for Kelli

Humid summer heat had never been as refreshing. To emerge from the bowels of a restaurant writhing in the clutches of a Friday summertime dinner rush is a heavenly experience. The asphalt was so firm and smooth and not-greasy, even with my black waiter's shoes on it was as if my feet had been awakened from the dead. The air was fresh and leafy. Deep patches of blue sky peeked from behind the giant green blooms of the oak and pecan trees around Meekins' Auto Body Shop. Cicadas buzzed, the aroma of honeysuckle wafted gently across the parking lot from the fence behind the BP station, and light dripped like morphine off of the fattening sun. These are the sensations that cause some people to hate their jobs. In myself they only bred contempt for those people who chose to sit inside a stuffy chain restaurant and substitute my potential memories of a beautiful June afternoon with images of themselves bitching about my inability to bring them items served at another restaurant.

It is said that whoever loves the least controls a relationship. The commencement of the Virginia deer season had resulted in a screeching halt to the collective Bowling Green lust for the 'out-of-doors'. The remaining few of us who still held an affinity for fresh air and sunlight were confined to breathing pepperoni and canola oil vapors beneath spasmatic florescent lights. In all honesty, I was probably just miffed that I had not been handed so much as a postcard's worth of job offers upon my graduation from college just a few weeks earlier. Four years at The University had only landed me a job at The Pizza Hut.

I heard Nathan rustling from across the parking lot. Our cook and resident survivalist had again fled to his favorite worktime foxhole. During the span of the last month I had learned that the phrase 'taking out the trash' could mean any activity from smoking a blunt to throwing pebbles at bats, so long as it occurred proximal to the dumpster. It appeared that this time Nathan actually did have some trash, contained in four large cardboard boxes, which he was emptying into the trunk of his car.

"Ever make napalm?" asked Nathan as I approached. He was sporting a bit of an air of 'patronization for the college boy' that suggested a forthcoming dissertation on the practicality of unconventional warfare in middle Virginia.

"Never been overrun by communists" I replied.

Nathan stepped back from the car. He looked something like a fly- brushing his palms together in bug-eyed anticipation over his newly acquired pile of styrofoam packing peanuts. "Better to be safe" he said, slamming the trunk lid down. The force of the closing trunk created a small whirlwind of foam as some stray floaters were blown off of the bumper of the car. I surveyed the expanding vortex of white detritus that was gradually spiralling outward from a large stack of boxes beside the dumpster.

Looking up from the mess, I caught Nathan's eye.

"I just got an order for three cavatinis with chicken, there's a ticket for two Sicilians up, and Margaret says it's time to make some more breadsticks."

Without a word Nathan clomped past me across the parking lot, into the back of the restaurant and disappeared in the steaming kitchen. He was wearing big, steel toed work boots which everyone joked about having been on his feet since birth. When Nathan hurried (which he always did since he was always catching up) the heavy boots caused his shoulders to bob upwards at the apex of his strides. This kinesiological anomaly gave Nathan what could only be described as a surreally redneck look. Maybe I just never saw anybody wearing work boots and hurrying before.

I took a final loving gaze at the big fluffy trees that arched peacefully into the sky. I started to take in a deep lungfull of life through my nose, but where just moments before had been dizzying quantities of honeysuckle aroma, was now replaced by dumpster stench and a hint of bondo which emminated from the fender of a Camaro in the Meekins' shop.

I returned to the inside of the restaurant and shut out the sunlight with the large steel door. A few yellow rays still shone through the peekhole; today a wink and a smile rather than a poke and a jeer. I ventured into the dining room to subdue my customers with an all-pacifying pitcher of sweet (properly pronounced 'swait') tea, and eventually smiled my tips back up to twenty percent.

Fridays are always big kid days at the Pizza Hut, and as usual I spent a generous portion of the evening extracting bacon bits and cracker crumbs, croutons and straw wrappers from every possible crevice in the dining room. Facial skin steadily tightened with a film of sugar, grease, and servitude. One can always tell that it is nearing closing time when the first perception that crosses the mind is how cool a spitball feels when it hits your cheek. It was apparent that I was growing accustomed to feeling the nightly progression of pore clogging servility that comes with being a waiter.

When eleven o' clock arrived I decided to re-clean the bathrooms so I could grumble about some campers at table forty-seven who were apparently grasping for new ways to postpone their venture toward somewhere less appealing than a closed Pizza Hut. "Agatha and Dweezil" as I referred to them in the bathroom, (sir and ma'am at their table) figured that ordering decaf would pacify my desire to go home. This was most likely a conclusion reached via the same thought process that procured the belief that the chunks of metal poking through their noses and eyebrows reflected their unique inner being. They had two cups with lots of cream and stayed for another forty-five minutes.

Agatha and 'the Dweez' finally dragged themselves to the door and I took their check to our manager Margaret so she could close out the register. The evening gave the appearance of finally ending and I bid my customers goodnight, which they returned with glittery, tongue-pierced smiles and an impressive collection of fluttering rings.

Shutting off the neon 'open' sign I suddenly felt that I shouldn't dislike the Dweez and Aggie. They were simply trying to have a good time, and I was getting paid while it happened. And they were nice people. One can always tell what kind of person someone is by the way they treat a waiter or waitress. People who are rude and condescending are in actuality insecure and need to make someone else look bad in order to hide the imperfections they perceive themselves as having. I had found that you get a lot of that when waiting tables. People who are friendly and understanding are comfortable with themselves. Consequently they get free refills too, and they get them before the other tables.

The floor of the kitchen was at greased-flounder proportions of slipperiness as I secured the top of a fifty-five gallon plastic bag of half-eaten pizza, spent lemon quarters, and the soggy and crumpled remains of what was once about three acres of pine trees. I walked stiff-leggedly across the glistening red kitchen tiles, carrying what seemed like two hundred pounds of the afterbirth of capitalism which, after a moment, decided to micturate down my leg. I stepped out the back door and into the dark humidity which sprouted nightly behind the restaurant. A cool layer of moisture crept out of the woods and snuck through the field of Queen Anne's Lace behind the Meekins' Body Shop. It spilled out into the parking lot of the Pizza Hut and wrapped around the dumpster like a foggy stole. As I lifted the straining bag of trash up for disposal, the bottom of it tore open in an explosion of half eaten lettuce, ranch dressing, and plastic straws. A chilly, Hi-C solution sprang from behind the falling salad chankings, carrying with it a puree of desintegrated napkins, parmesan cheese and pepperoni grease which doused me between the right armpit and left molars. I noticed that I tasted a bit of anchovy in the mix, though I didn't remember anybody ordering any within the past two days. I turned, spitting and unsuccessfully straining my neck in search of a dry part of my uniform with my mouth, meanwhile routing the falling gargbage into the dumpster with my chest, which turned out to only route it into the pockets of my aprin, saturating an entire evening's worth of one-dollar tips. In a frantic and flailing search for some dry cloth onto which to wipe my hands, the ultimate goal of which being the further search for clean cloth for which to exponge my mouth of second hand cheese and waste grease, I was profoundly bummed to realize that I had been left with the responsibility of harvesting the styrofoam peanuts from the parking lot. The white particles lay scattered beneath the spreading fog in a giant modern-art rendition of the Milky Way, which I momentarily punctuated with a splash of bile. Actually, this all wasn't as bad as one might imagine. Work had long since ceased to be what I did for a living, and had become a psychological experiment. It was only a matter of time before I either got used to it or went insane.

Like many tasks in foodservice, the styrofoam peanut, puke, and salad-waste job wasn't particularly difficult, it was merely disgusting. The objects of my impending labor were resting in a greenish-brown slime that had etched a permanent trail between a hole in the bottom of the dumpster and a drain in the parking lot. Not to break tradition with my education-spawned inability to do things the easy way, I returned to the restaurant to employ a broom with an 18 inch head and a dustpan hardly bigger than my hand. These implements I chose to represent technology in my personal battle for world cleanliness and the furtherment of capitalism . . . -sarcasm always seemed to take the edge off of manual labor for me.

I swept together the slime and peanuts into the shape of a giant Pay Day candy bar and smiled sardonicly. I wondered if being an English major had actually gelled my future as an unskilled laborer, or if it had merely given me bigger words with which to describe my destiny as one. As I swept, I mentally scrolled through the alphabet and tried to come up with a fresh stock of descriptive terms for what it was that I did for a living: for redemption at my next encounter with some supercilious member of the upper middle class.

'Altruistic'. Well, any self assesed highbrow worth their salt probably wouldn't know that one.
I swept a glob of sticky green foam onto the dustpan and then wiped it off onto the inside of the dumpster.
But it hardly describes working at Pizza Hut. I do often wonder what exactly I'm getting out of this job, though.

'Bacciferous-'
I scraped some stray bits of rotted tomato and mushroom into the mound o' goo.
It did seem to be a cornucopia of dingleberries. . . and I smell the effluvium as I facticiously genuflect before the hole in the . . . icephalt? Oh my god, I'd started thinking in hayseed phonetics!

The glare of approaching headlights speared my train of thought. As I stood up, I recognized the faded yellow hulk of Nathan's car.

Nathan pulled right up to my legs and as I leaned on the handle of the broom and stood in the shade between the headlights, he revved the wheezing engine of his yellow beast and stuck his head out the window.

"Yeeeeeeeehoooooooooo!"

"WaaaaaaaHoooooWaaaaaaa!" I yelled back. (That was the way we 'Hoos 'cut loose' while showing that we were still well educated in spite of our occasional flirtations with frivolity.)

I heard clicking as Nathan stomped on the parking brake and watched him hop out of the car. He still had on his boots, but the tops were now covered by the pantlegs of denim overalls. He was wearing a Nike T-shirt.

"Is that my shirt?" I said, drawing my eyebrows together in faux concern. It knew it was.

Nathan took a dramatic look down at the shirt under his overalls, and after a moment said "Naw Bo, I found this in the dishroom." Before I could say any more he clomped around the huge door of his car and came toward me. "What chu doin' tonight?" He asked.

Before I could answer, Nathan took the broom from my hand and began unscrewing the handle. Once the bottom was separated, he held it and waved it at me in emphasis as he spoke.

"This is not a natural bristle broom head. It's synthetic, and you have just ruined it by running it through all this slime and water and pizza awl."

Without looking, Nathan chucked the broom head over his shoulder and into the dumpster.

"Fortunately, the night ain't a total waste. We can use this." Nathan put the broom handle through the open passenger window of his car. "Now" he said, "do you need anything from inside?"

After a moment of blank silence indicated that he was, in fact talking to me, I cleared my throat, "What do you mean?"

Our manager Margaret had appeared in the doorframe behind me.

"Margaret, Larry's coming with me, is he all done?" Nathan had his head cocked back so he was peering down the underside of the bill of his baseball cap. He had that sort of comical-yet-serious look which I had noticed country folks get when they are talking about farm equipment, NASCAR, and things of that nature.

"Yeah, he's done about as good a job as one can expect a male to do, I guess," said Margaret. "Give me your apron" she said stepping toward me, her hand outstretched.

"Um" was all I managed to get out as I removed my sopping tips from my apron before untying it and handing it to her.

"Why men get paid more than women I'll never know" she said to me, then turned and disappeared back inside the restaurant.

"'Cause we don't work as much and it evens out!" Nathan yelled after her. He turned and smiled at me in a display of proximity that begged dental examination. He did have nice teeth. Apparently he was unfazed by my lack of appreciation of his phosphorescent wit.

Margaret retorted by reappearing to shut the back door to the restaurant. By that time Nathan was packing a bit of Copenhagen into his lower lip, and upon seeing Margaret he hung his head out like a parakeet in an attempt to keep from spilling tobacco on himself. There were brown clumps decorating his engorged lip as he quickly waved at the closing door, then he wiped his hand on his overalls.

Nathan closed his tin of Copenhagen and returned it to rear pocket. His new overalls were not yet worn enough to have the telltale ring of a snuff dipper chalked into them.

"Let's go," he said, climbing into the car.

"Where?" I asked as I moved the broom handle and plopped into the passenger seat.

"We're goin' to Nam bo, we're goin' to Vee-yet Nam! Wooooooooooo DAWGIE!" Nathan broke into song as we pulled out of the empty parking lot:

" and it's five-six-seven

Whoopie! We're all gonna die!"

Nathan was a pretty safe driver, so I wasn't afraid for my life at that particular moment. The evening had gone from the tedious and ego-bruising cleaning routine at work to the semi-joyful nervousness of not knowing whether or not I had just been fired. I reflected for a moment on my progress toward adjusting to working at a job which every day taxed my self perception of being an individual with the ability to do things greater than being yelled at by used car dealers and attorneys' kids, and it made me wonder whether my ego was becoming callused or merely disappearing altogether. I figured either option to be a hindrance, since someone, somewhere would always make themselves present to capitalize on my deteriorated bourgeois state, and rather than dwell on it I jerked myself back to the present fiasco of riding shotgun with someone whose drive to ponder these sort of things had been spanked out of him as a child. I liked Nathan, even though our conversations had never hatched out of what I'd considered to be 'idle dick talk' concerning various firearms and ordnance about which I knew absolutely nothing. These bizarre variables, coupled with my riding in a vehicle of which I was not in control, but rather was in the hands of a lunatic country bumpkin singing songs about Viet Nam, precipitated an atmosphere that should have made me uncomfortable enough to involuntarily urinate. I then suddenly realized that I had forgotten to clock out at the restaurant. Despite all these things, I was for some reason mulling in the back of my mind a lecture I had attended in my first year English composition class. It was about humor.

It is obvious to most people, the lecture went, that some things are funny and some things are not. The theory as to why this is so goes like this: something is funny because it is spiked with just enough truth to be comprehendable, but is not actually truthful enough to be viewed as fact. Thus, in certain contexts these half-truths constitute what is known as humor. For example, the joke we liked to tell at The University was "Why don't they serve drinks on the rocks at Tech?" The answer is "Because the guy with the recipe for ice graduated", and that was funny to us. In fact, it's probably funny to students all over the state. All over the state, except of course at Tech, but that only makes it funnier.

The reason that this collection of verbiage was classified as humor was because everybody knew that Tech was a good school. After all, an institution's greatness can often be determined by its rival, and since The University was perfect in every way, Tech had to be a pretty good school as well. However, everybody always knew somebody who went to Tech that was as dumb as a ceramic chicken. A brief affair with the inconsequential but always noteworthy tickings of logic left these variables to be reflecting of truth, and thus untrue because reflections are not reality. Of course, that being so then neither is logic, so scrutiny is obviously pointless, which boils everything down to humor's ultimate resolution: let's just laugh because we aren't the ones who got hit!

Of course in the peanut gallery there were always the flaming Hoos who thought that The (our) University actually was the best school in the universe and that Tech was completely ridden with losers. The sorts who called blacks on athletic scholarships 'Canadians' because it was more socially acceptable than calling them 'niggers'; but everybody quit listening to the flaming Hoos back when they were first-years.

The car slowed and Nathan turned down a sandy path leading into swamp. My stomach began to knot with anxiety. It wasn't Nathan that I was afraid of. Not directly anyway. He was a good person; he was just a little wild. It wasn't the dark, or the swamp, or the animals in the swamp, or the hour of night, or how long it would be before they found our bodies. The thing that terrified me was the joke that we used to tell in High School-

"What are the last words you hear before a redneck dies?"

Of course, we would all chuckle initially because someone said 'redneck'. Those who hadn't heard the joke before would picture a guy in a Confederate uniform yelling "No Yankee's gonna tell me what to do" and they would try to find humor in that while praying that it wasn't actually the punch line. Those who had heard the joke before would giggle in anticipation. When the end was finally delivered, we would laugh, partly because of the camaraderie of friends sitting together telling jokes, and partly because of the little spike of truth that stuck us in the funny bone. The thing was, every one of us kids could see one of our own friends saying that very punch line and then getting severely maimed immediately afterwards. The only thing that prevented this from happening was the good fortune of not living just a little farther from town. So, we laughed.

When you are a kid living in suburbia, there is just enough wildlife and nature around to make you feel that sometimes, if there were just a little bit more of it, you could really be in a bad way.

In the car with Nathan, I no longer had the buffer of suburbia to take the edge off of my fear of the unknown. Whatever he was going to shoot, blow up, incinerate, or whatever it was that he had planned, I would really rather it be performed by someone who didn't preface it with "Yeeeeehooo!"

The punch line of the joke was, of course, 'Watch this'.

Nathan killed the car engine and left the lights shining on some abandoned refrigerators that were rusting twenty yards ahead.

There's a strange thing about the sound of an engine turning off at times like those. It's the noisy sound of hope fading into the distance. That noise, when it was present, meant that you still had a definite means of leaving an environment that was so brutal that it's preferred methods of killing were malnutrition and exposure. In the city, it was a relief to hear an engine turn off, although, ironically, people died of exposure and malnutrition all the time there too. In the swamp with Nathan however, I was getting a more and more vivid image of the car lights burning the battery down in his old yellow piece of crap, and us never again hearing that wonderful rattling, knocking, rumble.

It would be too dark to leave, we would freeze to death in the back of his Monte Carlo, and back in town there would be rumors that we were 'fairies' or some such nonsense. Some local ordinance would deem all of the property of people found dead in the swamp to be donated to the County Commissioner's daughter, and my little brother Mikey wouldn't even get my Catfish Hunter rookie card, which he specifically requested to have left to him when I die. Mikey was eight when he had made that request.

All light was absorbed behind the refrigerators at the edge of infinity. The blackness was only broken by some dull gray columns that seemed to bend and shrink away from the car's headlights. The columns extended upward toward nothingness and downward toward an invisible plane whose existence was only made apparent by the glowing of gold eyeballs piercing it from underneath.

Nathan had already gotten out of the car and was again foraging in his trunk. I opened the gigantic passenger door and checked the ground for snakes, possums, and Satan before I stepped out.

"Grab that broom handle there would'ja Larry" said Nathan.

"Yeah!" I said, almost yelling. In my peripheral vision I saw some of the smaller eyeglows wink out.

When nervous, I sometimes get deliberately overzealous about whatever scenario is making me that way. This is done by my reverting into the equivalent of a mental fetal position, marked by quick and cheerful responses and usually, extremely dumb questions. I hoped this wasn't too obvious to Nathan. Considering all of our conversations thus far had imitated this structure, I didn't suspect that it was.

I felt a question working its way toward my mouth.

"So, what's on the agenda for tonight?"

"Hold this," said Nathan, handing me a plastic container with self-sealing lid. Since I was still holding the broomstick, I received it with my left hand and right forearm.

"You been marinating some chicken, Nathan? We gonna have a cookout? You know, I didn't bring any beer!"

Nathan cracked a Budweiser tall boy as he handed it to me. I dropped the broom handle against his car with a loud clank and took it. He then returned to fumbling through a cardboard box full of aerosol cans and what looked to be cleaning supplies. In the dark hold of Nathan's trunk I noticed that the styrofoam peanuts appeared to be gone.

I rested the beer on top of the car for a second and situated the plastic container under my left arm so I could drink. If I was going to die in the swamp I definitely didn't want the event to happen while I was sober.

"A-ha!" exclaimed Nathan, and he backed away from the car.

"Find it?" I asked.

"Naw" he said "found the flashlight though." I heard a click from the cylinder in Nathan's hands and slowly a yellow glow crept out of the end of it. He shook the flashlight a bit and banged it against his leg and it got a little brighter. He then returned to the cardboard box in the trunk. Seconds later he emerged with an aerosol can and held it up for my examination, the flashlight gleaming dully on its shiny surface.

"Ta-Daa!"

"Hmm, Griddle Mate" I read aloud. "Preferred nonstick cooking aerosol of industrial cooks everywhere. Very nice. 'Sthat your Christmas bonus?"

He tossed the can at me and it bounced off my chest. I took a swig of beer. Back into the trunk went Nathan, after brief rummaging returning with a ten-pound bag of potatoes. Again he displayed his possession with a dim spotlighting effect as he held it up as if it was a trophy bass.

"Mmm-Hmm! Mmm-Hmm!" he said, then put the potatoes on the ground.

I shifted weight from one foot to the other and took another large gulp.

"Be careful with that" he pointed to the plastic container which was working its way down to my hip "it's highly flammable and if you get it on your skin you may tend to hallucinate."

I placed the container on the ground, stepped to the right a bit and sent the remaining beer on a mission to infiltrate my bloodstream. When I returned my chin to square, Nathan relieved my hand of the empty can and immediately restocked it with a heavier one. Obliged, I bit my lip and squinted as I worked my fingernails under the tab and observed the device being displayed by my host, mentor, captor, or whatever role it was that Nathan's knowledge of the thing that he now held in his hand had given him.

"Constructed entirely from products available at any plumbing store" he announced "best twelve dollars I ever spent!" My guide into the world of improvised devices of mayhem and general disorderliness pointed to the plastic container of hallucinogenic substance on the ground beside me. "Hand me the napalm."

The next minute or so allowed me to become somewhat relaxed. Nathan took on a clinical air which I found malfitting but comforting nonetheless as he rapidly described everything that he was doing. Granted the details were blurry since all of the talk of oxygen availability and paths of least resistance were foreign to me, but I distinctly remember the sequence of events immediately following his wink-punctuated statement "You'll like this."

"Point barrel away from face . . . aim at something you want to hit, and . . . depress ignitor."

With a flash and a roar, a fiery streak hurled into the swamp and splattered just beneath the canopy of a skinny cedar. Blue flames ejected in every direction as droplets of napalm sputtered toward the water below. Once in the water, they momentarily continued to burn, causing the water to boil and hiss around them.

I watched in amazement as the swamp slowly returned to darkness and then looked at Nathan, who was still smiling proudly at the carnage he had bred. Finally, he glanced at me and said "pretty cool huh?" then gazed back at the dwindling glow.

After a few seconds I noticed that Nathan's smile had begun to fade. The glow from the little cedar was becoming slowly brighter and more yellow.

"Oh shoot!" I heard, then I saw him dive into the trunk of his car, throw a blanket out onto the ground behind the car, and lift a pistol gripped shotgun up over the trunk lid as he turned and hurried away from the vehicle.

I put my beer down in the sand and took a step backwards as I heard the first shot go off. It was followed almost instantaneously by the sound of a sharp crack into the trunk of the cedar and the sound of Nathan swearing and mumbling something about a slug, which I took to have no inference whatsoever toward the nickname of Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, and once again wondered about the actual value of my education.

He quickly returned to the trunk of his car, pumped the shotgun about ten times while holding it over the box of cleaning supplies, then reached into the dark and produced a box of shells. Grabbing a handful, Nathan watched as the flames immolating the small tree crept up into the lower branches of the canopy as he reloaded the weapon/fire extinguisher. Once reloaded, he stepped again to the side of the Monte Carlo and lowered the shotgun to waist level. Nathan squeezed the trigger and held it as he repeatedly pumped the slide until anything emitting light in the swamp was obliterated.

