Jack's yellow-flagged questions are these: did diagnosis of lung cancer for a murderer justify early medical release?
Pulse, pulse. VIEWED.
The case had gone federal when no one was watching. Now Arx has to weigh in. Given his openness to innovation, a backdoor exists, a not insignificant one. He could merely submit to the flickering will of the people, lay himself open like a gutted fish. The moment would go down in the recordbooks as:
STATUTE 2.4, DECEMBER 11, 2008, VOX POPULI EDICT, VICTOR MAHLER VS.THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA.
Or he could go the old-fashioned route, the old cowboy-pulling-the-reins model, exert gubernatorial control, levy the charge that the guy's appeals have run out. Pull the plug on his life, throw the electricity.
Sizzle: the word is awful.
As Arx reads on, the true question becomes: should the prisoner go to his end in ten days (electric calipers or venipuncture, another question being debated by top anaesthesiologists at that moment, as a few had backed out from service to the state and it had proven unseemly and difficult to find qualified replacements)?
Or should Vic be released, either to the outside world or at the very least, a min-security up north. Jack has written up what Arx liked to call the Daily Short-'n'-Maximum, the SM for short:
Arx –
two groups have moved in on the rancher's land.
Already set up a shantytown of tents, quarreling with each other. Women Against Violence, called WAVE, against the No Death Penalty (NoDope) people.
Freak splinter groups in both parties share the same opinion.
Mass of each arrayed against the other group.
WAVE ladies want the guy to stay on death row at the state's expense. "Mahler has committed a heinous crime against one of our own."
NoDope people want him released into either minimum-security or out into the world. NoDope has a group of Carmelite nuns on their side.
While Arx can follow most of that, he still thinks Jack must be some kind of frustrated writer – quarreled, okay, but arrayed? who still uses words like arrayed in a memo, for god's sake? -- but the Carmelite nuns throw Arx.
Any mention of religion makes a Catholic flicker rise in his gut and then dissipate. A momentary confusion. Carmelite. Carmela of Tiajuana saying Ay cabron!
He can't read anymore, heads turning into tails.
It always comes down to money and real estate, Arx tries reminding himself. This had helped greatly during his first California job, served as both dowsing rod and catechism. Money and real estate. Then the idea comes. Rifle through the files, look up the rancher. If private property rules allowed the rancher to rent to groups whose spectacle was about to muddy Arx's first term, maybe some provision could reverse the situation without anyone turning this into some kind of free-speech free-for-all.
As Jack would say, a quagmire, but he'd been born during Vietnam and doesn't own rights to use the word. Not that Arx does but at least in so many other ways he was entitled. Age does that to you. And not that Arx feels himself to be old, not at all, just that he isn't some puppy off the farm puling around using words like quagmire to get adult dogs to listen. You don't need anyone to listen once you're governor. In fact sometimes you want them to stop listening.
Jack's annotations say the rancher is absentee, living on an island off Santa Barbara, collecting a fee through some trustee for any group ready to pay for the use of his fallow land. Fallow?
Money and real estate. If no one were looking, the rancher probably would've rented to the Klan or some kind of terrorist cell ready to blow up everyone's idea of America.
Disgusted, Arx reads the memo of the phone message from Graham, his buddy who'd organized the big Golfing Society of America benefit, with its headquarters down in Laguna Beach and its beautiful stationery that shamed you, its ivory weave and Scottish heraldry and elegant letters a helpful reminder that certain lands must be kept in stewardship for one of the world's oldest ongoing recreational sports. A short handwritten note: Follow your principles on this one, guy, Graham had said, not being one of those guys who hid the message. Essentially, Arx gets it, Graham says he shouldn't forget the worldly offerings which had gone into the effort that had gotten him at his desk today. Arx could understand such principles. This was a backslap, reminding him of the old steroid days, when he'd been filled with such a constant need for human intercourse.
Come help me make sense of this messed-up prison stuff, Jack! Arx yells to his aide, leaning back in his ergonomic chair, having not intended the tinge to his voice: panic. Though he could have said get your butt in here, the words that had occurred to him.
His aide, in the other room, screws the top back on a thermos he keeps in his lower locked desk drawer. With equivalent frisk, he shouts back: Coming!
HOPE SPRINGS
Fifth of June, 2010
You can say we're farther from the original spirit which could make you sad but in another sense we're CLOSER to the end of the days, but that's a mystic CONCEPT. It is said in the book that all the EXTRANJEROS will return to their lands, and you can see in our new immigration laws that this has COME to pass, so it is not a bad thing, one just has to accept FATE.