The shotgun blasts echoed into the dark depths of infinity and another silence converged in the swamp. The scene returned to the small sandy island whose border was marked by rusting refrigerators on the edge of the abyss. I had backed away to the edge of the swamp while Nathan was blasting the burning tree with the shotgun. Now that safety had appeared to have returned to the scene, I assumed a search for my beer. Meanwhile Nathan picked up the blanket, shook it, wrapped the shotgun in it and placed it back in the trunk of his car.

"That tree must'a been dead" he noted "bigger trees took all its light, prob'ly."

Despite the coolness of the evening, I noticed Nathan was sweating slightly. "You look like you could use a cold one," I said.

"I think you're right" he replied.

I scanned the dark and cluttered trunk in silence.

"So, um . . . where are they?" I asked.

"In that bag next to the gas can."

I reached into the brown paper sack and pulled out the remaining four tall, sweating cans of beer. I handed one to Nathan who said "Thanks bro" and then turned around to dispel the lump of Copenhagen from his lip. I took a deep draught from my own can, remembering from my days at the University that Budweiser gets worse with warmth.

OK, forget it, I know this isn't convincing you to come visit. How about this- I'm going to get some cushy government job, rub elbows about DC, get in good enough with a Senator to have him tell me about some affair he is having with another Senator's daughter and consequently get appointed by him to an ad hoc committee to survey golf courses of the greater Midwest. I'll visit you, and you, Josh Taxpayer, can spring for the bill! Hey, better me than somebody you don't know, eh?

Write me something back, I'm extremely bored here! Better yet, email me, because if I get this job I don't know what my schedule will be like or if I'll be able to pick up my mail. My address is intheweeds@hotmail.com . It was all I could think of at the time, and it's better than the cryptic address that the computer would have given me using letters in my name.

May 27, 1997

Dear Sir or Madam,

It is with great enthusiasm that I request information concerning the position with your agency listed in Thursday's publication of the Free Lance Star.

I have recently graduated from the University and seek challenges at the next level of service to both my country and myself. I am no stranger to selectivity, and have an appreciation for obsequiousness provided it is sustained in a teamlike and respectful atmosphere.

I receive the impression that these are the qualities which your organization values as well, and I greatly hope that we can be of service to one another in the near future. If there is any way in which I can expedite the deliverance of my service to this finest of governments with which we are so fortunate to be blessed, please do not hesitate to call on me.

 My Dearest Snookums,

Mr. Anderson peered down through his reading glasses at the letter. He imagined the person who had composed it standing in front of his desk. After briefly testing an entourage of faces, he settled on contempt and measured his browknitting for effect.

The truth be known, Anderson was intimidated by this potential recruit. It was palpable that the lad could very well follow the same path of ascension as himself, possibly even outdoing him one day. No doubt he himself would be retired by then, living somewhere in the Hamptons and spending his afternoons fishing, clipping bonsai trees, and making plans to do whatever it is that people do with their grandchildren. But the idea of someone with the same brass, the same chutzpah, the same brown-nosing ability as himself working within his department gave him the shivers. He would definitely have to do the country a favor and boost the spirits of the leaders who do so much for them, namely himself, and send someone on a tedious and unrewarding task at the taxpayers expense; after lunch of course. Maybe that mouse Langston. Langston was always being a nuisance around the office with his questions and observances. Langston really did not appear to get the gist of government work. But back to this Valentine kid, he could go vary far indeed. He could even surpass agent status and earn a space for his own eight-by-twelve photo portrait in the Hall of Outstanding Servicemen. It was obvious to Anderson that he was going to have to grant the boy an interview, and provided that he wasn't a spoiled brat or a hippie, if in fact there was a difference between the two (Agent Whiffle had assured him that there was), then he would probably grant him the position as well. Any graduate of The University had to be of good stock, after all, it was his alma mater as well. It was in the best interest of the country to select the best candidates for the job, and unless a first generation immigrant or a Senator's son or daughter responded to the classified ad within the next forty eight hours, Valentine was their man.

It was in fact the very next day that Mr. Anderson received the letter of request to be interviewed for service by a Jocelyn Arawan. Ms. Arawan was immediately asked to send a resume and report at nine a.m. on the fifth of June to the recently commissioned satellite office of Agent Mark Langston in Bowling Green. Ms. Arawan was black, attractive, and educated to the point that she would believe anything told to her by a person who professed authority, thus making her perfect for government work. Had anyone been noticing, she also arrived exactly three and a half minutes early for her interview, possessed a copy of her resume in addition to the one already received by the office, and in her time allotted, managed to compliment the new secretary of Agent Langston, who was still cranky from her transfer from Manassas. This secretary was a woman renowned throughout the Department as being a sour and unnerving verbal misogynist. Mr. Anderson lapped up his serendipity at being able to dump her on Agent Langston.

Ms. Arawan's resumes had been laser-printed on watermarked, granite-colored resume paper. She came to the interview equipped with her own writing instrument and scratch paper. She wore a sweater that miraculously both hid and accented her breasts. Her fingernails were natural colored and clean, but not indulgently so. She smiled when someone said "yes" and looked intelligently pensive when someone said otherwise. She wore low-heeled shoes, kept her mouth closed whenever someone besides herself was speaking, conservatively laughed only at the most appropriate times, and exposed no jewelry with the exception of a single, thin necklace supporting a small locket which emitted an aura suggesting it contained pictures of a nephew and a golden retriever. However, there was the slight problem of Ms. Arawan's inability to drop the horrendous English accent that so often plagued Kenyan immigrants. Moreover, there was the sensitive issue of her noncompliance with the profession of her African-American status on the application.

How would the Department look if the Times were to conduct a survey of ethnic declarations on the applications of their employees and turn up evidence which suggested they were not hiring a politically acceptable percentage of the population with skin colors other than 'fleshy'? No doubt the politicians who had slid into their positions on top of greasy promises to 'make everyone rich and equal' were seeking ways to secure their own jobs by keeping as many people as possible feeling hopefully underprivileged. The Department could be attacked and people could lose their positions. This was a dilemma!

Agent Langston knew that Ms. Arawan would not be hired if she did not check a box that indicated an epithelial tint which held a statistically positive aesthetic to the Department. He felt like somebody, somewhere was being cheated and that somehow, he had the power to prevent an injustice from happening. Devoid of options, Agent Langston phoned Mr. Anderson.

"Whadd'ya mean she won't check the damn box?"

"She says that she is just 'American, and that's it'" whispered Agent Langston into the phone.

"'Just American'? What's that supposed to mean? What is she a communist or something?"

"Sir, she is exemplary in every aspect, but has filled out the application as a 'Maryland-American' and I am not certain how to approach it."

"How to approach it!" growled Mr. Anderson. How he loathed Langston and his traffic jams of overanalysis. "There is no such thing as a Maryland-American! To whom am I speaking again?"

Langston straightened up in his chair and placed his free palm on his leg "Agent Langston sir, in the new Bowling Green satellite office."

"Ah, Langston, right, Clemson boy if I'm not mistaken, 'sthat correct?" Anderson had lured another victim into his beloved remind-the-omniscient-one farce again, and he excitedly spun himself from left to right in his large leather chair.

"Yes sir" said Langston.

"Your parents were military, am I right?"

"Yes sir."

"Dad was Army, you lived in Germany, Italy, California, North Carolina, and I believe Texas?"

"Yes sir, but I was actually only born in Texas while my family was driving to-"

Mr. Anderson removed the phone from his ear in order to turn his mouth more directly toward the receiver. He thought that yelling at Agent Langston over the telephone in such a manner would be delightfully authoritarian of himself and he even wiped his mouth of any traces of Egg McMuffin before unloading on the jabbering subordinate. "Well you didn't put yourself down as Pangaean-American on your application did you? No, I suppose you put down Earth for your body and then checked Mars for your brain! There is no such thing as a Maryland-American Agent Langston! That application is null and void and that woman has committed perjury for placing fraudulent information about herself on a government document! Who do you work for Langston?"

Agent Langston was now standing, watching the sunlight bounce off of nothing in particular outside his window "The US Government sir" he replied.

Mr. Anderson quickly covered his festering chuckle with a napkin as he listened to Langston's response, then removed it and yelled into the phone "You work for the American people A-gent Langston!" he drawled "and the American people don't want just Americans working for them, they want boxes checked that suggest ethnicity! They want a racial spectrum! They want 50 percent black, 50 percent Hispanic, 50 percent Asian and one hundred percent white do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal, sir" lied Langston.

"Don't patronize me Agent! Do NOT patronize me! Do you want me to come to Putting Green and handle this situation myself? By this woman's act of not declaring herself what a majority of the voting American public has so wisely determined her as being, she is not acting in the best interests of the American people and is not fit for government service."

"Yes sir."

"Are you saying that you want me to take over your position Agent!" screamed Mr. Anderson.

"No! No sir! I meant that she . . . this person" Langston moved himself into the corner of his office in hopes that Ms. Arawan wouldn't make out what he was saying from her seat in the reception area "I was just agreeing with you sir."

"Well good!"

"Yes sir." Agent Langston thought for a moment "Well, you know sir, she is a woman . . ."

"We've had our quota of female boxes checked since the dawn of the Clinton administration Agent Langston" grumbled Mr. Anderson. He then thought for a moment, decided that this conversation could not possibly get any more fun, and hung up.

Agent Langston rolled his tongue around inside his dry mouth as he folded the phone and returned it to the inside pocket of his jacket. He made a mental note to write that particular call off of his taxes when he received the bill, and wondered briefly if someone at headquarters had taken steps to have a phone hooked up at the new satellite office.

As he stepped out into the lobby he saw his new secretary filing her nails and snapping gum. He took a deep breath and turned his gaze to Ms. Arawan, who was sitting at attention on the front half of the folding chair which constituted a full one-third of the furniture in the 'lobby'. He looked at her feet, which were neatly pressed instep to instep, and noticed that her heels lifted slightly as he turned to her. He felt like he was going to throw up. The Agent swallowed dryly, brushed his palms down the front of his jacket while his mouth hung open, and felt his back bend slightly as he looked up to her eyes.

"We have your number . . ." he started, and remembered that there was no phone in the office. Briefly he glanced around the room. "Here" he said reaching for his front jacket pocket. He fumbled briefly with the edge of the pocket and finally broke his gaze away from her anticipating eyes to see what exactly it was that his hand was doing. Ever since he had gotten his own business cards, Agent Langston had been attempting to perfect a swoop-with-the-left-hand, into-the-pocket, produce-a-card maneuver. He sometimes even practised this move at home in front of the mirror, but so rarely got to give out his cards that he always seemed to fumble when an opportunity finally presented itself. He clenched his teeth and employed help from his right hand. After a second he produced several cards together from his breast pocket, picked one of them, and extended it toward Ms. Arawan. "This has the number of my cell phone on it".

Ms. Arawan leaned forward slightly, held one side of the card examined it as Agent Langston held the other side. He pointed over the top of the card "This is my cell phone here and" he suddenly realized how totally unhelpful he was being to this woman who was so innocently unaware that she had practically no chance of getting the job. He then decided to do his country a service and bear the burden of blame himself by not telling her that, aside from the 'Agent David Langston' and his cell phone number, all of the other information on his business card had been rendered incorrect when Mr. Anderson transferred him to the new Bowling Green office. Ms. Arawan would think that Agent Langston himself had not hired her and was in fact, avoiding her out of shame. It would be apparent to her that he had no dignity because when she tried to reach him, his phone would be disconnected and someone else would reside in his apartment. She would think him a fraud and a coward, and Agent Langston would let that be his punishment for his not being able to help her. There was of course his cell phone, but he suspected that the ringer was broken on that.

"If you need anything," he felt that one could literally see his compassion for this beautiful woman pouring out of his eyes and into hers "anything at all . . . Please, contact me."

Ms. Arawan stood up and smiled. It was a small, tight smile for such full lips, but the corners of her eyes had flinched slightly indicating to Agent Langston that perhaps there had been sincerity in it. She took the business card, placed it in the folder that contained her resume and in a voice that was deep for a woman yet still rich and feminine said "Thank you Agent Langston." She then turned to the secretary and smiled with the same eye crinkles and said "And thank you Miss Harris".

"Mmmm" said the secretary, who didn't look up from her nails but did stop filing them long enough to wave the fingers in a 'good-bye' motion.

Agent Langston watched Ms. Arawan open the Plexiglas door, step carefully down the molded cement steps, and disappear out into the big, cruel world that neither deserved nor appreciated a woman of her abilities, whatever they might be. He then looked over at Miss Harris who was staring blankly at him, her bright red lipstick forming a pouty and skewed O on the front of her extensively made-up face. After a second she raised her eyebrows and blinked at the same time, returned her attention to her nails and resumed snapping her gum.

Agent Langston walked into his office, plopped down in a folding metal chair behind his tiny desk with the Formica delaminating from its top. He wished that he smoked or had some sort of destructive habit that he could wreak upon himself. He thought of poor Ms. Arawan. How she had driven all that way from Baltimore for a fruitless job interview. She had probably spent a great deal of money staying at the local bed and breakfast which was taking such great advantage of its monopoly that it had spurred him to opt for sleeping in the office and showering at the truck stop. And now she had at least another two hour drive back home, where she would wait for a phone call that was never to come.

I received notification that I had been deemed acceptable for interviewing on a Wednesday. The letter was postmarked from Washington, but I was to report to a satellite office literally right down the street from the Pizza Hut at which I worked in Bowling Green. It was apparent that the Department for which I had hoped to work, whatever it was, was literally everywhere. I was still pretty nervous that it was the Marines, but mostly because I realized that I would probably enlist if it were.

Since the interview was to be on Thursday of the following week, I had plenty of time to check out the office and feel out the persons with whom I was to converse.

Upon first glance, the office appeared to be vacant. It was constructed of red brick and had white shingles. No shutters decorated the windows, and the white trim around the windows and eaves was peeling and needed caulk. A platoon of boxwoods hugged the walls of the little office, suggesting that at one time the building had had plans made for it. In the morning the shrubs would be silver with the dew caught in spider webs that were invisible by midday. The same type cobwebs plagued the sides of the building, giving it the photonegative appearance of a big, square Dalmatian.

On Thursday I noticed that the telephone lady visited and turned on the phone. I knew this was what was happening because it was the same lady who had turned on the phone at my apartment a few weeks earlier. It then struck me as to why this particular job had been advertised in the Bowling Green Newspaper; this was a new office, and they needed some green college sap to kick around and make do all of the trivial things that needed doing while all of the real government employees were out doing the fun stuff. A government office in Bowling Green? What department could it possibly have been? If it were a department that did anything interesting, any intelligence-related type things at all, the office would probably be located, ironically, on the gigantic A.P. Hill Army base right down the road. There was no way I was going to get to manipulate spy satellites and watch Castro have coffee in the morning from this locale. There was no indication of the presence of apparatus for loading tortoises with infa-red sensors, or tree trunks with super sensitive seismometers to detect the footsteps of anyone over eighty-five pounds. And there was no possible way that the office on which I laid my eyes could in any way, covertly or blatantly, be related to any facility at which the minions of the arsenal of democracy were dispensed. I was gravely disappointed. I was undoubtedly about to subject myself to a government position behind a desk full of things that no individual person anywhere on the planet had any desire with which to fool. I actually began to hope that it was the Marine Corps.

After a good night's sleep and some labor at the Pizza Hut to bring me back to reality, I took another look at the office. Two people inhabited the small brick hut from exactly nine in the morning to four in the afternoon. The woman always dressed like she was on her way to husband-shop at some two step joint, and the man looked very serious and bored. Neither of them ever did anything besides talk on the phone and look out the window. On Saturday morning I realized that it had to be an office for the Department of Agriculture. It was the only thing that possibly could have made any sense. It was hardly summer yet, and nothing substantial was being harvested. Bowling Green only had about sixty different families in it, and a full one-third of them were involved in farming.

Back at the restaurant that night, someone threw up literally all over the men's bathroom. Being the only person who didn't live with in the same town as their parents and thus wouldn't quit to get out of it, Margaret chose me to clean it up. I tried to think of something sarcastic to say to myself to make the scrubbing somehow more meaningful, but the only thing that I could come up with was that soon I was going to be a 'field agent'. When I emerged from the bathroom radiating the odor of partially digested pizza and chlorine, I was immediately sent home. It was obvious that I was in no shape to present myself to a table full of the general public, and I returned to my apartment without having made a single dollar in tips. During lighter years when I was a child, I was made by pastors, parents, teachers and all sorts of onmiscient adults to believe that all dark clouds had a silver lining. I now resorted to this philosophy, which had weathered the years by eroding from a façade of satisfactions found in Christmas presents and summer vacations to a façade of compromises involving insights and convictions. I emerged from the cloud with the resolution that there may have been no greater gravy train than a United States government job, but I was not about to relieve my impecunious state by finding reasons why Bubba should receive more money for not raising hogs. If youth is wasted on the young it is because it is a veritable petri dish for inebriation, skirt chasing and a multitude of other pointless things that make life fun, but most importantly it is blown on the nobility of idealism. No way was I spending my days thinking about dirt clods and pollen and better ways to manage them. Call me a dreamer but I liked the idea of a food surplus.

I wasn't scheduled to work again until Thursday. On the Wednesday before the interview for which for I had decided not to show, I ran out of food. I spent my last two dollars on black socks and went to bed hungry.

I showed up for the interview five minutes early- with clean fingernails. I brought my own paper and pencil, laughed conservatively at only the most appropriate moments, which were few and far between because the gentelman who interviewed me, David Langston, was laying on the ol' 'cold and aloof government agent' routine pretty thick. Basically I followed all of the 'how to get a job' tips that they posted next to the water fountain in high school. I also expounded exactly what Agent Langston desired to hear, though he was quite adept at hiding his appreciation of this, and I even thanked the secretary, who, incidentally I think possessed some affections for me. I figured that there was no possible way that I could be turned down for this position, especially when they coupled my interviewing skills with the fact that I had graduated from The University. One week later my calculations were confirmed. I was mailed orders to report to Colonel Applebee at Fort A.P. Hill at five a.m. on the twenty-eighth of June, to bring the addresses of anybody who might want to hear from me within the following eleven weeks- and nothing else.

I had managed to get out of Miss Harris, the secretary where I had the interview, that this was not the Depertment of Agriculture. "No honey" she had said in between smacks of Trident "this is Department P." I was then briskly escorted out the door by Agent Langston who nearly threw me down the awkward, molded concrete steps in front of the office. I had no idea what was ahead of me, but I was certain that my employers were aware of that fact. I thus reasoned that since my ignorance was true and unintentional, and that that was what they wanted, then I was in full compliance of their every demand. In fact, my ignorange probably bordered on outstanding, and I could imagine the government bigwigs, who were undoubtedly watching me from afar, making exagerrated frowns, raising their eyebrows and nodding to one another in wise appreciation of such blithe and honest unknowing. "This kid's outstanding!" They would be saying "he could be White House material!" They had to have loved me.

The next day while sitting on the toilet, I read a magazine that Nathan had given me. It was a small circulation publication, printed entirely in black and white. It somehow seemed to be proud of it's low circulation, and of the fact that it had again had to change titles. The publication was now called "Nightshade", and I was reading an article on how to have all of your phone calls charged to someone else's number.

I hoped that as a G-man I wasn't actually going to chase individuals. It would be a real awkward thing if I had to bust Nathan someday. However, there were a lot of articles in "Nightshade" that I could see myself, or especially my grandparents being the victims of. I hoped that I would have some sort of hand in preventing the things which I read about in "Nightshade" from happening.

Some of the articles however, were actually quite interesting. There was a portion on how one should behave when denying a police officer permission to search their vehicle. I didn't even know one could do such a thing. "Nightshade" described in mindboggling heiroglyphics how a computer virus works without the victim knowing that they are downloading it themselves. It also told how to make silencers for firearms out of duct tape and plastic bottles, and suggested the use of sub-sonic ammunition to further the muffling.

About that time my cat, named Cat since he wasn't actually mine, came in the bathroom and hopped in the tub. Cat was extremely friendly, but not like cats usually are. He didn't rub up against your leg as if he thought that you were getting some sort of pleasure out of his stroking himself on you. Cat maintained a comfortable distance at all times, but loved to be rubbed whenever it was offered, and was always attentive to any indication that it may be. He was also quiet, which I liked as well, but the true bonus to Cat was that he belonged to a neighbor, and I knew that if I ever had to go away, he would be taken care of.

The bathroom in my apartment was so tiny that while Cat was sitting in the bathtub in front of me, I could scratch him behind the ears while sitting on the toilet. I put the copy of "Nightshade" down on the edge of the tub and gave Cat a brief rub on the head. He liked it so much he had to close his eyes and lean into it. As I did this I noticed that the back cover of the magazine had a subscription sticker on it. The subscription belonged to Pizza Hut. I contemplated this briefly, then remembered that I needed to give Margaret an address to which she could send my last paycheck. Since, aside from being brainwashed, I had no idea what I was going to be doing for the eleven weeks of my absence, I decided that I should go visit Agent Langston and try to get some information out of him.

After finishing an informative yet mindbogglingly stupid article on how to puncture the tires of logging equipment in such a manner that the person doing the puncturing would not be injured and the tires could not be repaired, I emerged from the bathroom. In a display of either tremendous will or hopeless narcolepsy, Cat decided to stay in the bathroom and sleep in a niche in the wall on top of a six pack of Charmin.

I took my name tag off of my work shirt from the day before and pinned it to my Pizza Hut hat. Nobody had puked in the bathroom this time, and I went home with thirty-five dollars in tips. I tossed the copy of "Nightshade" into the hat, and laid my work clothes on top of it. I locked the deadbolt to my apartment behind me and felt beads of sweat already starting to form on my forhead. I walked out to the sidewalk and turned left. The sun was bright on the concrete and I could feel heat radiating onto my calves. Escorting me towards town were hundreds of grasshoppers which flew like bullets into the pavement, stuck, then rotated slightly and flew back into the tall grass that bordered the walkway. I often had to make irregular steps to avoid squashing them under my sneakers.

As I approached Agent Langston's office, I noticed a white pickup truck parked in the parking lot. The truck was amazingly clean, and had many doors and compartments built onto its sides. On top of the truck was a large bee molded out of plastic, with a menacing grin on its face and an oversized, Z-shaped, black stinger on its abdomen. The bee was attached by four pollen-stuffed legs to the top of the truck's cab. The remaining two front legs of the bee had elbows, allowing them to bend upwards toward oncoming traffic. The front two legs also had hands which were curled into fists. There was absolutely no dust or dirt on the vehicle. It was a pure, unadulterated spectacle of cleanliness. The white paint was waxed to a near frictionless plane and clearly reflected the shrubbery around the office building. The chrome on the bumper was so spotless that at twenty yards I recognized my own image bobbing silently in the reflection which it held. At ten yards I saw the images of grasshoppers zipping onto the sidewalk.

Emerging from Agent Langston's office was a tall man in a white jumpsuit. He stepped with graceful agility down the steps, while holding a tremendous pink toolbox in his right hand. The man had short black hair, a tiny mouth that seemed deliberately pursed shut, and he was wearing horn rimmed sunglasses. As the man got closer, he pulled open with his left hand the snaps holding the front of his jumpsuit together. He was wearing a watch over top of his sleeve. I was looking to see if it was a diver's watch, which it appeared to be. It would have been somewhat peculiar for a person in Bowling Green to be sporting a diver's watch, but I figured that that would explain why the tall man in the jumpsuit would be wearing it over top of his sleeve. He was probably used to wearing it over top of a wetsuit. Unfortunately, before I could identify the watch, it disappeared into the breast flap of the jumpsuit and reappeared with a small pistol in front of it. The man pointed the gun directly at my head, and without even looking at me, shot me in the eye!

Pain speared through my head and I reeled around away from the man. I heard myself making disgusting, growling type noises as I bent over on the sidewalk. I felt something bite into my calf and shrieked as I figured that he had shot me again; but the pain immediately disappeared and I realized that a large grasshopper had jumped onto my leg. I then thought that it was somewhat strange that I had been shot in the eye and wasn't dead. I had both my hands pressed hard against my throbbing eye, and I had my other eye closed just because it seemed like the right thing to do. The man had shot me in the left eye, and I lowered my right hand to see how badly I was bleeding. To my surprise there wasn't any blood at all. I started to straighten my back and noticed the white truck pulling out of the parking lot. The license plate said BEE MAN. It displayed no state and had no expiration stickers.

My eye was still throbbing, but I tried taking my other hand away and noticed that there wasn't any blood on it either. At my feet lay a small purple plunger dart with a hard plastic stem. I picked the dart up and examined it with my right eye. On the side of the dart was printed 'Laurence Valentine'. I felt slight relief with the shocking realization that this had not been a random act of violence.

I stumbled up the steps of the office, forgetting that I had to go back down a step to open the Plexiglas door.

Miss Harris had acquired a new artificial-oak name plate which identified her and had and 'secretary' embossed on it in white letters. She had also gained a computer. On top of the computer monitor was a plastic troll which was two inches of ugly nakedness and two inches of very bushy blonde hair. The troll stood on a patch of sticky foam tape. Miss Harris's gentle handling of the mouse and dead gaze into the monitor suggested that she was surfing the Internet. After a moment she looked up at me and said "Ran into the wrangler huh?" then looked back at the computer screen without waiting for an answer.

Agent Langston trotted out of his office and gazed upon me. I wasn't sure, but I thought I saw him smirk slightly when he saw my injury. Before I could get a fix on his expression he approached me and extended his hand.

"How's it going Mr. Valentine?" he said.

"Some bee guy just shot me in the eye with a plunger dart!" I said, spearing the air with my right hand in an attempt to connect for a handshake without depth perception. I missed and poked Agent Langston in the stomach. He winced.

"What can we do for you today?" he asked.

Apparently this sort of thing went on all the time at the new Bowling Green office of Department P, I guessed. I took a look over at Miss Harris, who was engrossed in what looked to be a website for "Days of Our Lives". Her red lips spoke silent v's, b's, f's, m's and p's as she scrolled down the page.

"I was just wondering where to have my last paycheck from Pizza Hut sent when I was at-" Parris Island was what I was thinking, but didn't know what to call it exactly. Agent Langston finished my sentence for me.

"The farm."

"Right" I replied, "at, uh, the farm." I heard myself go 'Hmm'.

"Have your check sent here." Said Agent Langston.

"Well, thank you, but I like to deposit my paychecks in my checking account. I like to collect that ol' two percent interest you know" I laughed to smooth over my feeble attempt at saying 'no'. Actually I just didn't want to have to go back to Bowling Green, and to that office in particular. I noticed that I could feel my heartbeat in my eye.

"Have your check sent here." Repeated Agent Langston, more sternly this time. He then whipped his hand into the breast pocket of his blue jacket and produced a business card. "Have your manager send your paycheck to the address on this card. We'll take care of it."

I took the card and Agent Langston reached over my shoulder to put his hand on my back. He smiled as he turned me around toward the door and told me not to ever call the bottom telephone number on the business card. He gave me some story about the ringer on his cell phone not working, but I figured that he just didn't want to have to pay for a call from me. At that point it became clear that Agent Langston wasn't very adept at handling people. He was probably intimidated by me for some reason. I suppose that was why I told him that if he ever got his cell phone fixed to let me know, so I could give him a call and test it. I just wanted to push him a little bit, and he gave me a slight push as I stepped out of the office. I made a point of saying goodbye to Miss Harris through the door as I walked away.

My eye pulsated in the bright sunlight. I thought it may pop out of my head.

Back inside the office, Agent Langston was bending another one of his business cards slightly before placing it in the freshly emptied breast pocket of his jacket.

That evening at work, the store was empty except for Nathan and Melissa. My eye was feeling much better by that time.

Margaret was at the bank to making a deposit of the superfluous bills from the lunch rush which had included two busloads of little-leaguers on their way to a game in Fredericksburg. The coaches had said that they were in a hurry and simply ordered nine pizzas with ground beef and onion, and iced tea for everybody. The coaches told the teams to pick the stuff off of they pizzas that they didn't like, and Margaret told Melissa to pick it all out of the carpet when they left.

Melissa was an uninspired waitress with long, curly red hair, deep brown eyes, and constant man problems. The main problem she had with men was that she was attracted to the living equivalent of a handyman special priced below tax valuation. Basically, she only dated jerks, always ended up crying about it later, and then would repeat the process. It was like she was confusing the directions for shampooing her hair with dating a guy; instead of lather, rinse, repeat, it was date jerk, get let down, repeat. I had only worked with her for about a month and had already seen this happen three times over three different guys, all of whom were total losers. The boys she brought in never spoke to me, or anyone for that matter. I'm not even sure they talked to Melissa. Dispite these things I didn't care that Melissa cried over them. If she had spent a fraction of as much time fixing herself as she had spent trying to fix them, she could have had any man she wanted. Like many women in Bowling Green, Melissa had a teriffic figure. Unlike most women in Bowling Green, she was also pretty. She had symmetry, and all her teeth. I didn't care that Melissa cried over those guys because it was apparent that she was actually most comfortable when she was 'being made' unhappy by men. It was what was familiar to her and she had consequently made a lifestyle out of it. Albeit Melissa wasn't aware that she had chosen to spend the rest of her life without knowing what it is like to be treated well by a man, I couldn't feel bad for her doing what made her secure. It was kind of like how boys in the area grew up to be farmers like their Fathers. They didn't enjoy it, but it was what was familiar so they stuck with it.

Melissa sat in a booth near the main entrance to the restaurant and rolled up silverware in napkins. I went into the back and leaned against one of the two large, stainless steel sinks where the pizza pans were washed. Nathan was describing his fantasy of having sex with two women at once.

The reason I stayed around listening to Nathan ramble on about something was, aside from my being at work and unable to leave, his anecdotes and postulations uncovered a peculiar contradiction in my personality. Most of the things of which he spoke were, in fact, interesting to me. The fantasy of having sex with two women for example. I had had that fantasy countless times myself. Always with women I didn't know, or at least didn't know well, like Melissa and Margaret, or women on whom I had waited at work. It was just not the sort of fantasy one has using the image of a woman with whom they are in love. But Nathan could take any topic and adulterate it. This time he became engaged in a near glossolalic dissertation of profuse and graphic detail about what he would do with every single appendage on his body, all of which I had no desire to imagine on or in anything I could find possessed by a woman of fantasizable quality. I was ensnared in a trance of intrigue and disgust which was only broken when Nathan, after using the word 'cock' to the extent that even he had grown tired of hearing it, paused in search for a yet unused synonym for his proboscus of love. He was stuttering "my . . . my. . ."

"Bulbospongiosis" I suggested.

Nathan just looked at me, and for a second I thought that he was actually going to drop it. His eyes wandered up the wall behind me.

"My SCHLONG!" he exclaimed, his eyes returning to mine. "You know that's a Jewish term, schlong?"

"Yiddish" I said.

"Naw, Jewish. It means penis" he nodded his head affirmatively. "You know the people who own the deli down on Main Street are Jewish. Their last name's Johnson, but they're's Jewish as . . . as . . ."

"Jesus" I offered.

"Damn Bo! You are educated ain't cha? Dumb summa bitch don't even know Jesus is Christian." Nathan paced briefly to let his system absorb my colossal ignorance. "Why you think they call him Christ? Anyway, that's why you'll see the Johnson's at the Fire Department Pig Pickin', but they never eat. You watch, they come every year, pay and everything and never even eat. They'll do it again this year, just you watch."

Suddenly Melissa appeared from the front of the kitchen "What are you talkin' about Nathan?" she asked.

"What are you doin' back here woman?" yelled Nathan, joking "this back here is the man's area"

Melissa smirked and gave a sarcastic nod.

Nathan continued "And unless you're goin' to give us a little hoo-ha, you'd better just carry yourself on back to the front of the store."

"Oh I don't want to come in between you two lovebirds, hanging out here in the back by yourselves all the time. Hey listen, when you can spare him, why don't you let your bitch here" Melissa nodded her head in my direction "know that he has a four top at twelve." She then turned and walked back toward the front of the kitchen. I was barely into a fantasy about Melissa, Vanessa Williams and myself in the bed of Melissa's Toyota truck on top of some bubble wrap, the kind with the little bubbles, not the big ones, when I heard Nathan say "You gonna let her talk to you like that?"

I looked at Nathan, who was ogling Melissa's firm, campanulate behind as she disappeared into the dining room.

The rest of the evening proceeded uneventfully with the exception of Margaret's return from the bank with a bag of Almond Joys, which she had picked up for her beloved employees on an opportunistic raid of the supermarket next to the bank. Accompanying the Almond Joys were two whole bags of other things that she felt the restaurant needed- Brillo and such.

After closing, Nathan and I adjourned to the swamp where we got into our now-routine Saturday evening of firing the potato cannon, drinking Budweiser, and shooting the cans off the dead refrigerators with a .22 rifle. With my recently acquired awareness that it was not to be a permanent affliction, I no longer minded playing the role of a bumpkin. I also realized that I should break the news to Nathan that I was going to leave in a little over a week.

"What 'chu gonna be Larry? A paratrooper?" Nathan thought this concept was so funny he bent over laughing. I began to feel sort of dumb. For all I knew I was going to jump school.

"No, I'm going to do some work with a department of the government called Department P."

"What's the P for?" He had to ask.

"Paperwork" I replied, laughing, and took a swallow of beer. Nathan chuckled a bit.

"Yeah," said Nathan, "Margaret said something about you leavin'" Nathan was taking on a serious tone that was making me a little uncomfortable. Not uncomfortable in a bad way, he just was behaving as if he was going to say something sort of heartfelt towards me. Whenever a guy verbally expresses, in a serious manner, his affinity for the presence or personality of another guy, it is always a bit awkward. Women, on the other hand, secrete love like it's hair or something. Emotions are a perfectly natural, comfortable, and mindless thing for women, and they can also trim it at the drop of a hat. If a man feels something, he is experiencing a phenomenon over which he has no control. In fact, a man is likely to never even use the word love, simply because it means too much to him. He will usually substitute the word 'like', if he even says anything. I was afraid that Nathan was going to suggest that I was 'all right for a college boy', or something god-awful like that. It was so unnerving when someone used words to convey their emotions towards me. I felt like it meant that they had given up on my being aware of how they felt and had decided to just go ahead and tell me. That was why I had such a difficult time finding the proper formula of emotions to fit my psyche at the moment when Nathan presented me with a live hand grenade.

"Take it, go on, I got it for you!" Nathan insisted.

"Oh, man" I said, trying to figure out how to make 'I can't accept this' sound reasonable for turning down an object whose sole purpose in the universe was to blow up indiscriminantly. "I don't know anything about these things" was what I came up with.

Showing the full depth of his generosity, Nathan said "You don't have to use it now, just take it . . ." he placed it in my hand- it was heavy and cool "and save it for a rainy day."

I stared at the steel pineapple in my hand for what seemed like forever. I was too much in shock to be embarrassed by wearing on my face what I knew must have been an expression of total cluelessness of what to do with my gift.

Finally I heard myself say; and I don't know where it came from "If I take this thing home, I know I'm never going to get to use it. Can we just blow something up with it now?"

Nathan turned his eyes toward me and almost whispered "Now that's what I'm talkin' about." He slapped me on the shoulder once and went around to the passenger side of his car. Reaching through the open window of the car, he opened the glove compartment and groped around inside it with his left hand. After a minute he came back to where I was standing. I was still holding my hand like it had been when Nathan had placed the grenade in it, and he quickly removed it from me. In his other hand Nathan had a Swiss Army knife, with which he began a fit of gouging and poking and twisting at the grenade. Eventually Nathan had taken the core of the pineapple out, and dumped the remaining contents onto a pile on a sheet of newspaper which was laid out on the hood of his car. Nathan produced a roll or duct tape from his trunk and taped the newspaper and the gunpowder into a sort of explosive, gray, bon-bon.

"If I really wanted to do some damage I would put some nails in this" he said. Nathan thought for a second. "Actually, if I really wanted to do some damage I would do something different. This is just fun stuff."

He inserted into the bon bon a fuse which he had removed from a large package of firecrackers, then wound some more duct tape around the whole thing until it was roughly the size of a softball. He tossed me the new and improved grenade, snapped up the gutted carcass of the real grenade from the hood of his car and tossed that to me as well.

With surprising commercial eloquence, Nathan announced "Now you too can have all the fun of owning your own hand grenade, without all the threatening flak." At that point he promptly reached down his pants, bent slightly at the waist, and started feeling around in his crotch. Before I could even ask what he was doing; before I could even decide that I didn't want to know what he was doing, he pulled out another pineapple hand grenade, pulled the pin, heaved it into the depths of the swamp and yelled "better take cover!"

Like emotions, explosions are also things which are not done justice by words. However, I will go as far as to say that the Earth rocked beneath us, mud and vapor spewed twenty feet into the air, and it was one of the most exhilarating things I had ever experienced. Later I made my first solo detonation with the duct-tape grenade. I placed it inside one of the refrigerators and watched giddily as vapor puffed out of the rusted bullet holes, and the door, driven by adhesive silver shrapnel, launched off its hinges and flopped heavily into the swamp.

On the morning of the twentieth-eighth of June, I awoke at three forty-five on the floor of my empty apartment. Things moved rapidly due to the absence of other things, and within a half an hour I found myself completely prepared to leave, and thoroughly sleepy. I drove myself to the main gate of Fort A.P. Hill and was immediately drawn upon for failure to extinguish my headlights. Rain had begun drizzling sometime after I went to floor earlier in the evening, and I had been riding with the car windows up. I was greeted by the hard tapping of the barrel of what appeared to be an M-16 on steroids. The bulk of my previous exposure to military rifles was entirely confined to the realm of A-Team re-runs and Viet Nam movies. From the looks of that particular weapon I guessed that when it came to firearms, either the camera takes away ten pounds, or they have put on some weight since the early eighties.

I lowered the electric window of my near-classic Nissan Sentra just enough to let the barrel in, yet keep the droplets of water which tried to jump into the car to a minimum. Behind the rifle was the rain-soaked shine of a large, green poncho. The poncho narrowed slightly at the shoulders and lumped up to contain a dark hole where a head should have been.

"I'd like a Happy Meal with a Sprite, and two McFlurries please." I said to the barrel.

The lump in the poncho where the head should have been looked down to where it's stomach should have been and then glanced down the road from which I had entered before zeroing back in on my kill zones.

"What do you want" the poncho asked.

"I am to report to Colonel Applebee at oh-five-hundred at his office."

"What's your name?"

"Laurence Valentine."

"You're going to have to show me some identification" said the poncho.

I retrieved my driver's license from atop the sun visor and handed it through the crack at the top of my window. The barrel of the rifle retreated slightly and relaxed to a position pointing at my torso. A skinny white hand with blonde knuckle hair took my license and brought it up for the dark hole at the top of the poncho to examine.

"Put your head out here where I can see it" said the hole.

I pressed the button which lowered the window all the way to the door and extended my head out into the effulgence of twin mercury-vapor lamps and misting drizzle. The guard examined me for a moment then looked back at my license. I noticed that the very tip of the guard's nose now shone in the light. It bobbed slightly as it spoke, "what's your driver's license number?"

I had no clue what my driver's license number was.

"I have no clue what my driver's license number is, sir." The guard bristled slightly, then lowered his rifle.

"You must not want to get on this facility very badly then," my stomach began to knot "which means you're not much of a threat." The guard lowered his head down to look at me. He was about my age, and had blue eyes that didn't look to contain malice, but showed fathoms of dedication. He was the sort of guy that I wouldn't feel bad getting shot by, because I could be sure that I deserved it if he did. If he shot me it would undoubtedly mean that I had been doing something wrong. Since I had no intention of being in any way subversive, I knew that the only possible way I would get shot is if I was doing something which I didn't know was wrong, in which case this gentleman soldier would probably not shoot me and would rather spring for his manual submission options. "When you come into this gate, always turn off your headlights." He told me. "And don't call anyone sir unless they're an officer."

"Er, right on!" I replied. "Or off, if the case may be."

The guard took a deep breath. "Look" he said "This is a training facility, not a country club playing host to every family member of Major Tom, Captain Dick and Private Harry. If you are on this facility, it means you have a very definite purpose for being here. The actual number of persons on this base is classified, what most of them do is also classified, and what they use to do it with is especially classified. What I can tell you is that those who aren't here to pretend to kill people are here to kill anybody besides themselves that aren't pretending to kill people. They put me here at the gate to protect people from coming in and getting themselves shot because I was the only one at Fort Bragg who didn't stick toilet paper up his ass and light it on fire."

The guard straightened up and cradled his rifle in his left arm, his right finger rested beside the trigger. "Just don't do anything stupid." He said.

I swallowed dryly, wondering exactly what sort of sticklers they were for activities that were considered "stupid" if not sticking toilet paper up one's ass and igniting it was an offense reprimandable by sticking someone on the night shift as a gate guard.

"Do I need a pass or something to let everybody know what-"

"You don't need one" the guard interrupted "Colonel Applebee informed me that you would be making a one-way trip and wouldn't need a pass."

I blinked.

"Colonel Applebee's office is in Menden Hall. Go down this road ahead of you, when it splits, go to the left. Go about a mile and a quarter and you will see a red light blinking above the trees. That will be a water tower. At the foot of the water tower, right beside the road, there will be a sign for Menden Hall with an arrow to the right. Just follow the signs from there."

"Thanks" I said.

"And turn your lights back on" the guard added.

I followed the guard's directions to Menden Hall and parked. It was getting light, but not from anywhere in particular. The precipitation and the trees had transformed the sun into a giant circular fluorescent bulb which illuminated everything equanimously as it hooped the planet from the side opposite A.P. Hill.

Menden Hall was a large building full of offices and secretaries' desks, most of which were empty. When I first spied Colonel Applebee he was standing in the door frame of his office talking to his secretary. He was a crisp figure of middle-aged authority standing with his feet shoulder width apart. He held a cup of black coffee in a manner similar to that which the gate guard had cradled his rifle; right finger on the handle, resting the cup on his left forearm as it cooled. He spoke first.

"You must be . . . Valentine."

"Yes sir."

"Good, and you're on time, I like that. I'm Colonel Applebee."

"Nice to meet you sir." I saw no immediate place for him to rest his cup of coffee, so I waited for him to offer a handshake which never came.

Colonel Applebee's secretary turned and scooted her chair toward her desk slightly and began straightening things. WILLIAMS was printed boldly on the right breast of her uniform. The uniform was camouflage, which I thought would have made her stick out like a sore thumb amongst all of the manila envelopes and wire baskets loaded with white papers, had the office been stormed by whatever the going code word for 'bad guys' was at A.P. Hill those days.

"I understand you have a vehicle" the Colonel stated.

"Yes sir."

"Well, we'll just put it away for you in storage. Unless you would like to pay me to have some of my men blow it up for you."

"Blow up my car?"

"Yes, for a small fee."

"Is it tax deductible?"

"No, but it's fun to watch" the Colonel smiled benevolently.

It was doubtful that my car would even start if it were left unattended for eleven weeks. It was on its last legs, and I didn't trust it to carry me any farther than I could walk.

"What will I do for transportation when I get back?" I asked.

"You probably aren't coming back to Bowling Green, not to stay anyway. And even if you did you can pick up a ride anywhere. We have vehicles available for transporting your belongings from storage to anywhere you may need them. But in all honesty, you probably won't even want them. The department you're going to, Department P, is what is known around these parts as a cushy little, pansy-assed, Mamma's boy's department. Bunch of goddamn spooks hiding behind their papers and their benefits, letting all of the real men" WILLIAMS cleared her throat "and women do all of the life-threatening, down-in-the-trenches, blood squirting from your buddy's neck, the same buddy that was closer than a brother to you who just moments before saved your life by throwing himself on top of you at the beginning of NVA mortar attack while you were jerking off in a stand of bamboo to a photograph of his girlfriend in a bikini at a pool at the Holiday Inn in Memphis while back at home long-hairs rechanneled their feelings of guilt for not getting drafted because their parents were wealthy enough to send them to college by throwing dogshit on men" WILLIAMS cleared her throat again "and women who were returning home from an entire year of snake-ridden, commie-tunnel-infested-jungle Hell to protect the goddamn shit-throwers' very right to do such things!"

The coffee in the cup resting on Colonel Applebee's arm sloshed slightly from side to side as I hopefully scanned his rantings for a yes or no question on which to impale myself. His smile was still present, but the benevolence had taken a hike and was replaced by what can best be described as a means of showing control. The Colonel's eyes fixed on a spot on the floor somewhere behind me as he raised the coffee slowly toward his mouth. Just before the cup touched his lip he drew it away and resumed his speech.

"Tom Kight, Caleb Fry, Wombat Jones, Mark Harbinger, Johnnie Wilson, Big John Winslow. These were all close personal friends of mine" the Colonel's eyes returned to mine "and not friends like you sissy little college boys have in your frats and keggers. Those men all died to protect your precious right to buy stinkin' rice burner cars with power windows, and spend the time between your nights of ten hours of sleeping like a baby, never once waking up flailing at the man with a bayonet at your throat, scaring the shit out of your third wife and her worthless, punk-ass kids who ride those damn skateboards and wear their pants down around their knees and wear their wallets on chains as if someone would actually steal a three-year-old prophylactic, a nudie picture of Kathy Ireland and seventy-five cents worth of video game tokens, reading Jack Kerouac and Virginia Woolf and all of that other rambling bullshit that only makes sense to people who think that making sense of it will make them superior to those who are smart enough to know it's nonsense!"