A radio played its low buzz of oracle speech, a talk-radio tune. The young aspirants filed past, some awed, some terminally angry or searching for a father. Some already saved. No matter the banality of origins, they'd come to congregate in a circle. A teach-in, as they'd told one another, to be held upon the redwood platform.
Drawn by text messages (C U @ HOPE 12-08?) hinted at in certain exclusive blogs, whispered among hemp-tents at rainbow gatherings, chewed over by wearers of lip-rings, discussed among tattooed shirtless elite, mud-people at country fairs or at gatherings in honor of burning effigies. No matter. From sidewalk of town and burb, from lawn and forestbed, night crawlers, day-job-holders, welfare-check-signatees, as one they had arisen, come undercover to Hope Springs, each promised a fateful meeting in the gazebo at midnight.
Upon arrival at Hope, they'd heard that the famous Native American activist flown to meet them from a different desert altogether would prefer to convene out in the elements. Crowlike. It could have been guessed. At a redwood platform, up in the trees, the only witness to whiteness the activist and galaxies.
A bit windy up there on the platform but still.
The famous activist of course would have methods for the proto-kamikaze maneuver. Through his channels it had become clear that he had wished to enlist a special group of people, and those gathered from diverse habitats, shivering on the redwood platform, had self-identified as special. To put a microscope on it, some may have felt that specialness was killing them, specialness a sentence casting them into the ranks of the terminally unsatisfied, determined to make change. Wear specialness too long and it becomes your cross. Still, what made this meeting particularly special lay in how they had heard the word, the word coming at anointed moments – I was serving a wheatgrass smoothie, my customer mentioned it and I knew! Or I was cashing a check from my new pamphleteering job but when I heard, I had to drop everything.
Because this was to be a Maneuver as in the early-seventies days of Maneuvers: a Maneuver to end all others, like certain stunts the activist had mounted back before he'd had to go into hiding from the FBI, not long after the time of Baader-Meinhof. All details get buried in the sands of time, becoming older people's history, but was it not sort of cool to mention the FBI in the same breath as your summer plans? A cool calibrated to elicit panic in its listener – a listener, thus delegated, felt mostly fear for the fate of the future maneuverite – and this panic created community for people whose specialness had isolated them too long. The community being a loving audience, a mommy saying stop! Or don't go there, it's too dangerous! Join the Maneuver and you'd get to be part of by being apart from. Into your twenties, thirties, even forties and the unthinkable beyond, get to be an adolescent and infant at the same time! Being apart from helped express anger at all the absentee parents of the world, and there within your Maneuver you found presto new loving eyes and hands, comrades ready to share in caring, deep listening, or at least group back massage.
The most recent moment the activist was known for was his famous Utolab experiment, out in Arizona, back in the day. Utolab for which, from distinct if more handpicked habitats, the activist had convened twenty-one people diverse in age and ambition. For Utolab he'd canvassed. Choosing both those receiving welfare checks in ironcrud government housing and those receiving trust fund checks in well-armed Tudor mansions, mirrors posted at every curve of a twisting driveway. In Utolab, the activist had wished to pose a social question none too original but all too relevant, given America's troubled class and race history: could everyone just get along?
The implication being: if under the activist's tutelage this experiment didn't work, when would it?
Long before the rise of reality television, before desertbound festivals restituted one idea of anarchic creation, Utolab happened. A few who'd made it through had been the ones to go found the original burning-effigy festival, which made others feel they had missed out on yet another moment, as if every year you were doomed to arrive too late to Guy Fawkes day.
During Utolab, for five months, the residents weren't allowed to leave the precincts, a Bedouin tent city they'd erected. Volunteers brought in water and food for the human test subjects, shipped out waste, the rent on the land paid by liberal mommies and daddies.
Lore had it that, given the pressures of truly engaging with twenty other people, some participants went catatonic, while others felt that never before had they truly lived. Of course the underground publicity had set Dram up for a big fall if the whole thing had flopped, which it came close to doing. Had it not been for what saved him and Utolab: an out-of-print tract written by some white guy, Vic Mahler:
The Future of Love, a prescient work in which Mahler had worked in the interstices of game theory to lay out various rules for optimal coordination of social systems, surpassing those found in the scrambled forebrains of most people.
Before Dram had discovered the tract, Day 13 of Utolab, during morning circle Dram had seen that no one was speaking. The hostility so thick you could hear its buzz. At the back of his neck Dram intuited that a murder could happen, an instinct which never had failed. Words came to his tongue, evanesced before he could speak. Demoralized. How had they gotten to such a sad point?