I stood in respectful silence and waited for the closure.

"Those were good men." The Colonel finally said into his coffee cup, before taking a sip and burning the smile off his face. He then turned and entered his office. I remained in front of the secretary's desk intuitively awaiting some sort of signal which allowed me to emerge from the naughty box and resume being a person still young enough to do the respectable thing and enlist so the Army could treat me like shit on their own terms.

WILLIAMS began typing a requisition for more wire baskets in order to facilitate her ever increasing output of requisitions for typing paper, and Colonel Applebee shuffled around at his own desk out of sight from the place in the foyer to which I was now glued. After several minutes the Colonel came out of his office, sans coffee, and handed me a sealed, nine-by-twelve envelope with my name neatly stenciled on it in black magic marker.

"Corporal" the Colonel addressed WILLIAMS. "Do you know if PFC Mueller is over at the mess hall at this hour?"

"I believe so, sir." Replied WILLIAMS.

"Call him up and tell him I want a some link sausages, hash browns, two scrambled eggs with green pepper, and a container of orange juice. Tell him I want them on a plate, not in one of those darn styrofoam boxes that he thinks so highly of, and tell him that he is also to take Mr. Valentine here to LZ-31and make sure that he gets on the Huey leaving at oh-six hundred for The Farm."

"Yes sir."

"You can wait out in the hall for Private Mueller to give you a ride to the LZ" the Colonel told me. "Where are the keys to your car?"

I reached in my pocket. "Here" I said handing him the keys. "Sir."

The colonel gave me a form for the storage and eventual retrieval of my car, which I filled out in the hall on a clip board also given to me by the Colonel. About twenty minutes later a tall, lanky figure in white arrived bearing a plate covered in aluminum foil and a container of orange juice. He walked into the foyer to the Colonel's office and a low rumbling of pleasantries was exchanged between the cook and WILLIAMS. A moment later the cook, a black man about 19 years of age, trod out of the office and said "Let's go" as he passed by. Colonel Applebee hollered "Thank you private" after the cook, who was presumably Mueller and was going to take me to my flight to 'The Farm'.

"You're welcome SIR!" the private yelled over his shoulder toward the doorway from which the Colonel's voice had come.

PFC Mueller's strides were long and hurried and I had to break into a jog to catch up with him. At his gazelle like pace I started to get out of breath and in between gasps for air I managed to ask him what I was to do with the form and clip board of which I was still in possession.

"We got to get to the LZ before your flight leaves. I'll take care of that for you." Said PFC Mueller.

We stepped outside into the diaphanous fog that had seeped out of the woods since daybreak. It had stopped raining and I followed the private to a running Hum-V with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the roll bar and a heated box for transporting food built into the back of the vehicle. Twenty-five minutes of kidney-bouncing, stump-jumping off-roading later we arrived at LZ-31. It was a quiet ride, conversation wise, but I did manage to find out that the .50 caliber was in case PFC Mueller spotted any deer while driving. The Colonel apparently had an affinity for venison stew, and rabbit stew as well, which was good since that was all that could be made of a rabbit after its neutralization with that particular weapon.

LZ-31 was a clearing on the top of a hill which looked barely large enough to accommodate a Fiat full of drunken high-schoolers wanting to do doughnuts in the wet grass, and it was completely taken up by a dark green helicopter. The large, horizontal blades on top of the aircraft were rotating at a speed not quite quick enough to make them a blur, which made them look surreally gothic and magical as they whipped through space sucking the limbs of surrounding trees down toward the ground before sending them bounding back upwards.

PFC Mueller slammed the Hum-V in reverse as soon as my feet touched ground, and the headlights of the vehicle quickly disappeared down the road which was cavelike under the thick foliage of the forest. Fearing that I would be inadvertently left in the middle of a war game if I didn't get on the chopper, I stooped down like I had always seen on television and clutched my manila envelope as I trotted toward the open side of the vehicle. I was wearing a sweatshirt from The University, blue jeans, and white running shoes which were browning with every step. The pilot took one look at the figure approaching his aircraft, shook his helmeted head and said somehthing with a lot of m's and f's into his headset as he stabbed his thumb toward the open door behind him.

The ride was fantastic, and the noise of a helicopter is not as bad as one would think. You get used to it after about fifteen minutes. There is something different about flying in a military aircraft as opposed to a civilian one. There is no fear of mechanical failure. Since childhood when Airport was first shown on television I had had an aversion to flying. The idea that these aircraft were designed with the passenger, and not the dollar in mind, mollified my angst to the extent that I spent most of the flight peeking out through the opened door in an alto-relievo of sheer flying pleasure. The Farm was to the south of A.P. Hill, and the morning traffic of Interstate 64 was visibly slowing as we passed overhead. Lines of station wagons and mini vans were filing into the parking lot of Busch Gardens, and roller coasters arched upwards to meet us as we descended toward the treetops of Williamsburg. None of this was happening for the two men flying the helicopter, of course. They had seen it all many times before and had become jaded with the thrill that accompanies the freedom of no longer being confined to two dimensional travel. I, on the other hand, had just increased my traveling worldview by fifty percent!

Below us now bobbed and jiggled the vast, secret complex of The Farm. I wondered how it would look to me in eleven weeks once it became tainted with memories, and I tried to scratch into my mind my exact perception of The Farm at that moment, in its full and unfamiliar honesty. It was ambiguously nondescript. It was the sort of nondescript that begs for one to relay just exactly how so.

Our helicopter came to rest on an asphalt landing pad striped with white parking spaces. All around the complex were buildings constructed of cinder block and corrugated aluminum. The buildings were cleverly labeled, each with its own sign suggesting- but not really telling for sure- the goings-on therein. The painted parking spaces extended for about an eighth of a mile to my left and right, stopping only for concrete traffic islands harboring small oaks and some shabby looking orange flowers. At the end of the parking lines to my right (I think I was looking south, because the sun was in my eyes) was another long building. The long, low building housed several different offices, each having their own original sign and unique entrance. There were about seven different departments to the long, low building, and then the building took a ninety-degree turn back toward the area where we had come to rest just moments earlier. There were more entrances for different departments, presumably places where intense training and molding were to take place on my mind and body, but the entrances were all somehow suspicious. There was something inside me that, in all honesty, wanted to believe that this was all some sort of practical joke. This was the preferred interpretation of the situation, for the other more likely, and less appealing option, was that this joke was not a joke, and that my entire life was about to somehow be rendered meaningless by the delivery of one simple fact. We had landed in the middle of a plaza shopping center, complete with a Wal Mart, Lowes, Gap, Fashion Bug, Radio Shack, and apparently there was a movie theater nearby because on the side of Sam's Club was a marquee displaying showing times for Independence Day, Goldeneye, and a couple of other flicks, I can't remember what they were because as it turned out they never actually showed the movies at The Farm, they just kept changing the marquee.

I watched in silent resignation as the helicopter crew tied the rotors of the chopper in place. The large and still gothic-looking blades were situated along the axis of the vehicle and tied with a thin green nylon line to a bridle attached to the landing skids. The helicopter was put on wheels and rolled into Sam's Club. Thick black blankets were placed over the exhaust and engine areas of the helicopter.

"That's so the satellites can't pick it up on infared" came a voice from behind me.

Gazing with greater, or at least stiffer-jawed dignity then myself at the closing hangar was a tall, bald man wearing brown aviator's glasses, a thin white sweater, and plaid Bermuda shorts. His feet were clad in white topsiders and white socks.

"Never did care too much for those whirlibirds." He reflected "too many moving parts and not enough parachutes."

'Hmm' is the noise my body usually makes when knitting its brow. I was happy to note that that function was in regular working order dispite the overwhelming tiredness that had begun to plague me.

The man who greeted me was Otis, and he was somebody important enough to dress comfortably on The Farm. Almost everyone on the base was under thirty, and we were all issued the trendiest of clothes available on the American market. It became apparent to me that had we been middle aged, we would have been allowed to wear things that were comfortable and served a purpose, like keeping the person inside them warm or cool. That was how the supervisors, who were all middle aged men and women, were allowed to dress, and luckily for them, was how they dressed anyway. The trainees were also issued an accessory at the beginning of each day to carry with us at all times until the sun went down. Upon my arrival at The Farm, Otis escorted me inside the pseudo Sam's Club to the automotive service desk and promptly issued me a tire to lug around. Fortunately the tire was small and not very heavy, and Otis confided in me that he felt it appropriate that I be issued a tire since I was in constant worry about the well being of the automobiles which surrounded me. Another 'Hmm' signified the scrunching of my eyebrows together, but there was no time to dwell on this diagnosis as we were immediately en route to another station.

At a check-out counter in front of an entire wall of bubling fish tanks with no fish in them, I was issued a card key which would open anything that I was allowed to see and would record my having tried to open anything that I was not allowed to see.

"The things that you shouldn't see at this time" they told me, "should be obvious".

Otis led me out of the warehouse and into a storefront designated 'Cargo' in large glowing letters. Once in the Cargo showroom, Otis took me to a bunk which I was to use during my training at The Farm. Due to the nature of the store it was difficult to tell how many other trainees had arrived. Otis had stated that others would be arriving all during the day, and by eighteen hundred hours everyone, including myself, would have settled in and converged at Morrison's Mess for chow and briefing. Until then, the day was free to spend exploring the compound, the only conditions being that I kept the tire with me at all times, and never stepped off of the pavement.

Otis provided me with one meal pass and gave me a couple of twenties to snack with if I got hungry again before the briefing at Morrison's at eighteen hundred. Otis shot me a congenial smile, turned and walked briskly toward the garden department of the Lowes façade.

The first thing I did was get a cup of coffee. I went into the TeleCommunications Building, Yellow, with tire and twenties in hand, and ordered the largest coffee available. I handed the cashier a twenty, which she took and my key card, which also contained my net worth and identification. She swiped the card through the top of the register and entered $.75 for the coffee.

The register reported that I had no money, rendering the twenty that I had given her worthless. She was patient however, and asked me if I had just arrived on The Farm. I told her I had, and went into great detail describing Otis to her as she shook her head affirmatively and punched some keys on the register.

"How much money did he give you?" she queried.

"Forty dollars."

"Did he say he was giving you forty dollars, or did he just hand you two twenties?"

"Well," I didn't get the distinction. "He gave me two twenties."

"Let me see if I can figure out how much Otis gave you" the cashier said as she pulled out another keyboard from underneath the register and her fingers erupted in an explosion of typing.

After a moment the sound of raging keyboard buttons slowed and eventually concluded with an expiry 'TAP!'

The cashier smiled as she looked at me "Otis gave you two dollars." She said cheerfully. "You said that he gave you two twenties?" she then asked.

"Yes."

"Well, I don't have to give you any change then, since the coffee is only seventy-five cents."

As she looked at my face her bright smile faded into concern.

"I can give you change if you want" she said. "It would be handy if you wanted to use a soda machine or something later."

"OK" I said, at a loss for any other response.

She handed me my cup of coffee and two twenties in change.

"Condiments are over there" she said pointing me in the proper direction. She then returned to monitoring a television-like screen that was blue with yellow blips and another, perfectly flat, green screen that had gridmarks containing white blips.

There was no yogurt, only coffee. The glass cases which should have held frozen cakes and a plethora of pulverized sweets for dumping on top of waffle cones full of an almost ice-creamy substance, were instead chock full of radio equipment. Dials glowed authoritatively and needles jumped in front of numbers so large that they had to be very small just to fit on the instruments displaying them. Behind the counter where the prices for various treats should have been was instead posted a time table with what looked to be abbreviations for countries, except one was NOAA and several more were NASA. Following the abbreviations or acronyms were three separate times, each a few minutes later than the next.

I took my coffee outside and sat on the curb beside my tire. It all looked almost exactly like a regular shopping plaza except for one detail. There was an ambiguous lack of the usual shopping center avifauna. After a moment it occurred to me that there was no litter on the ground for the birds to pick over and scavenge for sustenance. Everything was perfectly clean.

The warm coffee cast a full blown spell sleepiness on me and I walked back over to Cargo for a nap, where I met a couple of other drowsy trainees. One was attempting to figure out how to fold the baby stroller they had been assigned for the day, and the other was looking for a place in the showroom to place her large, Sam's-Club-issue paper bag with jute string handles and an impressionist painting of a flower garden printed on the sides.

I commissioned an alarm clock from another display in the showroom and asked my new roommates if they minded if I set the alarm. They said 'no' and asked me to wake them up too if they were still sleeping when I awoke. We mutually agreed that two-thirty p.m. was both the best time for which to set the alarm, and to make proper acquaintances, then crumpled into our bunks on top of crisp, new comforters which adorned firm, soothing mattresses.

When my new bunkmates and I arose, the room was full of other squinting trainees with lopsided hair and drool on their chins. The showroom had become cluttered with artificial hanging ferns, plastic bags full of empty boxes, full length mirrors, beanbag chairs, dry-cleaned clothing covered on hangers, and various implements of both fresh and salt water fishing. A line of shopping carts appeared to be window shopping on the sidewalk in front of our new home. The trainees conversed drowsliy over how little sleep they had gotten, how snobby the military people whom they had met had been, and idly exchanged theories on what they each thought we were doing there.

Young trainees looking all the part of a living Sears catalogue without makeup, mulled around inside our stylish barracks admiring the contemporary furnishings, periodically venturing outside to survey the grounds and visit the soda machine with fiscal trepidation, always carrying with them their objects du jour of false domesticity. This continued up until just before eighteen-hundred, when everyone began to discover that they had the common distinction of all being freshly graduated from college. Further discussion uncovered the embarrassing truth that they had all returned after graduation to the same heinous jobs which they had held before their respective universities launched the mortarboard attack and rescinded all hopes of any further deferments for college loans. This anathema was unanimous with the exception of a young Rice graduate named Mark, who admitted to rather enjoying his job as a lifeguard on South Padre Island; which disappointed his parents immensely.

The trainees walked over to Morrison's Mess Hall as a group, each in possession of their still unopened nine-by-twelve envelopes and their assigned objects, which, through convivial discussion had transcended an evolution of similes to finally become affectionately renamed 'other' an in, one's significant one.

The interior of the cafeteria was sparsely decorated with yellow paint and beige tile that looked to have been left over from the construction of the neighboring Sam's Club. The trainees went through the cafeteria line and chose their meals modestly, conscientious of their ignorance of what the proper amount of caloric intake was for inhabitants of The Farm, not to mention the economic reprocusions that a big meal may have on the bizarre economic system of which they were now a part.

Fluttering at the back of the mind of each of the new arrivals at The Farm was the fear that we had all been somehow fooled. We made jokes to each other about the shoddy interior of the cafeteria- which was perfectly acceptable, we criticized the food- which was delicious, for some reason inexplicable reason, we said grace- and had no idea who we were mentally addressing. We all half-expected someone to come out and begin yelling at us at any minute, expounding what worthless, pathetic excuses for beings we were, who were lower than whale shit at a trillion fathoms. We imagined being randomly sought out and asked some trivial question for which any answer would be truncated and converted into ammunition to fire at our foolish, helpless souls who's most fatal flaw was the acute awareness that we had come up on the short end of some sort of sociological predestination which had no victims because every one of us had entered this fiasco of our own free will.

Across the dining room we saw a table of white haired persons eating quietly by themselves. Otis was with them. It was difficult to imagine that these were to be our captors for the next eleven weeks. The conception of time is often paradoxical in nature, but never moreso than when anticipating hell but knowing that it will be impermanent.

After a few minutes the garrulous dinn which had allowed us to delay acceptance of our stark vulnerability to those upon whom we now depended for food evanesced into a silence only broken by the clink of knives and forks touching plates. We began concentrating self consciously on getting our flatware to our mouths and chewing in a manner which somehow denoted respect. As if spurred by some internal alarm, or perhaps it was the overwhelming sound of twenty six people masticating roasted turkey with gravy and green beans, Otis stopped his fork in mid air toward his opening mouth and returned it to his plate. It was as if time, for Otis alone, had suddenly rewound itself for a fraction of a second and he had immediately restarted it on a different path of events. He released his fork and placed his hand upon his right thigh as he turned to face the center of the dining room. Otis's right arm was bent in rigid preparedness as his left hand grasped his red cloth napkin and rested on his hip. He could have been preparing to stand, collapse, flag down a waiter, yell, throw up, sneeze, single someone out and reprimand them for chewing with their mouth open or sprout horns and sing the lyrics to War Pigs backwards. Every trainee in the room had been anticipating just such a development and immediately all eyes were upon him. Otis paused for a second. He opened his mouth as if to speak. He rolled his eyes toward the northeast corner of his face in thoughtful repose, then waited patiently until every trainee in the room had almost the exact same expression on their faces. He then shut his mouth, shook his head as he returned to face his supper, and raised his hand in a mild flourish before picking up his fork and resuming eating.

The room breathed an audible sigh of relief and resumed to clinking and chewing and making all the sounds characteristic of a healthy and prosperous Morrison's Cafeteria. A moment passed, and Otis suddenly said in a sonorous and authoritative voice "After supper, we will walk over to the theater behind Lowes, and you will find out exactly what it is into which you have gotten yourselves." He smiled briefly as he examined us through his bifocals, then returned to his meal.

The movie theater was built on a slight hill to accommodate a sloping floor which descended inside toward a huge stage. There were about twenty of us, and we filed into the oversized theater and quickly took seats, all in the front row, where we gazed upward past Otis's white topsiders at the glare on his wire rimmed glasses where we wanted his eyes to be.

"The reason you are all here" he started "is because you have been chosen to be given the option to serve your country outside of the privatized world of industry. You each have a talent, and unique abilities of which you are probably not aware for the simple reason that there is no demand for them in private enterprise. Those among you who are Republicans are probably thinking to yourselves right now, sardonically, that it is because you are too honest, and those Democrats in the crowd are undoubtedly thinking that you have been chosen, at long last, for your 'street sense'." Otis said the phrase as if it were a colloquial Latin term, "This is not the case." He followed.

Otis paused and allowed a brief sprig of bipartisanship to sprout within our small group before pruning it with more facts about ourselves.

"You all have, I use the term loosely, earned college degrees from prestigious Universities, each school boasting a long and proud heritage of producing the country's most prosperous leaders. However, it was noted by some very influential members of each of your school's Alumni, that those of you here in this room, for some reason or another, did not have the proper direction while in college and have now returned to the very same jobs which you had thought would miraculously evanesce and transform into fruitful and challenging careers after graduation. Careers which would pay all your bills, bring you respect and purpose and life, and get you laid by the most sumptuous members of the appropriate sex or sexes which you find desirable."

Otis began pacing as he spoke, his face grew ruddy and his brow furrowed. He languidly curled his right hand into a shape as if he were holding a softball and rotated it counterclockwise in front of him as he spoke. His left hand retreated into the deep pocket of his Bermuda shorts, his white sweater bunching slightly over the bottom of his wrist.

"You are the most privileged persons on the entire planet. The most privileged in the entire universe if you happen to be religious; which, given your ages, and the pathetic display of prayer at supper tonight, I would suspect you are not. You live in America, and you have undergraduate degrees from American colleges and universities. Any other distinction past that, regardless of what you think of your Fraternities or Sororities or days on the Ultimate frisbee of Debate teams, is totally and utterly pointless on a worldwide scale. The distinctions of having a college education, and having received it in the United States, make you the upper crust of the upper crust in the global society. There is nothing that you cannot accomplish. As I'm sure you well know, in many parts of the world it is the case that one is born with a career of shoveling fecculence for someone else born with the career of telling them that he or she is lowly and trifling, but America is different. Despite what your friends who so knowingly professed to you about the trendy idea of a secret five percent of the nation who maliciously and greedily control ninety-five percent of the nation's revenue, the simple fact remains that that five percent, of whom your friends are probably now a part, merely spend all of that money and everyone else keeps giving it back to them for lack of a better option. People from all over the world come to the United States, unable to speak English, without holding any currency, and without formal education and they make something of themselves, whereas you people have thus far failed to even challenge yourselves. The tragedy in your stories is not that you despise your jobs" Mark the lifeguard rustled in his seat "but that you want to be more, and think that you can not.

This compound is a government operated facility. I hope that by this time you have deduced that our government is aware of your predicament, hence my ability to lay it out for you as I have just done. Your unique abilities which I mentioned in passing earlier, are those skills which you have learned in attendance to the finest institutions of higher learning in the country. The talent, which you all have in common, is the same entity which prevents you from attaining success in the privatized world. During your eleven weeks at this facility, it will be your obligation and your goal to use your abilities to discover your hidden and hindering talent, and then to use it. You will all be released after the eleven weeks and will be offered a position in a government Department which most fits your skills. However, the first thing we have to do is get your signatures on some forms which indicate that you belong to us for as long as we feel you are performing in a manner deserving of the food, shelter, clothing, and training which we give you. If you do not sign the document, you do not stay at The Farm, it is as simple as that. If it is any consolation, it is the same type of document as those given to persons entering the military, but we are not in the business of 'shaping you up' by treating you as if you were no more valueable or unique than the iron bearing ore which is smelted and manufactured into so many other components of firearms."

We lined up at a table which had been set up for the dispensal of the forms stating our loyalty to, membership of, concern for, sacrifice impending, dedication forthwith, and general good-mindedness henceforth, hitherunto, thence, standing, forever and ever, Amen to the United States of America in particular and its people in general. The exactness of the writing made it malignantly ambiguous, and I suspected that this may have even been deliberate. Ironic it seemed to be signing our names to a document which made not one bit of sense either as an opuscule contract or in lieu of the fact that we wouldn't have been let onto The Farm unless it was already determined that we were decent, though misguided, American citizens. Despite our inability to make sense of the wording, we all knew what it meant- 'if you don't sign it, you don't stay'. This made enough sense to all but three of us, who were taken outside immediately and were never heard from again. Besides, we knew that we couldn't have been signing anything evil since the document was being read over our shoulders by the eyes of the "Lord our God Almighty" Himself, as was noted at the bottom of the page just above where our signatures had conceded our honor by being one of His subjects, on this fill in the blank day of fill in the blank, in the year of our Lord fill in the blank.

After swearing away our souls to ourselves, Otis introduced us to Ms. Lucy Hinton, who was the resident informing authority on satellites. Ms. Hinton explained to us that there were others at The Farm, in TeleCommunications Bunker, Yellow, for example, who were more informed than herself on the yins and yangs of orbital communication. However, they were neither as adept nor as interested as she in teaching others about their forte.