To stop the spiral, one inspired guy had just begun reading forth some odd rules from a thumbed book. To Dram's amazement, a few people nodded, slowly. Later Dram would frame the moment for everyone: Mahler's hallowed tenets had helped the group come to recognize the truth of itself. A valiant struggle against the forces of anomie, apathy, and individualism that waged their own bloody wars outside Utolab.
To the assembled, the man read the entire set of rules. Finally, group dynamics worked in Dram's favor: as if one organism, one body with a single heart and brain, the twenty-one Utolab participants agreed to abide by the rules. A new covenant struck, thanks to Vic Mahler: the man had saved the day.
While Dram does not quite remember Mahlerian rules anymore, or scrambles them upon recall, he still feels he owes not just the revival of his present-day reputation but almost his entire life to them. Even if most of them had fallen away, he can remember, for instance BEGIN BY RESPECTING THE OTHER'S SUBJECTIVITY and the last two: ADMIT THAT YOU KNOW NOTHING and RETURN TO THE FIRST INSPIRED PRINCIPLE.
Having survived only barely, Utolab ended by spawning so much else that followed: and Dram returned to being a cult hero, as if the name Dram had never once been covered by desert sands.
So for this most recent crop of young activists – youth useful for its energy -- hearing they could work with Dram on a Maneuver was cousin to hearing you could spearhead the Free Speech Movement all over. Or that you could be the first to streak. Freed of jealousy about previous people who'd struck new ground with new freedoms, you could create your own moon craters, be part of living history and not like, say, some revolutionary doofus who every Sunday dresses in clothes meant to reference 1775 so as to buddy-fire muskets. You'd do something better because your act might come from now but definitely would influence later.
What the attendees understood about the methodology of this Maneuver was that they were to come separately to Hope Springs, not mentioning they formed part of any group. Among pools and gardens, they were to recognize the signal: a fist bumping off the other fist (under duress, an index finger bumping off the other) in order to know when the special meeting would take place. Fist bumps, you ask, they'd been told, which had already led to a laughable but bonding series of misunderstandings and also not wholly unwelcome beddings arising from incidents in warm and cold pool alike.
Those drawn to the Maneuver – already calling themselves Maneuverites -- knew they teetered on the brink of the historic, the kind of might-be to make a knife out of all previous stumbles. Plus, secrecy in a place of complete nakedness appealed, having everything sure to fire up youth: sex and the exclusive. Plus: a Native activist, flown in from the desert. How could this not speak to their terminally undergrad or drop-out whiteness, an unplanned element among the nascent Maneuverites, rendering them almost unspecial, the fact of whiteness something to resist. Yet for all the different tributaries by which they had come to Hope Springs, once they'd assembled for this first secret meeting, all too easy to note what a homogenous pool they created. Most bore a filial visual relation: in den and lair, Maneuverites had settled on an indie-rock, post-goth or back-to-the-land scruffbucket charisma, that conformism unique to anticonformists of all ilks, milking the elk! Only a few caramel-skinned people among them, usually older. Yet a we-shall-overcome unity sang their veins, this contingent which would honor all spirits beneath the land and do something meaningful and political, despite or in honor of the thirty-third birthday of this nutty Hope Springs spa.
With perfect timing, at the apex of the whispers, Dram came before his flock, stood before their circle. Moon upon his face, tall and strong in shades, but his hair – so famous in the old photos, long and bandanna'd, a raven's -- now long pigeon feathers. Yet in a cowboy shirt tucked into faded jeans, didn't he still suggest Colorado butte, wild horses, late nights of pipe-passing?
Next to Dram stood a round woman smiling, holding an unlit smudge stick, eyes blinking rapidly behind thick glasses. She could have been Native or a wannabe of Mediterranean stock, who could know? And did it matter? Because before them he stood, cocking an eye at their imperfect version of a circle.
There's more room there, Dram said and the group shuddered, aimed to create a closer approximation of the ideal.
He appeared ready to address them, finally beginning in oracular style: Now, said Dram, wind blows this way, right?
They shivered again, happy, in touch with a man who held out the promise of being able to mediate struggles between superego and libido by one means: he could bring them closer to the simplicity of nature. Mud-person or suburban person alike noted: the famous activist began by naming the direction of the wind!
The activist withdrew a pack of Marlboros from his chest pocket. Which means, he continued, that those of you too delicate can move behind me if you can't take the smoke. He waited. Any of you heard that the World Health Organization now says cigarettes are good for you? I say the U.S. government is the greatest killer. Many fatalities from the U.S. government. The whole country should be outlawed. Right?
A few heads nodded. This trickster schtick unsettled them, but didn't schtick form part of Dram's reputation?
Yuppies have a problem with smoking, but I have a problem with what yuppies have visited upon the world! continued Dram. As if invoking an ancient peasant curse, he spat out: Lattés!
The blinking woman next to him had brought out her own pack of cigarettes, withdrew one.
Thanks, Chouchou. So -- Dram exhaled a huge plume of smoke toward the majority of the Maneuverites, mainly health-conscious people trying to ensure a handicapped-horse course toward immortality and their own moral immunity. Yet as if on pain of death, no one coughed or shifted. Whiteys being hazed! Could they have loved it any more? Did it get any better? And sure, no one would wish to reveal any ancestry through any yuppie bloodline, except how could most of them have paid the day admission to Hope Springs, given low-rent income, if their lineage didn't include some semblance of yuppie or money?
I helped defend Leonard Peltier, said the Native activist, a little redundantly. Did they not know that? On the basis of this famous defense, plus Utolab, some had come to see the living legend. Hadn't he stood up to the U.S. government? To the FBI wanting to investigate the case, he had thumbed his nose, had said pooh-pooh to the tiger in the zoo, had been in hiding for years.
No undercover feds here, no narcs, right? said the famous activist.
More trembles.
Hey, we're at a nudie spa! he continued. I hear people are being asked to come up with some kind of appropriate celebration for this place but you know, I had another thing in mind.
The concept savored. Another thing in mind!
Here a robust girl in sundress and cowboy boots came up to the activist, bringing an ashtray. At which Dram did a doubletake, exaggerated, to register both his cognizance of her leadership skills in the arts of coquetry and also to establish that, should she approach him later, he wouldn't look askance at anything offered up on the cookie-tray of youth. She blushed and smiled at the doubletake, which meant a dialogue had begun, yet all with enough dignified minstrelsy that Dram could return to his more overt speech.
Down the road from you, okay, some hundred miles from here, you have someone who meant a lot to our people's self-respect. Vic Mahler.
The whiteys understood the majority of them were not being included in this Our People. This was okay. This was what they had come for. To be audience to exclusion, to be honorary exceptions, confidantes, inverted Pocahontas types.
An important man is being held on false murder charges!
(A tingle, an ecstasy.)
I'd like to mount a counterattack. Here's the Maneuver we're proposing. None of you are here for the Young Republicans' NRA meeting right?
Yeah! some overenthusiastic boy said, punching his fist high.
Thank you. So what we're doing is your old-fashioned freedom march. We're heading toward the prison. When we get there, we're hoisting Vic Mahler up and disappearing with him. I have special means. Not at liberty to divulge. Yet.
The group oohed. Did it get any more exciting? Most had not heard of Vic Mahler, but those who had tended to associate the Mahler name, vaguely, with passionate dorm bed kum-ba-ya philosopher types, or with crumb-covered interiors of vans parked outside shows led by musical troupes inspiring hallway antics, hallucinogenically aided Sufi spinning.
Dram went on: Hey. Things we're not aiming for. No prison riot. This is more full-on Coyote Disappearing Maneuver, got me? I need whitefolk not scared of their own skin to join up.
They'd joined, hadn't they, so no one really needed what happened which was this: some self-appointed advocate stood up, a semite in glasses.
Excuse me, Mister Dram, said the thin man – and Dram smirked broadly at the ridiculous salutation -- but with respect to your background and achievements, is it sort of gratuitous to bring up white this white that?
(One could feel the collective squirm of disapproval.)
I'm just asking – the thin guy continued on, his boldness making him unpopular, his unpopularity causing further boldness -- has anyone here heard about liberal masochism? Why do some people become the whipping boys for all history's excesses? I say, okay, good, do something, help change the world, but don't sit there being insulted! Being a whipping boy does nothing for the world.
Now the famous activist did another doubletake.
Friend, calling yourself some kind of honorary Injun here? Someone passed you the talking stick?
The semite had returned to merely shaking his head.
Maybe what he's calling masochism is necessary for our development, said the robust girl, trying to smooth things over. Of civil society, she added, a bit uncertain.
That may be, said the famous activist, but he might as well have said I'm a giant elephant smoothie ready to be sucked through a straw, because he shone his smile's full light upon her cookie-tray self. You could tell he'd do what was called for in bed, aim for robustness, turn generous, almost unsolipsistic, hips slim over her full ones in traditional initiation style.
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