Ms. Hinton explained to us that everything done on The Farm was carried out with satellite observation in mind. The satellites could be watching at any time. At various places within the US government, there were people who knew every satellite, its path in orbit, and had a pretty good idea what it was doing. Department P, though it had some idea what some of the satellites were doing through TeleCommunications Bunker, Yellow, was not on the list of those with whom the information was shared. Supposedly it was a security risk and could compromise the counterintelligence abilities of those who were so avidly making a career of satellite tracking and tweaking. This scenario leaves everybody else in the world to either pretend that the satellites aren't even there, or to take on a lifestyle such as ours: devout. At The Farm we did everything with the belief that the satellites were not only present, but knew our every move. This devotion was exhibited by our acting 'exactly like' everybody who didn't act like they knew they were being watched, and we were given specific and explicit details on how to do so.

We were given clothing ordered from men's and women's fashion magazines. It was divulged to us that Department P was the foremost consumer of runway fashion pieces in the world. This was done in order to keep The Farm looking as much like stereotypical America as possible for those eyes behind the satellites.

Though the techniques of American adversaries for gathering information concerning our government is often primitive, it is by no means ineffective. To understand a particular democratically-governed country, one is behooved to understand the people who elect their leaders. What better way is there to do this than by observing the most popular pastimes of the country? In the case of the United States, world leader of "cable in the classroom" and Attention Deficit Disorder, volumes are written on the collective mentality of the forerunning nemesis of tyranny and oppression by observing the national pastime of its' citizens- television. Only the most popular stations are taken seriously by rising dictators- and by Department P; E!, USA, Lifetime, NBC, CBS, ABC, TBS, MTV, BET, HBO, The Playboy Channel, and naturally CNN. Thusly, inhabitants of The Farm had to look the part of what every literate terrorist with cable expected- dumb. Men at The Farm were dressed in everything from Aramni Suits to nylon mesh shirts and black denim jeans, while women were ruthlessly slung into anything from oversized T-shirts silkscreened with various Loony Tunes characters, stirrup pants and KEDS, to full length dresses with sheer, translucent tops and imbricate trains of UNO cards and lace doilies. Most of the outfits were overpriced at minimum, but the clothing of the culottes-embriodered-with-black-eyed-susans-with-combat-boots-permanently-affixed-to-the-crotch-by-their-shoelaces-and-a-poodle-at-the-end-of-the-extra-long, neon-green, belt-slash-dog-leash genre cost what can only be described as an obscene-amount-of-money-of-Larry-Flint-proportions. The prices for such outfits were grossly inflated to the tune of two and three thousand dollars a piece for the sole reason that the only persons who could ever afford to purchase them were regular, every day taxpayers.

"The Farm" Ms. Hinton said "is specifically designed to appear to be a shopping center which is clearly not a shopping center, but rather a secret government installation."

In other words, not only were we dressing like a bad flashback episode of Friends, but the eyes behind the satellites watching us knew that we were faking it. This was because the CIA had voluntarily leaked, or DT'd the information to Russia.

DT was the pet name of an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. DT was an exiter of UPenn who was caught during his first month at work with the Agency selling information about the slime-secreting abilities of Naval Submarines to a female CIA agent posing as a curious intern of the French Embassy. DT sold the female agent the information for the cost of a date at the Russian Tea Room, which she attended, and then gave him a completely fabricated story about a secret Spainish Naval vessel called Ouija Kattwinkle, which was capable of manufacturing a special variety of olive oil on board and using it to coat cruise missiles, rendering them undetectable to radar and impossible to shoot down with anything not itself coated with hummus. DT then sold the information to a real intern at the Yemeni Embassy, who in turn told his supervisor and was promptly sent to scrub the embassy bathrooms.

In their infinite wisdom, the CIA realized that having in their employment someone as witless and dependably untrustworthy as DT was truly a blessing, for they could use him to leak tainted information to subversives all around the world, consequently bringing money into the country and improving the economy of the US, while throwing a wrench into the schemes of bad guys everywhere. In the case of The Farm, DT was commissioned to receive "Top Secret" information about 63 secret CIA training facilities which looked like shopping centers and were sprinkled at locations throughout the United States. Of the supposed 63 Farms, DT was given only the location of The Farm to sell to Russia because that allowed the CIA to know exactly where everybody who was looking for something was looking, and they would also have a good idea what the lookers-on thought they had discovered. This development held no bearing on the activity at The Farm, because The Farm had been designed, and was in operation in such a manner as to not divulge any information about its inner goings-on anyway, and even had it been, it was not a CIA facility, it was Department P's.

"Are there any questions?" Asked Ms. Hinton.

A tall, thin, young man with short brown hair raised his hand. Ms. Hinton pointed to him and protruded her chin in expectation of the first question.

"What about the other 62 facilities? Are there other places like The Farm, with other people or," he paused and briefly glanced at those sitting around him "students, like us on them?"

"It's all right Bradley" she answered "You can refer to yourselves as people, that's how we think of you. The answer as to weather or not there are 62 other facilities like The Farm is very simply 'not that you know of', which inferrs that there are no others in training like yourselves, people or otherwise, that you know of either." She smiled kindly and scanned the audience for more hands.

"How did you know my name?" Asked the same young man.

"We have brought you, here. What would be creepy is if all of you knew our names, in which case we would have to have Craig" Ms. Hinton spoke toward the side of the stage at a nondescript figure with a shaved head and crossed arms "interrogate you."

Ms. Hinton laughed alone as the stares of the trainees moved from her to the dark and unmoving sunglasses of "Craig".

"What sort of training are we going to be doing" A girl with short blonde hair spoke up. "I mean, we have just signed our lives away to some sort of government department, and we don't even know what this department does. Are we to be assisins, are we supposed to create cover-ups for the President, or are we really in trouble, taken captive by a bunch of people who seem nice, all except for maybe Craig over there, but are in actuality really warped people who are going to try to make me believe that my government is a wholly and entirely a good thing?"

The smile crumbled slightly on Ms. Hinton's face. Her hands, which were clasped at her waist, tightened slightly, then relaxed as she spoke. "Lisa, we are not here to fool you, or anyone else. Our government is a very complicated thing, and often appears to have facets which are quite malevolent. However, what-"

"What do you want from us?" the blonde girl raised her voice.

Craig failed to move in a manner which I found unnerving.

"You, who?" asked Ms. Hinton.

"You," replied Lisa "You, what do you, an individual want from us?"

"Ah, me, what do I want from you, that's what you're asking. Tell me Lisa, I realize that you majored in English at Brown, exactly what year did you take on a minor in egocentrism?"

The girl, Lisa, who wouldn't look Ms. Hinton in the eyes was now attempting a face of disgust. "What?" She asked

"I" Ms. Hinton spoke slowly "don't want anything from you. And your colleagues" she breifly broke away her left hand from her right to expose her palm to the audience, then replaced it just as quickly "though I am sure they do sympathise with you, do not necessarily consider you to be in a position to offer them up as a collective 'we' in order to defend your insecurities. You have signed the document stating your willful submission to The Farm, you will stay here until we decide that you are either unable to help yourself or have learned to do so, and you may live if it suits you, in denial of the fact that we do not care one iota whether or not you are here."

"Then why don't you just let me go, because I've changed my mind. I don't want to be here anymore." Lisa arose from her seat and started working her way through the legs of the aisle toward the aisle.

"Leave your envelope please." Said Ms. Hinton.

Lisa tossed the envelope with her name on it onto the stage at the feet of Ms. Hinton, who immediately picked it up and tore open the top. Lisa stopped in the aisle directly in front of Mark the lifeguard and showed no concern that her dress clad buttox was blatantly blocking his line of view of Ms. Hinton. Ms. Hinton cleared her throat.

"These envelopes contain histories, psychological profiles, assesments, and schedules for the next eleven weeks of training. They are all unique with the exception of the schedules. Here is a look at Miss Lisa Veronica Whitcomb's assessment for what is expected from her during her stay at The Farm." Ms. Hinton removed a thick pile of papers and rotated them 180 degrees in her hands. "Aha!" she said, removing a slip of paper from a paper clip at the top of the pile. "There is a note attached to Miss Whitcomb's assessment."

Lisa petulantly shuffled her feet under the edge of her skirt and tried to navigate them around Mark the lifeguard's feet which were also hidden by her dress. "I don't care what your people think I'm all about, I'm outta here!" She placed her hand on Mark's shoulder as she carefully stepped over his legs.

"It is with seventy-eight percent certainty that Miss Whitcomb will be the first to ask what it is that the trainees will be expected to do at The Farm. If it is not asked by her, it will be asked by Mr. Laurence Valentine, who will be seated in the front row in the center."

I looked behind me at the girl with whom I suddenly had something in common. She looked back at me and showed no interest then turned to begin working her way out of the aisle again.

"Miss Whitcomb will state that she intends to leave and will throw her files onto the stage. Upon hearing that the files are going to be read, Miss Whitcomb will stop to listen, but not until she is positioned in front of Mr. Markus Hostas, who will be seated fourth from the right end of the same row."

Lisa blushed, then hurriedly began to work her way out of the row.

Ms. Hinton continued. "She will still leave, but not without first touching Mr. Hostas with her hand. She will leave unless immediately spoken to by Mr. Morrisette."

At that moment all the attention in the room turned to Craig, whose full name everyone figured must have been Craig Morrisette, for he immediately took his feet and approached the front of the stage. He stood beside Lucy, who stepped back slightly and looked up at his large shaven head and dark glasses. Craig removed his glasses and looked directly at Lisa. Craig had seemed stern and even heartless sitting at the back of the stage in the shadows of a dark curtain, but the removal of his sunglasses revealed round, blue eyes which were ever-so-slightly just a little too close together. His eyes were kind and sincere, framed by thin, gray-black eyebrows which traced semicircles on his forehead in between furrowed grooves of concern.

"Lisa" he said in a tone which for the first time brought her eyes to meet another's in the room. She looked at him as if appealing to him to please, please don't be kind to her. "We would like for you to stay . . . I would like for you to stay. If we told you what we were going to do before we did it, it would take the value out of the experience. But I promise you; we are not here to hurt you; we are also not here to help you, we are just here. I know this seems hard to swallow, but you have an ability which is a dying characteristic in humanity, it is also a talent which has to be cultivated while one is not looking directly at it. Your dossier has assesed you as being pacifist and thoughtful, as being somewhat anti-narcissisistic, which is vain in premise, but is merely a reflection of your compasion for those who are the victims of socially determined aesthetics. You are impatient when it comes to happiness and feel that everyone deserves your high standards of it. We do not want to change these things about you in any way. Not in definition, not in manifestation, not in psychological hierarchy. We know that you can strengthen these characteristics in our society, and we are here to show you the path which will enable you to accomplish it. Please stay, Lisa, if not for others then for yourself. The Lord knows that the government is full of people who are in it for themselves, for once it would be nice to have somebody like that who at least has a conscience. Please, stay."

Craig hung on the stage with his hand outstretched toward an empty seat on the end of the row. Slowly, the baffled girl drew her eyes away from the gentleman with the shaven head and thick neck, and took the seat on the aisle. Craig mouthed a silent 'thank you' at her and left the stage. Lucy handed Lisa's dossier down to me and indicated to hand it back to Lisa, which I did.

Lucy, as we came to know Ms. Hinton, spent the next hour and a half going over our personal histories and informed us of how Department P had been passively in observance of our lives during the past decade. Substitute teachers, waiters and waitresses, people in ticket and cafeteria lines, bank tellers, movie theater attendants, carnies; there were people all over the country, associated with Department P, observing people like us. They were not looking for us in particular, the field observers were merely looking for any young people who had whatever characteristic it was that we had. We just turned out to be a common denominator between the field observers, and had also gotten a recommendation by an alumni member of our respective universities.

The field observers would make themselves present at places where there were public gatherings. They took brief notes on those whom they observed, basically scribbling down names and addresses, or merely social security numbers if possible, and then moved on. Some observers had such good memories that all they would write down was a date and a place with our names and they would remember what it was about us that had made us stand out. The observers alone kept their files containing the names in safe deposit boxes and never allowed anyone else to see them. When the people behind the names turned twenty-five, the field observers burned the files. Sometimes however, as in our cases, alumni members, or occasionally a business owner or executive who knew of the Department, would send a name to Department P. This was done when someone whom they felt had potential but had failed to find direction in life. If the names sent had no file on record with the field observers, then the recomended names were not chosen. Our names had all been on more than two field observers' files, so we were offered positions. Basically, we could have shown up to our interviews naked with iguanas on our shoulders and we would have been chosen.

We were all told of the first time we were observed by an agent of Department P. Lisa had been noticed by a field observer who happened to be shopping in a Salvation Army thrift store. The field observer's regular job was that of a disk jockey at a local radio station. His on-the-air name was Marvelous Mark in the Morning, and he always played Innagaddadavida at sunrise on days which it wasn't raining because he thought it was most appropriately listened to as the world got brighter. Lisa had been looking over a rack second hand blue jeans, and had found a pair that were perfect. The jeans were worn to a white haze on the thighs, about an inch longer than necessary, and ever-so-slightly bell bottomed.

Browsing the store with Lisa and the observer from the Department was a man of about fifty years of age. The man was wearing blue jeans and loafers, had curly graying hair shooting our from underneath a white dollar store Captain's hat with a gold knot over a black bill. What was most memorable about the man was that he carried with him a green parrot on his shoulder, which screeched obscenities down at the children in the store. The man paid no attention to the bird, he just kept wandering the store in circles until every person in the store had looked at him. When the people looked at him what they saw was an aqua colored T-shirt which was stretched as tight as a drum over the man's huge belly, on which there was silkscreened a exceedingly buxom woman wearing nothing but a bikini bottom and a fishing gaff, riding some variety of marlin. The shirt had 'Fight-n-Lady' printed on it, which was evidently the name of a charter fishing boat. The man never cast an eye toward anything in the store besides the breasts of the women shoppers. Had he done so, he would have encountered a variety of glares and slack-jawed amazement as mothers tried to distract their children's attention from the bird and the naked woman by asking the children 'do you like this' and holding up anything within reach that had a reasonable price tag on it for the kids to observe. One mother handed her blonde-haired son of about five a brownish yellow mixing bowl for him to observe, which he promptly handed back to her and said excitedly "Mommy did you hear that? That bird was talking to me! Mommy, what does 'fuck you' mean?"

About that time, a man who Lisa recognized as being homeless entered the store. Lisa was fairly certain the man was homeless because she had seen him one day sleeping in an alley down the street from the thrift store under a dryer duct. He was curled with his hands crammed under his arms and his head on a towel which was barely contained by a brown plastic bag. Upon entering the store, the man was met with a barrage of resistance from the people behind the check-out counter. Lisa couldn't understand what the homeless man was saying- he was missing some teeth or something, it was hard to tell through his grizzled beard. The woman behind the counter told him that if he wasn't going to buy anything then he had to get out of the store. The man tried to tell the clerk that he was going to buy something, but as he spoke she closed her eyes, defiantly stuck out her chins, shook her head in a slow and sarcastic 'no' motion and pointed toward the door. "Uh-uh, get out!" she said sternly. "You don't have any money, but you will have the police to deal with if you don't leave this minute!"

"I gots a minid? How muss fo' dat wash?" The homeless man pointed a waxy black finger at a watch inside the glass case which separated him from the ruddy woman. The woman turned quickly and started around the counter, her fat elbows swinging in countering centripity as she waddled as quickly as she could along the long glass case full of greening earrings, coffee cups brandishing obscure emblems, and 45 records of Huey Lewis and Crystal Gale. The homeless man turned slowly and slid back outside the door, in no hurry for he knew that the woman wouldn't dare chase him out into the summer heat. The woman stopped in front of the double glass doors and put her hands on her hips, out of breath from her sloshing dash around the counter.

Having finished his rounds of breast ogling, the man with the parrot on his shoulder shuffled past the woman on his way out the door. "Thank you, come back and see us." She offered to the man in between gasps for air. The man said nothing in response, but did compliment her femininity by squinting at the pulsating shadow between the uppermost buttons of her large, white, heaving blouse. "Fuck you lady" said the parrot as the door swung closed behind him.

Lisa noted all of this, and the field observer noted that Lisa replaced the jeans that she had intended to buy, despite their being perfect in every dilapidated and second-hand way, and left the store.

This was a minor note for the field observer, hardly even worth writing down. But the fact that Lisa looked very young (she was in fact only fourteen at the time) caused the field observer to go ahead and make a mental note of the license number of the car which was parked outside waiting for her. A quick check with the DMV, then the IRS, and the agent could put down a nine digit number, a date, and 'thrift store' in a notebook chock full of similar notations, culminating on that summer day with his ability to forget about her with a clean conscience for the next eight years.

I was first observed when I was in ninth grade by a substitute teacher in my history class. Field observers can be anybody, and observing is usually not a career for them. They can be toll booth attendants, dentists, or construction workers. They also just happen to be silent employees of Department P, on the lookout for persons who are like themselves. My ninth grade substitute history teacher came into class with the full intention of earning his twenty-six dollars a day by doing as little as possible. I was in a rather lousy class. My school was ridden with kids who didn't care about learning, no matter how flowery and glittery it was presented to them. Those kids could see through the façade of 'hip' education. It was painfully obvious to the students with whom I attended class that any teacher who tried to make learning fun was doing nothing more than attempting to make themselves feel powerful. The kids figured that the teacher probably had delusions about "shaping the future" or something, not that the kids with whom I attended class would know what the word delusion meant. The kids in my classes only humored the teachers if the teachers were likable on a personal level, which usually meant the teachers had to maintain a fragile balance of hating their job and loving their kids.

The substitute teacher that day was just that sort of person, but he was also new, so the students didn't know what to expect from him. The sub surveyed the class, looking for the tell-tale scowl of kids who would challenge him, and for the timid looks of those who would actually like to learn if it didn't get them beaten up by the scowlers after class. He may have been slightly hungover, or maybe just lazy, but the sub merely told the class to read a chapter in our History of the United States textbook, and then began himself thumbing through a copy of Sports Illustrated. This pleased the class because it suggested that the sub didn't enjoy being there any more than they did and was merely passing the time. It also gave them an opportunity to write notes to one another and silently play poker in the back of the class. The sub was a bit eccentric, and though he knew that only two or three of the kids were actually reading their assigned pages, he felt that the rest of them were learning a very valuable lesson on the importance of keeping quiet. The substitute felt that a person could go quite a way in life if they merely kept their mouth shut. It had worked for him, and despite his knowing very little about the contents of the History of the United States textbook, he didn't open his mouth and let anyone know it was the case. Besides, he was a substitute; it wasn't up to him to teach the kids about Patrick Henry or Cornwallis, his job was merely to keep them alive until the regular teacher returned.

About halfway through the class period students began to get restless. An argument was being harshly whispered between two of the poker players, apparently someone was making up rules that someone else had never heard of, and nobody was prepared to lose so the only option was to insult one another. Several of the note-bound conversations had mutated into the verbal stage after the words intercourse, pap smear, and gym had been either impossible for the writers to spell or not in the readers' literary repertoire. Who was illiterate was not quite as interesting as who was pregnant, so the silence was broken and those in the middle of the class were behooved to whisper over the whispering of the poker players. This low noise was distracting to the people in the front of the class, who then had difficulty concentrating on the already numbingly boring section of the History of the United States textbook on the Stamp Act. They began whispering to one another about what to do when they had finished reading.

This all distracted the sub from his article in Sports Illustrated on the earthquake at Candlestick Park during the World Series and he decided to give the class a quiz.

"You can't give us a quiz, you're just a substitute!" Said one of the students.

"Watch me." Said the sub. "Get out a sheet of paper and number it from one to ten."

Zippers pulled slowly and feet shuffled dryly on the red concrete floor as the kids in the back of the class deliberately took their time borrowing supplies from the kids at the front of the class, at whom they glared ominously, suggesting that the pencils they borrowed had better not be cursed and the lenders' answers had better be in plain view during the quiz or there could be some violent reprocussions at the bus stop after school when they gave the pencils back.

"First question" said the sub into a barrage of protests such as 'wait' and 'slow down', and 'who does he think he is?' "What river runs under the Potomac River Bridge?"

Suddenly the class looked as if God had ordered a round of dumb expressions on the house. There was total silence for almost a whole thirty seconds until the second question.

"Who is the Vice President of the United States?"

This question aroused a totally different reaction from the first question as the rear two thirds of the class broke simultaneously into discussion which resulted in the conclusion that the answer was Jesse Jackson.

"Question three." Said the sub "Spell Principal Andrews."

This question released from the students a fog of disgust with the entire quiz, and the majority of the class decided practice civil disobedience and not answer the question.

"Number four, who is buried in Grant's tomb?"

"Who's what?" Said one girl "Grant who?" Asked another student. "Who's buried what?" Said one of the poker players. The sub repeated the question, slowly, and the glass quieted down.

"Where is the Statue of Liberty located?"

By this time the sub as well as the students could see which way the quiz was going. They all knew that every question was going to have its own discussion, which meant that there was very little chance that the quiz could count as a grade. However, the students were now curious to see what the new sub would ask next.

As if understanding this, the sub asked "Which is a mythological place: A, Treasure Island, B, the clitoris, C, Hollywood, or D, Greece?" The question had to be repeated several times as the class went from relatively blissful certainty before discussing it with one another to total confusion by the time the next question arrived. Greece turned out to be the most popular answer.

"What is the capital of Pennsylvania?"

Since everyone in the class lived in Bethel Park there was a silent and grossly inadequate display surreptitious peeking at one another's papers for the answer to this question.

"Number eight, who was the Lincoln Tunnel named for?" More shuffling of feet and low grumbling.

"Number nine, is Minnesota part of the United States or Canada?"

"Minna who?" said a boy in the middle of the class to a background serenade of smothered chuckles.

"Minnesota, as in the Minnesota Vikings. Are they a Canadian or American team?" Said the sub.

"Oh!" Said the boy as he quickly lifted both hands from his desk just for a second before returning them and lowering his head to within about eight inches of the desktop to write his answer. His long legs adducted and relaxed like pendulums underneath the low desktop and his skinny knees bumped between the legs and the bottom of the desk as he wrote.

"And finally number ten, what comes on television on Thursday nights?" The class erupted into discussions ranging from comparisons between Arsenio and Jay Leno to the cancellation of Cheers, but the topics finally narrowed and resolved into a joint dissertation to the class by the girl who possibly couldn't spell pap smear and the girl who possibly couldn't read it about the issue of Lisa Bonet's being dumped from Cosby for doing a movie in which the character she portrays in the movie had sex with another character in the movie who was white.

The sub, who was named Mr. Nguyen, who was later dubbed Mr. Guy by the students, collected the quizzes and went over them orally for the class.

My quiz looked like this:

Larry Valentine

November 15, 1989

1. the Potomac River

2. Dan Quayle

3. P-r-i-n-c-i-p-a-l A-n-d-r-e-w-s

4. Eddie Grant is still alive

5. Liberty Island

6. the clitoris

7. Harrisburg

8. it wasn't named after a person, it was named after a penny

9. the United States

10. I don't know, we don't have a TV

The quiz was in my envelope but I vaguely remembered taking it because my memories for the day were saturated with emotions related to having my pencil returned to me by Melvin James via his hurling it at my head from the back of the class. The sub, my field observer, had noticed this and deliberately held me after class under the guise of my being a smart-ass on the quiz by answering numbers four, six, and eight in the manner which I did. In reality, Mr. Guy was merely doing his job as a sub and was saving me from certain death by Melvin in the hall. When I discovered this- eight years later, I was warmed by Mr. Guy's gesture, though he couldn't have known that I rode the bus with Melvin and got my ass kicked by him every day of the week anyway. Mr. Guy saved my quiz and wrote down my social security number on it after I apparently told him that the only reason the other kids didn't answer the questions on the Lincoln Tunnel and the Potomac River was because they thought that he was trying to trick them.

"How do you know I'm not trying to trick you?" I remember him asking me.

"Who would try to trick somebody into believing something as dumb as this?" I had responded.

"As dumb as what?" asked Mr. Guy.

I was lost for a decent answer on that one, which was probably why I didn't remember him asking it. But, Mr. Guy insists that he did ask it, and he is now a full time math teacher at a High School in Avalon. Incidentally, Department P would trick somebody into believing something as dumb as that, whatever that may be.

We were released outside into the fading twilight and to the bathrooms while others stretched and had sips of water at the theater water fountain. We mulled over our having been somewhat surveilled over the past years.

The idea that there were people who took note of us was not quite scary, it was merely strange that anyone would remember such seemingly inconsequential things. Every time I began to feel that my privacy had been invaded, I would remember my fantasies involving totally unknowing women on whom I had waited at work. Granted, I thought the world of those ladies, but I hardly think they would care for me imagining them in the way which I did. Or would they . . .

Of course, dominant in my memory were also those rude customers at work who expected everyone in the restaurant- in the world for all I know, to have everything they wanted right then and there. Forget physics, forget the mortality and imperfection of man, there was just no satisfying some people when they dined out. I wished that those people could know that they were on the minds of the people whom they didn't even know, and what those people thought of them! And we did remember them, we knew their names, where they lived, what they did for a living, how much they made per year, where their kids went to school.

Mrs. Deborah Littlefield, 105 Pines Ln., worked for the telephone company and had a two sons named Fred and Dougie who had a different last name than she because they were the products of her first wedding. Dougie was in seventh grade and was a swimmer, Fred was in tenth grade and was a loser. 555-1212. Mrs. Littlefield had ordered a pizza with pepperoni, mushroom, and sausage just before the most violent thunderstorm in anyone's memory bore down on Bowling Green. The storm knocked out both the power and the phones and brought down tree limbs up to five inches thick as all over town. Shortly after the storm ended, it was sunny again and Mrs. Littlefield arrived to pick up her pizza. She went absolutely ballistic when her pizza was not ready for pick-up when she arrived. She reamed out Margaret, for being the manager, Melissa for being the bearer of the news that her pizza was not done, me for taking the order on the phone, and she would have blasted Nathan too had he not been outside loosening the coil wire on her car rendering it unstartable. Mrs. Littlefield then demanded to know the name of the owner of the restaurant, which Margaret gave her, along with his phone number in Richmond, and Mrs. Littlefield went on to ream him out for letting a bunch of morons run his business. Mr. Green, the owner, apologized profusely to Mrs. Littlefield and gave her five coupons for free pizzas of any size and limitless toppings. Mr. Green then called Margaret and said that the lady was a loony, which we already knew, and not to worry about it, which we didn't.

The mercury vapor lamps which lighted the sparklingly clean parking lot at The Farm clicked on and began humming as their intensity built. Lucy made a signal to someone in TeleCommunications Bunker, Yellow to come outside. A figure in a pink smock and tan pants stepped out onto the covered sidewalk and held the door open to their side as Lucy told the figure to cut the lights in the parking lot. The figure nodded affirmatively and returned inside. A moment later the lights blinked off again and the crowd was enveloped in the fresh darkness of the warm June evening. Locusts bussed in distant trees and cool patches of air wafted silently through our small group. The smell of gardenias and honeysuckle wafted among the trainees, and lightning bugs began to blink lazily at the edge of the forest behind Lowes and among the cattails of the drainage ditch.

Lucy gathered everyone, including Otis and another man and woman who had not yet spoken or been introduced, and had everyone lay down on the spotless pavement between two dark street lamps.

"Normally we do this in the grass over behind the theater, but it's still a bit moist from the rain this morning so I think this would be better. Is everyone comfortable?" Asked Lucy.

The asphalt was smooth and very warm, it was actually quite comfortable. Noone answered Lucy in slight fear that their response would be already predicted on some transcript somewhere.

"Silence means yes, then." She said, and began situating a large clock with glowing yellow digits on the seat of a folding metal chair which had been brought outside from TeleCommunications Bunker, Yellow by the girl whom I recognized as the person who had given me coffee earlier.

"Now everyone," announced Lucy "what we are going to do is watch the satellites going overhead and use this chart," she flapped a couple of stapled sheets of paper in the air with her right hand "which was so kindly spared for us by Marie from TeleCommunications Bunker, Yellow, in conjunction with this chronometer" she indicated the clock on the folding chair "to tell which satellites are going by. We are able to see the satellites during this time of year because the Earth is presently tilted on its axis toward the Sun. This not only illuminates the arctic area of the globe twenty-four hours a day, but it also sends light into the orbital trajectories of the satellites on the night side of the Earth, which reflects off of the satellites, causing them to be visible from the ground."

We spent the next hour watching tiny lights whiz by in the sky above us. There were also three shooting stars, which Lucy pointed out were all actually meteorites smaller than a golf balls.

Staring up into the twinkling darkness, I became entranced while attempting to focus on what appeared to be a cluster of stars, but every time I looked straight at it it would fade out of view. I didn't notice the dark body which had approached and was now hovering to my right side. Occasionally Lucy's voice twittered in the background, mentioning things about geosynchronous the west to orbits and cable television. Frustrated with trying to focus on the elusive blob of stars, I turned my head toward await the next satellite which Lucy told us should come into view somewhere in the vicinity of another minute and twenty one seconds. In my peripheral vision I saw a dark figure swooping down at me and as I jerked my head in its direction to see what it was I banged my cheek on the asphalt. I sat up quickly and saw that it was Marie, the girl from TeleCommunications Bunker, Yellow, and she was settling down on the pavement beside me to watch the show, the main attraction of which at that point was me. I smiled in the direction of Lucy, who was staring blankly at me and Marie, and then looked quickly skyward to point at a giant meteorite which burned a thick blue and yellow tail that stretched halfway across the sky. The meteorite burned an eastward streak in the sky for several seconds, to the gasps of awe and amazement of the warm bodies scattered across the pavement. Everyone mumbled to each other in disbelief about what a brilliant meteorite they had just observed until the satellite came crossing over, which was tiny and dull by comparison. Then Lucy reminded us that it was the satellite that could be looking back at us, and was therefore the one with which to be more concerned.

As soon as the satellite disappeared, Marie stood up and told Lucy that we "had forty-five seconds". She ran over to an insulated box that was sitting next to the clock. Otis and the other two people to whom we hadn't been introduced went to assist Marie, who quickly put on a glove and began handing out automatic rifles. Otis and the two others went about placing the rifles among the bodies which were now laying deathly still on the pavement as Marie began tossing handfulls of objects around the parking lot as if she were sowing seeds in a lawn.

"Ten seconds!" yelled Marie and the four who had been rushing around quickly dropped to the pavement and lay still.

"Don't anybody move." Said Lucy. "The satellite is watching."

There was a full minute of silence, followed by another thirty just to be sure, and finally Lucy told everyone that we could get up. Marie went inside and turned on the parking lot lights and returned with four brooms, four dustpans, and a bucket. I was given one of the brooms and was told that there were exactly one hundred and fifty-eight bullets laying in the parking lot, and that we couldn't go to bed until they were all accounted for. Otis and the man and woman went around collecting the rifles, which they told us had very hot barrels and to be careful touching them if we were to pick one up. The rifles were molded after M-16's and AK-47's, but had solid steel barrels with electric plug ins-to warm them up. The bullets were still quite toasty as well, and the four of us who were sweeping them up had to roll the bullets around in the parking lot for a bit to let them cool before counting them.

"Somebody's going to think that we've had some sort of bloody massacre here and they just missed it." Said Otis to the trainees, who were now squinting bewilderedly at one another under the blinding blue-white lights of the parking lot. Otis chuckled to himself and left the group to the care of Lucy, who held everyone in the lot until all one hundred and fifty-eight bullets were collected. She then released us to return to Cargo and get some sleep.

My Dear, Sweet, Honeydew of Maddening Voluptitude,

Week 1-2 . . . . . . civilian identification and classification

Week 3. . . . . . . . American freedoms seminar

Week 4. . . . . . . . economic balance

Week 5. . . . . . . . review

Week 6. . . . . . . . understanding statistics

Week 7. . . . . . . . political influence and response

Week 8-9. . . . . . politics and government

Week 10 . . . . . . the government and its relation to the farm

Week 11 . . . . . . review and assessment of trainees

The Washington Monument was a full red stripe lower than when William Rudolph Anderson first moved into his office. He had trod a long difficult road of mediocrity at the expense of numerous interns and countless tax dollars to get where he was, and it was high time he started thinking about his retirement. Mr. Anderson wanted to finish up his career with a bright feather in his hat such as Commander in Chief, or possibly even chairman of the poultry board.

It was time for Department P to become exposed and have done to it whatever the voting public thought best, by his hand, and for his credit.

There would be resistance. There would be some people telling him that the people wouldn't be able to handle the revelation of a secret government department that cost an exorbiant amount of tax dollars each year. Even worse, they would argue, would be the people's discovery that the purpose of Department P was to toy with the minds of American citizens. The money spent by the irresponsible and presumptuous heads of state would not have been blown on rollerblades or tickets to Knicks games, but on something as mindboggingly frivolous and esoteric as psychology; the concept of whose popularity had reached its estimated peak during the Jefferson Airplane set at Woodstock, before diving into a fiery and putrid tailspin when the public discovered that psychiatry was the one that involved drugs. Psychology was taboo whenever in the hands of the government, but the intention of using on American citizens turned the stomach!

The clincher of clinchers, the mother of all monocots which would cause the proverbial dromedary's lumbars to slip, would be the discovery by the people that not only did the government spend a heinous amount of money on something and then keep it secret, but the parties responsible had absolutely nothing to show for it! Not one brainwashed Denny's bus boy whose only peculiar quirks were a facination with numbers and an affinity for Luther Vandrose; no pathetic hairdresser whose only joys in life were her Lhasa Apso and a collection of Barbara Streisand movies on beta; no psychotic minority leader who'd had a 'hard life' and came to be the toy of the government would be found to have assasinated anybody, liked or otherwise, anywhere in the known universe.

If Joe taxpayer were to find out that he had been yet again huckstered by his government, he would want some sort of behemoth result to brood over- something visible, something tangible; so Letterman or Leno could throw a catchy anthropomorphic name on it and expedite its development into the people's next media soap opera. In the case of Department P however, there would be no hotel, no real estate development, no person in prison, not even as much as a field of mown grass at which people could scoff on their way to work. The behemoth would be left to the imaginations of the public and their muse, the media, to be made even more terrifying and subversive, and maliciously absent.

It would be horrendous, it would be an outrage, and it would be money in the bank for Mr. Anderson. He would rise in rank to Lord Anderson- bringer of justice and angel of economic efficiency. He would become Czar of Truth- the one man who could defend the American public from the barbaric and insensitive meddling of those who use the government for nothing more than the furthering of their own good- and, incidentally, coming soon to an election near you!

Of course William Rudolph Anderson had been paramount in the development of Department P, but that information was classified for reasons of national security. It was in the best interest of the nation that the names of those who acquired tax dollars to spearhead covert operations with the intention of getting into the minds of the voting public be kept secret. Tales such as that could bring down Senators or Presidents, or worse, prevent those who wanted to become Senators of Presidents from doing so. That was the sort of scandal that weakened countries by destroying the people who were great enough leaders to do such things and not get caught in an environment crawling with persons looking for a back to stab or a meaty piece of gossipy gold on which to cash in.

'Voters' mumbled Mr. Anderson to himself. 'What a sketchy lot they were.'

In a capitalist society, the voters elected whoever had the best campaign manager. They elected the name that they saw the most times in the grass beside an intersection. They elected the name that more strongly associated with sunny days and the American flag- because it was seen with those things on television more often than the other names on the ballot. The voters voted for the person who belonged to their political party, because those in the same party as themselves were as good as friends, and one could trust friends. The American voters voted for the person whom they had heard talk the most, whose face was seen on television and billboards the most, whose name was printed on posters and in newspapers the most, whose name was heard the most times spoken by one's friends at work. Basically, American voters voted for whoever had the most money, and that was the best thing to do because America was a Capitalist Republic and whoever had the most money deserved to be in charge.

Once elected, a politician could be immediately booed out of office for his personal life by the same people who had elected him for the depth of his pockets. The voters were in a perpetual cycle of waiting for their own boredom with Bosnia, the Gaza Strip, global warming and the illegitimate children of the NBA before turning their attention to the problems which affected them directly, such as why they can't eat at the Golden Corral every night, and how come people on welfare had bigger televisions and stereos than people who worked at Sears. When this happened the voters would turn to the news for suggestions on who to blame.

These fluctuations in interests within American society were the core variables of the media business cycle. As soon as the charts indicated that news of the world coming to an end would no longer sell as many newspapers or net as many viewers as gossip of a political figure who had screwed up, any officeholder whose lips weren't on a baby of the same sex was lynched.

The silver, soybean, and pork belly pits are all found on Wall Street, but the media pit is located on Capitol Hill and there is always someone whose future is for sale. Those who were bought were journalistically hung, and the selection process usually consisted of picking a public servant who had once turned down for an interview a journalist who was renowned by the Associated Press for their prowess at throwing a New Years party which was 'whack'.

Mr. Anderson considered for a minute that if it weren't for professional sports, there wouldn't be a name on Capitol Hill that wasn't blackened by the media- a hole in an oil tanker, the ozone, an American tourist overseas, or the home bench at Camden Yards could only attract attention for so long.

'If every political figure were picked on equally,' thought Anderson, 'it would become the norm and politicians everywhere might actually be able to get more done.'

It was certainly an interesting hypothesis. If in fact there were some truth to the thought, then perhaps there should be regulations placed on highly publicized sports. Mr. Anderson frowned as he pondered whether a motion for regulations on media coverage of sporting events and the personal and legal lives of professional athletes would be a Democrat or Republican supported issue. Finally he decided that it probably just depended on which party the person who brought it up belonged to- which caused him to make a note to himself to do some research and find out which political party was presently most popular. He scribbled a message on a post-it and stuck it in his wallet. The note read 'decide on a party to run in'.

It was 10:15 am and Mr. Anderson had a lot to do. He had an appointment at eleven to get his hair cut. He had a luncheon to attend at noon of the League of American Parents which was scheduled to decide if they should extend their proposed scholarships for Representatives' and Senators' children to cover pre-collegiate schooling. At two his computer tower would be ready at the repair shop with its new modem, and he had to call his wife and remind her to pick it up and bring it to his office. He would then have to have his secretary Billy return the loaner computer he was using to the computer lab at American University. With his own computer returned to his possession, Mr. Anderson could finally update his webpage from his office. This meant that he would have to take on an intern who knew HTML programming, so he would have to have Billy check for the availability of one while he was at AU dropping off the loaner. If there was not an intern available at American, he would have to have Billy call George Mason and Georgetown to check for interns there. If Billy couldn't find any interns there, Mr. Anderson would just have to have Billy find somebody to hire and edit the page for him; Mr. Anderson wasn't about to waste the taxpayers' money bringing in an intern all the way from Tech and going through the hassle of setting up an apartment and all of that nonsense.

At three-thirty Mr. Anderson had a Tee-time with three members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whom he would have to tell, again, that he had no idea what this Department P thing was all about, which was exactly what they wanted to hear since it was they who had put him in charge of it, and for the next seventeen holes or so they would discuss the prospects of getting scholarships for their children at Christ Church School, and the possibility of having funds allocated to inspect the campus in Urbanna on the weekend of the Oyster Festival. At five he had to appear, eighteen holes or no, before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and tell them that he was still looking into the possibility of the FBI using the Special Committee for Educational Progress and Implimentation as a front to run a secret facility which did anything that could cost them the next election were it discovered. Sometime after that, Mr. Anderson would have to call Senators Hastings and McDougal and do a little kissing up as a display of gratitude for renewing his position as Director of the Special Committee for Educational Progress and Implementation. Mr. Anderson had been Director of the committee for every year since 1992 when it had originally been ad hoced from the lungs of righteous leadership. Finally of course, there was the business of figuring out how to uncover Department P in the manner which would most effectively make him look like a hero to the American people. Well, the American voters anyway, everyone else could go take a flying leap.

The Wandering Monk in The Dalles

It was an unfortunate thing that wearing orange rags made everyone think he was an escaped convict. Not that he minded being in jail. Flesh was prison enough to make The Dalles Hilton seem like a cake walk; and the Monk smiled as he didn't dwell on the fact it required flesh just to make that observation. Jail was just another word in a universe beyond words.

The Earth was rotating around the Sun, which was rotating around the galaxy, which was traveling away from every other galaxy in the universe in ever expanding greatness, so for one to say that they were 'confined' in a jail cell made little sense, being that one was never even in the same point in space for more than the amount of time it takes to show one frame of a movie, which was one-sixteenth of a second. Of course the infinity of the universe rendered the concept of a particular point in space meaningless to begin with, but the monk didn't dwell on this either because there was no point in contemplating things that were abstract and nonconceptual; it tended to make one believe that they had intuitions of how things really were, which was totally mental. He merely mulled over the principles which allowed him to comprehend the answers to all of life's problems as they were told to him by, it seemed, everyone with which he had come into contact since his arrival in America. This approach to society, which the Monk had trained himself to exhume, consumed a minuscule amount of energy and allowed the bulk of his existence to be focused on simply being.

Jail was rather tranquil, actually. It often reminded the Monk of a cave in which he had existed in Sri Lanka, with the exception of its greater dimensions and luxurious contents. The narrow confines and dank, hard surfaces of the cell gave him an ever-so-subtle twinge of nostalgia, which suggested to the Monk that he would not find enlightenment in this particular lifetime. The walls of the cell were painted with a delightfully inconsequential shade of green which, when meditated upon, gave rise to many beneficial insights, one of which was the awareness that due to a serendipitous combination of their perceptions of him, his cellmates were sparing him the direct experience of certain behaviors that undoubtedly would be detrimental to them karmaticly.

For the Monk, jail was all right. Its only real drawback was that, despite his objections, his captors kept giving him food after noon. He also wasn't allowed by the jailers to eat out of his wooden bowl, but that was no bother. The police had confiscated his bowl upon his apprehension and it now waited somewhere in the bowels of the jail storage room for his release, along with the rest of his possessions- which were a black umbrella and a toothbrush. The jailers brought the Monk food on styrofoam plates, two times more a day than he had vowed to eat. They did finally stop bringing him a spoon however, after his first month in custody.

The Monk's name was Philip, and as a boy in Ceylon he had once helped his brother buy food for the novelist Arthur C. Clarke. They didn't actually buy the food though, they stole it and gave the shopkeeper a percentage of the money that Mr. Clarke had given to them to buy groceries. It was much cheaper than purchasing the food right out, and they could get away with it because they were poor and they knew the shopkeeper, who was impoverished as well. The shop wasn't owned by the shopkeeper, it was owned by some wealthy American who was always too busy making money elsewhere to spend time earning it there. Some years later, after the shop had gone out of business due to theft (and everyone in the neighborhood went back to growing their own food and not thinking of their well being in terms of dollar amounts), the owner of the store sold the land beneath the supermarket and the supermarket was torn down. In its place was erected a factory which built sails for Americans and Europeans to play with on their various forms of wind-powered watercraft. Some of Philip's relatives sewed the sails together, and other members of his family had the job of gluing the seams of the sails with super, industrial strength glue that came out of big, fifty-five gallon drums. The relatives who had the job using the glue were always sick, and many of them were dizzy from the fumes even on their days off. Philip was spared from working in the sail factory because by that time he was cohabitating in a cave with some bats and mice and devoting his time to living the living that he had instead of making another one.

One day, Philip's cousin Mary, whom he had grown up with since birth, died in the factory from suffocation. After Mary's death the factory owners put fans in the windows, but when they ran them it killed the landscaped shrubbery underneath the fans outside the building and cost the factory dollars in electricity. The people who ran the factory decided that they only needed to run the fans for fifteen minutes in the morning before the employees arrived, and for fifteen minutes at the end of the day when the employees left. That was what they did, and people still got sick, but nobody else suffocated.

In the woods outside of Colombo, Philip lived with no toilet. When Mary died however, he decided to make himself a urinal out of a slab of rock. The urinal consisted of a slight round depression, and a raised square carved in low relief of the sail factory. Phillip realized that he was not a very good Monk when he caught himself wishing that he drank more than once a day so that he could use the urinal more often.

In cell number four of The Dalles jail there was no urinal either.

Philip's cellmates could tell by the way he slept in a sitting position on the floor that he was some sort of religious person. Normally the presence of a holy person caused the inmates, who were all regulars to The Dalles jail, to take a defensive posture usually involving some form of violence. Philip was different though. The inmates couldn't quite put their fingers on what it was that caused them to lose their desire to rape and steal, and terrify him, each other, and themselves whenever they were in the same cell as Philip, but whatever it was also caused them not to dwell on the development. Philip knew why- he had discovered the answer one day while meditating on the horizontal reinforcing bar which connected all of the vertical bars of the jail cell. The jailers, who noticed that everyone immediately became docile when put in the cell with the Monk, always placed the most violent suspects in the cell with him. They never saw Philip do anything to the other inmates, they just suspected that Philip's skin color was an indication of his being some sort of kung-fu master who had pummeled the other inmates into submission without leaving any marks, and then terrified them into keeping silent about the incident later. The jailers liked this daydream of one doing unto others before they did unto you, and in preservation of the daydream, made a point of never watching Philip's cell very closely.

One day a jailer came to cell number four and called Philip's name. Philip had been in the The Dalles jail for two months and six days. The police had searched everywhere for information of an escaped convict matching Philip's description- Male, about fifty-five, dark skin, shaven head, unplacable accent, and most importantly, wearing a prison uniform with the numbers burned out of it with a automobile cigarette lighter. Philip was an enigma to the law enforcement officials, for they had never found anything dangerous or incriminating about him. They eventually decided that they could no longer hold Philip, and he was told that he could leave the jail. Philip was informed that he would have to leave the prison uniform with the police. This bothered Philip none, for he had spent several years naked in the forest, and he told the jailer so. The jailer swallowed dryly and told Philip that one could not legally walk around naked in the state of Oregon. Philip reminded him that he did have an umbrella, which was given to him by all seventeen of his nephews upon Philip's ordaination as a monk in Sri Lanka, but the jailor interrupted and told him that he would have to wear clothing on his body if he wanted to leave the jail for any substantial amount of time. Philip thought for a moment and decided that the jailer, who had been quite nice to him in comparison to the other inmates, was just worried about the harsh sun of the desert burning the parts of his body that was not offered protection by the umbrella. Philip thought that this was a nice gesture of the jailor and decided that in accordance with the American custom of allowing others feel like they have helped you, which had come to Philip during meditation on a tattoo of a bleeding dagger on the back of one of his cellmates, that he should respect the jailor's feelings and don some clothing. Philip asked the jailer for directions to the nearest cemetery where he could cover himself with ashes of the dead and search for some clothing which was in a desirable state of rotted deterioration.

This question gave the jailor the heebie-jeebies, and he pushed Phillip back into the cell, locked the gate, and walked down the hall out of sight. After lunch the jailer returned with a pair of Dickies, some brown loafers with leather tassels, two black socks, a t-shirt with Mt. Rainier and 'Vancouver' silkscreened on it, and a plaid Arnold Palmer sport jacket. The jailer had gotten these items from the Salvation Army thrift store for the cost of a kiss on the cheek of the cashier, who was his sister. The jailer gave the clothes to Philip, and reccommended staying away from the cemetaries or Phillip would get locked up 'for real'.

Philip was released into the blinding sun and dry air of The Dalles. The town slept on the south bank of the Columbia River and marked a point of diaspora where trees left the forest and scattered eastward down the hills and into the desert. In a physical sense the river made as good a destination as any, being visible from anywhere in the hillside town.

The loafers felt strange. They pulled at Philip's skin and formed pockets of sweat and hot air that churned with each step he took. The shoes separated him from both the Earth and the air, and were in objection to his vows as a Monk.

The jailer had insisted that Philip wear the shoes before he was released, and though the jail was not a bad place in terms of his monasticity, Philip knew that it was time he left jail and continued wandering through the universe in search of new illusions to overcome. He thanked the jailer for the shoes as he politely slipped them onto his feet. Philip also thanked the jailer for the extra sock, which made the jailer shake his head and escort Philip briskly by the arm to collect his umbrella, toothbrush, and bowl.

Philip wandered through The Dalles, snaking a downward path through streets dusted with the tops of mountains that silently pretended they weren't watching the blister that had formed at their foot. Eventually, he arrived at the edge of I-90 and carefully watched the east-bound traffic as he timed the sets in anticipation of crossing. There was a break, and the Monk darted out onto the road only to trip on the toes of his new loafers, which were still foreign to his feet. His wooden bowl went rolling into the lane ahead of him and made a hollow, spiraling noise against the asphalt as it settled next to the far white line. Philip quickly righted himself and shuffled carefully to the far side of the road. An eighteen-wheeled truck honked at him and blew dust into his eyes as he stopped at the guardrail and turned to locate his begging bowl. There it lay shining, dull and tortoise-like, about a foot from the edge of the highway. Philip looked west and saw a stream of traffic in both lanes barreling down on the unsuspecting bowl. Philip could do nothing but watch as the humming tires and fading honks of passing automobiles blew by him. The tire of one car touched the edge of the bowl, causing it to jump slightly on the road. Time stopped for the Monk as he focused on the bowl. He watched the bowl and imagined it to be the cap of a skull glistening in the sun. He imagined its brown color to be his own dried blood; it was his own skull he envisioned, resting in the highway; and he contemplated the impermanence of all things- the bowl, his body, the road, the mountains, the jail, the jailer, his cellmate with the homemade tattoo of a bleeding dagger on his left shoulder blade, the cars which sped by. It was a delightful experience for Philip, for he had always merely assumed that his bowl would outlast him, and now he stood, like another thistle sprouting out of the large compacted gravel of the roadside, passively awaiting the demise of his most familiar possession.

Philip's reflections faded with the noise of the passing traffic and he found himself looking at the bottom of his most important possession. It was still round and solid, resting on the brilliant white line of paint that didn't break for another two thousand miles. The bowl had not been crushed. He reckoned for a moment that he may have felt relief at not losing his bowl, and again smiled in his knowing that he was still very far from awakening, but that distance identified a destiny. He debated leaving the bowl on the road as a lesson to himself on non-attachment, but concluded that he would still need the bowl to eat from on his journey eastward. As Philip stepped over the guardrail and approached the less busy westbound side of I-90, he wondered if practicality ever actually postponed one's enlightenment. He then decided that it didn't matter- time was infinite, inward as well as outward. It was the mind's sequencing of memories that spawned the illusion of space-time being linear. Enlightenment was only perceived to be postponed by those who were wondering how long it would take. They did not see that their enlightenment had always been, just as they had always been. Everyone was enlightened, unfortunately they all just kept searching for it in individual memories. They were dreaming, and Philip knew that he was one of them.

Philip crossed the westbound lanes of I-90 without incident, scaled a wire fence which paralleled a set of railroad tracks, and hopped down into a fleshy patch of wild dill. Thinking of Gandhi, Philip placed his loafers in the middle of one of the concrete ties and continued barefoot on the warm rocks which supported the tracks. He felt his familiar perspiration evaporating into the dry desert air and anticipated meeting the new water molecules which would continue his thought processes where the others left off. Then Philip just walked and thought about nothing at all.

Upon receival of her copy of the eleven week schedule for training at The Farm, Lisa decided to live the rest of her life in misery. She decided to indulge herself in the most irritating and depressing of lifestyles as an act of rebellion against the society which had made her hopelessly well taken care of.

Lisa's parents had spent the best part of their lives working hard to insure that, unlike themselves, their daughter would be able to attend the best schools and be allowed all of the privileges of education and state of those who had money. Lisa had been raised with private coaches for swimming, a private teacher for violin lessons and private tutors to expedite her private school education. On account of these things, Lisa was accepted at graduation from High School into Brown University and was given an athletic scholarship. She traveled the country via jet and bus at the expense of the other students to swim around in swimming pools full of other kids whose parents had spent the time and money to develop offspring which were well rounded. At Brown, Lisa was given more tutors who continued to assist in her procurement of excellent grades. Lisa excelled at everything, and was offered a plethora of jobs before she even graduated from college, all of which paid starting salaries in excess of forty-five thousand dollars a year, plus medical coverage and 401-k's. Among other employment options, Lisa was offered positions with a cellular telephone company, a railroad, State Farm Insurance Company, K-Mart corporation, PepsiCo, Delta Airlines, Richfoods, Proctor and Gamble, a company named Merchantics that made all of its money by telling other companies how to make their businesses operate more efficiently and productively, and she was offered a management position by a company which made the heads of safety pins and the little steel balls which go in the ends of ball point pens.

Lisa was thoroughly disgusted by the concept that she was merely offered all of this money for the simple fact that she was lucky enough to have parents who gave her theirs. Lisa's father was a master chief aircraft mechanic in the Coast Guard, and her mother was a nurse anaestheticist. They weren't even rich, but that didn't prevent Lisa from feeling guilty about it.

This guilt matured and manifested itself at The Farm, where it first became identifiable in her manner of dress. Lisa picked out the most uncomfortably styled non-cotton outfits to wear. As a result, she usually sported a pricey runway fashion that left her either too warm or too cold and made her feet sore. In addition to her outfit, and in accordance with the guidelines of The Farm, Lisa would carry an other which was as awkward and heavy as possible; her favorite of which was an empty fifty gallon pentagonal fish tank with a slate bottom. After the first week at The Farm, Lisa noticed that she was drawing the attention of her fellow Farmies and arousing many cheerful questions about her quest to be miserable for the sake of the less financially fortunate. Lisa noticed that this attention was an excellent astringent for taking the sting out of her uncomfortable fatigues and cumbersome other, so after the first week she dropped the runway fashions and adjusted her wardrobe to include whatever clothing Otis or Lucy felt like giving her in the evening before bedtime, the only stipulation being that the clothing she was issued have large, crisp tags sewn into the backs. Lisa coupled this facet of her quest for personal equanimity with the poverty-stricken with wearing underwear that was two sizes too small. She also decided not to bathe or shave, and her armpits began to grow a delightfully irritating stubble which Lisa was only able to ignore when confronted with the bugs which began to fly around her waxing dreadlocks. Lisa did continue to brush and floss however, for she intended to spend many miserable years to come eating only stale CornNuts and Atomic Fireball jawbreakers, both of which she despised and figured would eventually lead to some sort of nutritional deficit, killing her slowly from the inside out.

She always headed into the wind, wore clothing that left her drenched to the skin in even the gentlest of misting drizzles, and walked where the pavement never rose up to meet her feet.

The crowning result of this advent of self-inflicted wretchedness was a revelation which some could describe as a divine awakening in Lisa; an awakening of her sense of how unfair the world was. She held complete and translucent understanding that there existed in the universe a greater and inescapable force or system. Lisa knew that this force was not merely indifferent toward financial equality, but it was actually biased toward those who held monetary wealth. This was all profoundly unfair, and upon her enlightenment Lisa transformed into the world's prophet for exposing the unfairness. Her greatness in cause led to greatness in her emotional stature, which in turn produced greatness in self-worth and image. Lisa's epoch of high self regard which budded in the abyss of self humiliation was proof that her mission was truly of a higher calling and purpose, for it is a known fact that all great insights seem paradoxical to those who do not understand them.

Basically, Lisa became a real bitch.

Everybody at The Farm, the instructors included, quickly grew to dislike Lisa's new egomaniacal lifestyle. Her bloated self image became common knowledge, for Lisa was quick to expound on the coming of the great uprising of the 'lower classes' whenever anyone in her presence appeared to not be looking at her with the condescension that she imagined they would give a homeless person.

Knowing that they would only have to put up with Lisa for another eight weeks, everyone humored and even encouraged Lisa in her quest to rally the underprivileged in rebellion against the evil capitalist superstructure. The residents of The Farm knew that any discussion with Lisa would do no more than cause her to become defensive to the brink of violence, so they patiently anticipated the end of the remaining nine weeks of training when Lisa would return to the outside world and promptly get slapped back into reality by total strangers. Either that or she could reveal her insights on All Things Considered and become wealthy by the hands of others who felt that the two steps to solving all of the world's problems were finding something to complain about and making out checks to those who are better at complaining about it than themselves.

Incidentally, research headed by The Farm had identified these people. Those check-writing pillars of righteousness who could potentially destroy Lisa by making her rich upon her return to capitalistic culture had been identified in their native habitat of American society and were given a scientific phylum. Their phylum was the 'someone should-ers'. The 'someone should-ers' always confined their attention to problems which they could somehow manage to blame on someone else. Thus they were hopelessly politically involved to the point that they took extreme measures to insure that they were adequately insulated from the slings and arrows of personal fault. The 'someone should-ers' were a vigorous and resilliant breed, for all of their psychological and social needs were satiated by the simple act of voting; after which they could comfortably sit back and blame all of their troubles on either the person whom they had helped elect, or the party of the person whom they didn't. There was no argument against the 'someone should-ers' beliefs, because they were beliefs, and Lisa illustrated the lecture nicely by making loud sniffs of disgust and looking out the window as the findings were revealed to us.

By late July the humid Williamsburg heat had baked Lisa's hair into a crusty mat of blonde polyester cotton substitute and had become a haven for fruit flies and various airborn parasites. Mark the lifeguard decided that he no longer felt like smelling or looking at the oily swabs upon Lisa's head and finally broke down and flat out told her that she reminded him of a sorority friend of he and his Lifeguarding buddies, who were all Delta Tau Chi's. Mark went to great lengths complimenting Lisa's hair and noted how trendy that style had been at Rice. He made repeated references to his being in a fraternity, and explained in nauseatingly shallow detail how at his University, dreadlocks were the true defining mark of a sorority woman with a brain. Of course this wasn't true, but Mark knew that Lisa would believe anything he told her if he carefully preceded his lies with the proper compliments toward her; it was an old lifeguard trick. Lucy overheard the barrage of pseudo flirting and reverence for the dreadlock style which spouted from Mark with all the sincerity and grace of drool on a hungry dog, and she gave him a subtle wink; which Mark took to mean that Lucy wanted to have sex with him. Intrigued with the thought of sex with on older woman, especially one who was smart, caused Mark to lose interest in charming the hair off of Lisa and he broke off his wooings with what he figured to be a less-than-graceful repeated remark on 'how cool [her] dreads were'. Mark then returned to his bunk in Cargo to lay in contemplation of how to play a hook-up on a highly surveiled government facility with one of its employees.

As expected, Lisa shaved her head within twenty-four hours. Quite unexpected however, was the concurrent disappearance of Mark from The Farm. At last report Mark had spent several hours in Lucy's office shortly following a proclamation to his male colleagues of his intentions to "Shag Ms. Hinton"; which had been responded to with various degrees of bewildered disinterest.

Some people collected animal heads and hung them on a wall, some read books for their thickness and popularity, Mark had sex with women whom he found a challenge. Of course Mark's hobby would have been more of a challenge to him had he been born with the ability to form sentences which suggested that he would actually be missed the next morning by the women whom he was about to deflower.

As many children of wealthy parents are, Mark was fabulously well maintained physically and completely devoid of any thoughts of his own imperfections or mortality. Having been born with looks which didn't warrant the development of a personality, Mark was the quintessential sex machine, and he viewed himself as such. In fact, Mark viewed all of humanity as machinery. He regarded the entire human race as nothing more than a mass of cybernetic organisms existing in reaction to stimuli.

When questioned about the validity of his conviction that all people were machinery, Mark admitted that sometimes there were discrepancies in the reactions of females to his stimuli. For example, sometimes they would let him buy them drinks all night at a bar and then not put out for him until later in the week. "But" Mark said, "that can be accounted for, just as physicists sometimes overlook subtle variables when calculating gravitational effect on satellites and stuff."

The Farmies wondered if Mark had encountered such a discrepancy in his attempts to canoodle Ms. Hinton and consequently been executed or deported or given a job in middle management of a large corporation. Maybe he had been sent to room 101, or maybe Mark had actually scored, though nobody went as far as to picture it.

Lisa was the first to take note of Mark's absence. She had successfully crushed Mark's inflated value as a person by negating his compliments with the act of shaving her head, and she wanted to emphasize how little she thought of what a capitalist swine such as he thought with a public display of languid disinterest concerning her not being as cool as his sorority friends. Lisa was also in an especially zealous mood due to a mishap while removing her dreadlocks. She had not actually shaved her head- Lisa had first clipped the plastic beads and hemp string ornamentation out of her matted rat's nest of rebellion with scissors. She placed the beads in a Cargo-issue hand-blown glass bowl on top of the cobalt blue transparent marbles the bowl contained. Following this, Lisa took the scissors and clipped off her hair in one piece, using a technique adapted from a process taught to her by an uncle in New Hampshire for shearing sheep. Bringing her hair before her eyes and for the first time seeing it in person instead of in a mirror, Lisa decided to take it to the sink for cleaning. After breaking up some of the pollen and dust, Lisa's hair began to once again separate into individual strands, and the bugs who had been secure and cozy in their matted follicular abode began to awaken and search for new shade in which to hide and breed. This observation made Lisa feel one step closer to the truth and honesty which could only be found through poverty, and she sighed with the teary-eyed pride and sadness of a mother who watches her child departing for college as the tiny creatures crawled and took flight out of her hair. Lisa decided that the best thing to do at that point was to take her hair outside. She laid the mat on the warm, sunny curb in front of Cargo where it could dry and allow the beetles and gnats to evacuate to more receptive habitats without hindrance. Lisa returned inside and decided that rather than shave the rest of her hair with soap and a razor, she should try an alternative method that better reflected her progressive and modern lifestyle. Lisa adjourned to Sam's Club supply and found a bottle of Nair, which she immediately applied to the remaining patchy blonde tufts which leaned with stiff resignation in all directions. This approach to hair removal not only gave Lisa's head the fleshy sheen of a cranium in the volatile wraps of chemotherapy, but also caused her tender scalp to blister in reaction to the chemicals. By the next day, strips of Lisa's skin had already begun to peel off in wide brown strips exposing shiny pink flesh underneath. The parts of her head which were not peeling were swirled in angry splashes of red as her irritated scalp tried to arch away from her burning skull. Lisa was miserable, and it made her extremely cheerful! All that was left to do was to come within receptive range of whatever remarks Mark would have about her lack of desire to be "cool" and she could unload a war chest of enlightened righteousness on him. But Mark had disappeared and everybody else prevaricated their admiration of Lisa's boldness with fabricated knowledge of heads which, "Unlike Lisa's", were not the proper dimensions to bear baldness in such a positive light. She knew they were lying, but her cheerfulness prevented her from calling them on it. Instead, Lisa became a smiling pit of loathing and despise for the spineless capitalist clones who lacked the balls to show their true feelings.

The disappearance of Mark occurred on the first day of a series of lectures depicting the manipulation of the T-shirt industry by various American intelligence groups. Lisa rechanneled her bottled up feelings into an outburst about how the CIA 'had no right to give interest-free loans to immigrants who wanted to start their own silkscreening businesses'. Lisa had gotten out of her desk and was yelling in some saliva encoded neo-hippy jargon and pointing at Otis, the doorway, and Otis's notes on the chalkboard for a whole three minutes until finally a Farmie with an accent which bordered proper English spoke up. The farmie spoke in a clear and resonant voice which completely smothered Lisa's whiney ramblings and turned the heads of the entire class. For a moment we all thought James Earl Jones was sitting in on class with us, fresh out of a Tom Clancy movie.

"You, little girl," said the voice "don't know anything about immigration, or economics, or business, or poverty, or national security, or anything. You have already proven yourself a fool with your words, but you have also proven yourself a child with this recurring saga with the hair. If you want to preach the dogma of media dictated ignorance, save it for the outside world, for faith is the placebo of the people who form markets for circular logic and culture-based beliefs in things you can't explain with words. Those who would desire sugar pills from your Pez dispenser of cultivated gossip are not in here. We in here are interested in the truth. We want to set ourselves free, and you cannot do any of us any good; but you can do yourself a favor and listen to your nemesis for once, so one day you may form arguments that are worth the time that you spend yelling yourself" the person looked at her watch "three minutes closer to death."

Circling at the ceiling and carefully watching the dying twitches of Lisa's pride was her ego. The entire class expected her to retort with added decibels of shrieking rampage, but it didn't come. As if in a brief whiff of airborne wisdom, the class realized that Lisa actually wanted to be reprimanded. It made her feel important; though as her slack-jawed and dewey eyed expression indicated, it obviously didn't make her feel good. Otis, who stood motionless at the front of the class holding a piece of chalk, quickly defused the situation by retaking control of the class. He nodding affirmatively to Lisa as if he and she were in on some sort of covert operation with higher orders and motioned for her to sit down. Lisa sat, and Otis addressed the class.

"Is that how you perceive yourselves- as pilgrims on a quest for truth? Do I have before me an entire class full of little Scullies and Moulders on a government funded expedition to find out what others who are doing the same have discovered?"

The class sat in silence figuring that the metaphors in the question had made it rhetorical, but Otis stood and awaited an answer with unnerving patience.

"For the sake of brevity" continued Otis "I shall refer to the schedule to see who is supposed to answer this question.

He approached the small Formica desk which rested in the corner of the room and unlocked one of the drawers. Otis produced a three ring binder full of papers separated into what appeared to be chapters by protruding tabs. Flipping through the book he began to read aloud- "week two, week three, A-ha! Larry!"

I straitened in my desk a bit at this unexpected address.

"After a disturbance in the class produced either by Lisa, Aaron, Thomas, or Camille, one or more of the trainees will respond to the upriser, telling them something to the effect that 'we are all here to learn the truth and you are hindering that process'. When the class is asked if this is true, noone will respond until the log book is quoted to them and then Mr. Valentine will have something to say."

Otis snapped the binder shut in his one hand and pushed his spectacles back up his nose with the knuckle of his thumb, getting chalk on his eyebrow in the process. While everybody noticed the smudge, the situation didn't allow for humor, and the lack of smiles further darkened the settling mood of the room. I cleared my throat, wondering what I might say, and after what seemed a very long silence I decided that all that was required of me was an answer, and at that point an incorrect one seemed more appropriate.

I answered, "Yes".

The trainees rustled like leaves in a distant breeze. Otis stared blankly at me for a minute; he seemed to possess the power to control the amount of glare reflected from his glasses. All I could see in the area where his eyes should have been were four bands of light coming from the fluorescent bulbs next to where Lisa's ego still taxied in a holding pattern. He referred again to the three ringed binder and read.

"You have" he started, then looked up to finish the sentence "chalk on your eyebrow."

The trainees sat in silence for a moment before slumping back in their seats and taking deep breaths of relief. Otis turned back to the chalkboard and continued the lecture.

"The advent of silkscreening into popular culture allowed for the easy identification of the degree of socialization of the person wearing them. This did not however, aid in the identification of specific threats to national security. In essence, a terrorist or other violent criminal is just as likely to be seen wearing a Lynard Skynard or Oakland Raiders T-shirt as a perfectly decent citizen. Thus, the silkscreens merely reflected the dependency of the person on mainstream society for their livelihood and identity, regardless of their means of survival within it. Being the lively bunch that the intelligence community is however, the CIA and FBI have figured out ways in which to get specific T-shirts into the hands of groups which they consider potential threats to the American way of life; but we will talk about that tomorrow."

I feel a dire urge to write about Philip, our wandering monk, for he is really the soul of this story. However, I am afraid that I will have difficulty expounding his importance in such a manner that both appeals to the reader, yet leaves the reader with the understanding that they do not actually understand him at all. Essentially I am torn by the need to appeal to a "target audience", which infallibly requires my dispensal of an injustice toward Philip, or the reader, or the natural state of being in the universe, or something, by my depiction of Philip as a humorous-yet-deep, troglodytic-yet-worldly, character whom everyone feels they can really relate to, for the simple fact that those qualities are the ones supposed by readers of literature to be descriptive of themselves. Suffice it to say that the author will delve into clichés and tap the kegs of bold and trendy metaphors in order to expedite the approbation of a society slayed only by turgid euphuism and happy endings, on the hopes that with higher numbers the chances of there being a reader who actually understands that they don't understand Philip at all will increase. Writing is dishonest in that way, and by including in this manuscript actual letters to friends, I suppose I have no soul left whatsoever, or even worse, have sold it.

Whatever.

I may as well include another letter to "My Dearest Snookums" which I wrote right smack in the middle of a fling with the girl from TeleCommunications Bunker, Yellow; who was quite passionate and lived life in such a manner as to make me self-conscious of transferring the encounter to script for fear of my unlawful carnal scribblings ever falling into the hands of my mother. I will leave the details of our concourse to the readers' imaginations, provided you involve in those psychic etchings a five gallon carton of Wesson oil and forty yards of surgical tubing- elements which for quantity, Mom will surely take as humor, and the rest of the target audience will accurately concede as hedonistic superflouity. But on with Philip.

Philip had wandered eastward for several days, and had on occasion gotten rides from truckers transporting various products such as cooking oil and surgical tubing across the continent. These truckers were beings who held in the palms of their hands a force that spelled demise for countless numbers of insects, avifauna and various phyla of North American creatures whose neighborhoods had been divided by inviting lines of smooth, warm asphalt. Many of the species crushed on the road were as unfamiliar to Philip as they were to the creatures themselves, though their insides all looked the same, and their deaths all seemed vaguely familiar. Philip didn't dwell on the deaths of the animals on the road, and neither did the truckers, so the truckers and Philip got along pretty well together.

In a truck stop in Salt Lake City, Philip was confronted by a minister of Jesus. The minister was very polite and suggested to Philip that if he came to his church, the members would give him some shoes and something to eat. Philip tried to explain to the minister that he couldn't wear shoes, and didn't want anything to eat (being that it was after noon), but the minister had a difficult time understanding. The minister offered Philip a sandwich, a raincoat, some suntan lotion, a place to sleep, a job, a car, friends, a community, and even a job as a missionary, which would allow Philip to see the world, all of which Philip politely and gratefully declined. Finally the minister offered Philip eternal peace and tranquillity, which made Philip smile. Philip told the minister that impermanence both gave and nullified the value of everything, and that peace and tranquillity are defined by the knowledge of violence and chaos. And although violence and chaos may appear to be absent when peace and tranquillity are present, it is merely due to the proximity of the mind to what it considers to be bad that causes it to submerge itself in the good and make it seem omnipresent. Thus an eternity of peace and tranquillity would merely wear away the goodness of it and expose the pithy core of its defining elements which the ego disposes; unless of course by 'peace and tranquillity' one means it in a sense that it is in an artificially maintained state of mind such as that acquired by morphine, perkiset, dexadrine or some other drug- only prescribed in such a divine way as to not cause addiction or side affects, in which case religion really would prove to be nothing more than the opiate of the people.

The minister stared blankly at Philip for a moment and was about to suggest that statistically speaking, Philip was going to spend eternity in Hell, when Philip spoke up and said that he liked the concept of an eternity of peace and tranquillity, and that that was probably why he would be reborn in a heaven instead of on Earth.

The minister didn't quite understand what this meant, but ran with it anyway in the hopes that he could turn the statement around into his favor.

"You can be reborn right here on Earth, it happens in our church all the time! In fact, you can be reborn today, with a group of your Asian countrymen, even. And when it comes to naturalization, it is definitely to your benefit to have friends in the church!" After a dramatic pause, the minister leaned toward Philip and asked softly "Would you like to be born again?"

Another moment of silence marked Philip's attempt to trace the evolution of the concept of rebirth from its Brahman roots to its foster home in Christianity, where it now meant that one could become the Christian equivalent of an Arhat by the hand of another being within samsara. Every religion required a leap of faith, but to leap over something as fundamental as one's compassionate behavior toward the other seemed absurd! The pressure on those raised to believe in the one-life, one-shot at paradise concept must have been too much and caused them to adopt the idea that good intention was behavior enough for salvation. Was it possible that the only good intention required for salvation was their own desire to go to a heaven? Christianity was truly a conundrum; and what a priceless experience is confusion, especially when concerning the workings of the mind of the other, for it is the path to knowledge!

After the long pause, marking Philip's contemplation of these things, the minister smiled a subtle, Mona Lisa of a smile and said compassionately "Would you like to be saved?"

Philip had read extensively of the United States. Being under what can only loosely be called the employment of the Central Intelligence Agency, Philip had access to limitless periodicals, textbooks, and literary roughage to keep him abreast of the yins and yangs, so to speak, of American culture. He had once read an article in a popular American magazine about a woman who had been accosted by her superior in their common place of work. Philip recalled that the woman had found the situation tedious and devoid of any intellectual value to her, since she was at the time trying to complete a report on a wiring diagram for the twin tails of a plane whose specifications had been dispensed to several aircraft engineering corporations by the U.S. Navy including hers, which was Grumman, for bids on the design and construction contracts. The article in the magazine depicted the female engineer's endurance of the dull and pointless intrusion by her male superior, which was eventually concluded by the woman's being saved by another coworker, also a superior, whose deftness at the handling of social situations involving the opposite sex made him much more attractive than the accoster, and consequently scared the intruder away. Now, noting the subtle smile on the minister's face and the conspiratorial tone with which he had asked the question, Philip concluded that the minister was finally showing a faint glimmer of compassion and understanding, and was suggesting that Philip be saved in much the same way as the woman at Grumman. Philip smiled at the minister's intuition, and was pleased with his own development of his grasp of the American vernacular, and responded to the minister with a firm, but polite nod of affirmation, followed by a definitive 'yes'. As much intrigue as Philip held for the minister and his bizarre rituals, he needed time to mull over the information he had already received before he took on any more.

The minister rolled in ecstatic glee and with a wink, disappeared around a corner in the truck stop restaurant. Philip arose and ambled outside. In the parking lot Philip saw a white school bus full of Chinese immigrants and their change of clothes, on their way to show their good intentions toward the God who reigned over the land in which they now resided. The people looked down from their seats on the bus and returned Philip's gaze through droplets of perspiration. The only language the two parties shared was broken, and it was only good for the exchange of hollow civilities anyway. Light bounced between Philip and the passengers on the bus allowing them to look at each other with the unspoken understanding of their shared endurance of the customs and rituals that lay on their journeys toward American acceptance. They were customs left over from when the world was the flat, epicenter of a universe created solely for the creatures on a search for explanations as to why they didn't always get to be the oppressors.

The Chinese were traveling to be baptized and show their loyalty to the Lord of America, who was so powerful that all the other gods in the country gave way to Him. There was really no need for prayer in America, all you had to do was be a member of a church and the other members would take care of any needs that you had. Still, it couldn't hurt to show homage to the God who had made the Americans so financially well off, and since that was what was required to belong to a church, baptism was a win-win situation.

Philip was striving to purge from himself the desires which cause the pain and suffering which create the demand for assistance from the gods. Though they were Buddhists, all of his family in Colombo went to local churches to make offerings to the local god for help with things such as toothaches, hunger, romance, illness; all the things about which one would have bad emotions. By their actions they delayed their enlightenment, as well as that of the gods, but Philip understood that one can't force themself to grow leery of the realm of gods, humans, animals, and ghosts; and his family was no exception.

Awakening follows the realization that one's desires creates not only their bliss, but all of their torment as well. Even one's now is a memory, and happiness is but a value placed on that memory- a reflection on a mirage; and an impermanent one at that. But life is filled with many aesthetically pleasing moments, and one may as well enjoy them for as long as they can, for once insight drives the joy out of Earthly existence, one is left with memories only, and that is malevolent, for the explanation that one gives the sequencing of those memories creates the prison named time.

Philip walked past the church bus and over to the lot where the large trucks were parked. The tractor trailers were lined together for over a quarter mile, backed diagonally into their spaces along a tall chain link fence that obscured the view of the Great Salt Lake to all who were not elevated to the height of the truck cabs. Philip found the red Peterbilt which had delivered him to the truck stop, and banged on the passenger side door with the handle of his umbrella.

The driver was with a hooker in the sleeping compartment of the cab, and it was she who answered the door. Philip smiled at her, intrigued with the length and curliness of her blonde hair (he had rarely seen blonde hair, and never a wig) and with unknown presumption, sought out the truck driver in the sleeping compartment in order to greet him as American custom dictated. Philip found the truck driver holding a pillow over his middle region, reclined beneath a string of illuminated chili pepper lights and listening to Hank Williams Jr. sing about a woman and a liquor that both had tried to kill him. The driver wasn't too enthusiastic about seeing Philip, and told him brusquely that he would be out shortly. The woman smiled at Philip and snapped shut the red leather curtain that separated the cab and Philip from the sleeping area of the truck. The inquiry of a feminine voice of "Who was . . ." was drowned out as Hank Jr. got a bit louder, and Philip drew his feet up into his lap and meditated on the large blue eye of an owl painted on the side of a Wise potato chip truck parked in front of them.

Across the blinding white concrete of the parking lot, only thirty yards away from the Peterbilt which contained the meditating body of Philip, scrambled three sweaty men whose white shirts were slowly crawling out of their black pants. They men were searching for Philip, but they could not find him because the Lord had hidden him. One of the minister's fellow fishers-of-men, renowned for his ebullient devotion to the Lord and evangelistic fervor in the church was being protected by his Savior from the embarrassment of being recognized in the company of his fellow devotees by the prostitute in the Peterbilt as one of her regular Wednesday dates. The prostitute was herself an avid Christian, but despised the organization of the church and, had she been discovered, would have gone out of her way to make a scene with the Elder in equanimous retribution for his praying for her soul with her father, who was the minister. Vengeance, being the Lord's, was withheld, and while in meditation Philip had a rogue vision of a bat in the Brazilian rain forest mistakenly devouring half of a poisonous frog, falling to the moss covered forest floor, and being eaten alive by ants as it died a slow and torturous death next to the truncated body of the frog. Neither the bat nor the frog wondered what they did to deserve their respective deaths; they just lay there in omnipresent desire for an end to the pain they felt.

The ---- is pretty interesting, but I miss the life that I had at The University. Just once more I would like to pass out under the Christmas lights before the end of A Murder of One. Of course I miss you, too, but I suppose you've gathered that from the rest of this letter.

August was in full sweltering bloom, and it was during roughly the middle of week five at The Farm that I began development of what came to be called the 'belief scale'. While in ponderance during breakfast at Morrison's of a dream from which I was awaken just moments earlier of cows discussing of the lack of gratitude exhibited from the humans for their development of calculus; correctly pronounced 'cowculus'; which climaxed with the execution of the cows' sudden decision to evacuate the ungrateful Earth by means of a magnanimous burst of flatulence that left the surrounding flora flourishing and the fauna asphyxiated by the pangs of an overwhelming abundance of greenhouse gasses, I began to wonder just how it was that the cows began to float above the ground in weightless repose as they folded their legs neatly into their undersides just prior to the grand exit. More specifically, I wondered how it was that it was all so believable- so real, as people often say about their dreams. I found it bizarre that the greatest shock of the dream was that the cows had invented cal- or rather, cowculus.

That the cows spoke at all was not particularly astounding, nor was the fact that they did so with Australian accents, or that they could defy gravity at their slightest whim. No, what was strange to ol' Lar was that they had invented calculus. And it had seemed so revelatory!

It stood to reason that this was probably an analogous dream. The interpretation eluded me, but it probably had something to do with my inability to overlay the theories of popular psychologists onto my perceptions of my life. What I found missing in the analysis of my dream was accountment for my acceptance of the unrealistic events within the dream as being normal, everyday stuff. It was as if the brain, when doing its nocturnal calisthenics, is not only making analogies concerning the feelings one has toward certain events in life, but it is also trying on different beliefs for size. My brain was telling itself that it was all right that cows can talk, that they can fly, and that they have retractable appendages in spite of their dependency on them during sleep. My subconscious workings were pointing out that, all of the other things aside, I have some sort of hang-up concerning the placement of credit for intellectual accomplishments. Either that or I have some pretty solid subconscious predispositions about the mental capabilities of our bovine friends, but not about their physical or communicative skills. Somehow this all boiled down to the idea that the brain, being the reasoning and emotive center for the being that thinks of itself as an individual, ultimately decides what it wants to believe, twenty-four hours a day, cliché, cliché. What the mind believes, it awards the title of fact.

From this assumption, which from early on I decided that I would easily dismiss as being false if other things proved it to be so, I derived a hierarchy of things that are believed. At the top of the hierarchy I placed the precepts that the mind would most easily part with as fact. Of course one's values play heavily on such a hierarchy; for on this vast and excessively populated planet there actually exist people who believe that politicians belonging to the same party as themselves are all very straight and narrow people with nothing more than the best interest of "the people" in mind. One who believes things of this nature will, for example, have more difficulty dumping the belief that Senator so-and-so, whom they love and voted for, is having an extramarital affair with the congressional gardener, who is not only of another race, but of the same sex, and is ninety-two years older than the philanderous Senator. The inability of that person to part with the fact that not all people of their political party fit into what they believe to be the quintessential mold of what they believe to be morality, would consequently place that belief far, far below their belief that the Whopper which they ordered for lunch will appear just as it does on the billboard outside of a Burger King. In fact, I chose the very phenomenon of franchised fast food as the most common denominator of expendable beliefs to perch at the top of the belief scale.

People who order fast food specify something when they do so. That is their belief. They so believe that they are going to get what they ask for that they pay for it in advance. When their order arrives, and it is cold, flat, and has onions on it, their beliefs are crushed. The crush is usually pretty easily accepted however, and they get over it much more quickly than do their arteries, and no psychotherapy is needed to get them past the incident.

Those connoisseurs of fast food, who actually expect to get what is shown in the pictures, are at high risk for a nervous breakdown. Side notes for those same people is that they should never go to a fast food restaurant when in a bad mood, and never go to Wal-Mart on a weekend between the hours of eight a.m. and nine p.m..

At the very bottom of the hierarchy of beliefs is the mind's inability to believe that it does not exist.

"All I know is that I know nothing" cries the mind. "Except that I think . . . therefore . . . I am."

Scattered in between the perpetual disappointment of fast foods and the inescapability of the I, were religion, mortality, social status, law equating to morality, love, steriod use, the existence of the ideal family, socialism as a self sufficient economic structure, the Jackson family, hallucinogenic drugs, violence as a form of justice, MTV, the guilt or innocence of OJ Simpson and how the Nicole Brown Simpson murder differs from Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopenche, the belief that one's skin color somehow makes them different from other racists, the death of Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan as a (fill in the blank) President, do college Greek organizations actually do enough charitable work to warrant the overlooking of all the stupid things that they do, global warming, nature vs. nurture, whether or not dressing up on Halloween is a form of Pagan worship, recycling, astrology, carcinogens, buying American, how the AIDS virus is transmitted, the computer crash of the year 2000, did Cindy Crawford actually go to your college, the lost city of Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, will outlawing guns make them go away, is anything that is popular since 1976 the result of talent, or is it all due to exposure, where oxygen comes from, are you intelligent, are you attractive, is it even important, and various other gripping and prudent beliefs that are lost and gained by ourselves and those around us every single day.

I showed my hypothetical hierarchy of belief to Lucy, who basically shot it down by saying that it was interesting. She said that not everybody would find the advent of flying cows as uneventful as I did, even in a dream. This of course reinforced the point that I was trying to make in the first place, but working at the Pizza Hut had toughened my skin to the abrasions of not being understood, so I feigned ignorance and let it go.

Lucy was most likely right though, the belief scale was probably nothing. She was the one with a real job. She was the one with focus. She was the one I went to with my ideas for their approval. Maybe thinking that noone understood me was nothing more than my being egotistical. In either case, there was really no point in my sharing of my ideas with anyone; either I'd be misunderstood or I'd be full of it.

Reality is not just a function of our own minds- it is out there, and the majority of people see it clearly. Those who don't see things the same way as everybody else- like schizophrenics who hear voices, people who see auras, or those who believe that the moon landings were faked, are crazy. People should just accept the fact that if their viewpoints don't make sense to the majority then they're insane.

The Press Leak

[NPR News] Concern for the possibility of CIA involvement in what has been called the 'intellectual programming' of students from America's finest Colleges and Universities is being brought to the attention of the White House today. Implications have been made that the Central Intelligence Agency has been secretly selecting students who are outstanding in their Ivy League classes to be taken away after graduation to a secret CIA facility, where they are intellectually probed, and eventually molded into space-age intellectual warheads. President Clinton has said that he will "Look into the matter", and that the minds of our nation's children are not the "Property of the United States government."

There has been no comment as of yet as to the ultimate purpose of the programming, but skeptics of the intelligence 'community' suggest that it is for the subversion, and surveillance of American society. Mr. Ian Hass.

"Around here, the CIA is known as see-ya, (breathy giggle) because they can see what you are doing, twenty-four hours a day."

Mr. Hass heads a civilian watchdog group, called 'Democracy for the Future', keeping tabs on those who keep tabs on us.

"The name 'Democracy for the Future' is not to imply that we are here to save a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but that someday we may actually have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. (breathy giggle)"

Mr. Hass says that not only does the CIA spy on American homes, but that now they are in the process of planting what are called 'sleeper citizens', known as beetles, within the mainstream of American society. According to Mr. Hass, beetles are people who do not actively work for the CIA, but who have been brainwashed by the CIA. Beetles can be activated by the Central Intelligence Agency during times which the Agency believes that certain events and conditions exist that pose a threat to the Domestic status quo.

"When an American Olympic team loses to China for example, or to any Middle Eastern country, the beetles are activated. Or, for example, when a union goes on strike, or a minority member wins a major election . . . anything that gives the appearance of threatening to disrupt the lives of those few, wealthy people who control this country will cause see-ya to activate the beetles."

(voice of an interviewer)- "Why the Olympics?"

"The CIA hates the Olympics because they are afraid that Americans will defect to the countries that beat them! (breathy giggle)"

The CIA rejected the implications of the use of psychological training for any of their employees, stating that all employees of the Central Intelligence Agency must fit the specifications of a particular psychological profile before their being deemed eligible for induction into the Agency. The desired psychological profile is allegedly concluded by an examination, which is given to all prospective employees of the CIA.

Mr. Anderson stood in his office, phone to ear, winking at the tall white obelisk in the distance. As the phone on the other end of the line rang unanswered, Anderson checked his alignment within the footsteps painted on the floor of his office, then stood on one foot. Tilting his head back and closing his eyes, he extended his raised foot roughly eight inches off the floor in front of him and brought his right arm up square with his torso, palms up. In his left ear he waited for the next ring. It came, and he folded his right arm toward his face, touching his nose with his pointer finger. On the following ring he returned his forearm to its extended position. On the ring after that Anderson extended the phone away from his ear and after a short pause, returned the phone to his face, touching the stubby rubber antenna of the cordless to the tip of his nose. He began to lose his balance and returned his foot to the floor and opened his eyes.

'What sort of Cro-Magnon doesn't have an answering machine in this day and age?' grumbled Anderson spitefully, then folded the phone and tossed it carelessly onto the Italian leather sofa behind him.

He looked absently at his watch and walked across his office to the phone on his desk. Authoritatively depressing the intercom button he spoke sharply at the little holes on the face of the phone. "Billy, is there anybody out there?"

Anderson waited but no response came.

"Billy?" he repeated, his voice stern but somehow pleading. Again he waited, but no answer returned. Looking at his watch another time, Anderson sighed with impatient contempt at the incompetence of the world around him. He walked back around his desk and across the office to stand beside the sofa. Sitting on the arm of the sofa he placed his hand silently on the doorknob of his office door and, pressing firmly downward in hopes of silencing any noise, gently turned it. When the knob resisted his efforts to turn any further, he slowly, carefully cracked the door open and peeked out into the common secretarial area for signs of life. All he could see was the edge of Billy's desk. Edging the door open just a few millimeters further, Anderson came to view the blue and white stripes of Billy's elbow. The elbow was covered in a fine Oxford shirt that Anderson recognized as having been on sale at Structure just the week before. Billy's elbow twitched in absent and indirect movements as it rested on top of scattered papers, suggesting that the body to which it belonged was so involved in some activity that it had forgotten that the arm was there.

Anderson turned his head and pressed his ear to the crack of the door. He held his breath as he listened to Billy's conversation.

"Well, sir, Mr. Anderson will not be back in his office until four this afternoon, and I would hate to waste your time by having you come in now and wait for him."

Sounds like Billy is speaking with Otis. God, how did they find out about it that quickly?

All right dear reader, this is the part where you may want to send the kids to beddie-by. We're about to get vulgar in the literary sense.

Enter my childhood friend Rick.*

Rick is an English major who still attends Randolph-Macon. His concentration of studies is in communicative efficiency, the ultimate goal of which is to return society to the level at which it started, prior to when words constituted people's thoughts. To conceptualize this lack of verbal conceptualization, try to imagine the inner voice of a deaf person. That's what Rick was after. Communication on a conscious level, rather than the self-conscious one on which words operate.

Ironically, Rick's purpose in doing this was to bring people closer together and to stem the essence of humanity into everyday life. This was ironic, because when Rick spoke in his efficient and heartfelt way, people almost unanimously became offended. He attributed this to people's being so absorbed in their belief in how they should act when words were spoken, that they forget that they are being said by, and listened to, by human beings. Rick understood (though he had difficulty conveying it) that anybody who became upset at a person because of their words, was missing the point; and they were also ignorant troglodytes and par for the course for society. Of course he just called them cunts. Incidentally, Randolph Macon has the reputation of being the college that rich parents send their kids to if they couldn't get them into real schools. This is mostly attributed to the price of tuition, which is not supplemented by taxes; and because of the exhibition of attitudes like Rick's, which to the average schmo came across as one of superiority.

Rick's appearance on The Farm was a total mystery, and neither he nor anybody else would hold the subject long enough to explain it to me. I was wearing purple Jams and soaking sweat through a 'Big Johnson Dictionaries' T-shirt as I carried a plastic jade plant in one arm and my notebooks in the other. I was on the way to TeleCommunications Bunker, Yellow to try to catch Marie on her lunch break, in hopes of a perspiration-lubed quickie in the garden section of Lowes. Earlier in the week I discovered a room literally half full to the ceiling with soft, 50-pound bags of sphagnum. I wasn't quite sure what sphagnum was, but it sounded enough like an erogenous zone to make me think of Marie.

Then, for the first time in seven weeks, I heard something unfamiliar. It was the sound of a car coming across the empty parking lot. It sounded like it was coming pretty fast, but it had been so long since I had been around any moving vehicles that I wasn't certain. I looked up to see a white Beamer Z3 with the top down, and a little speck of wavy black hair being pulled in the wind behind the steering wheel. How fast was it going? Thirty, forty? It was headed right for me! For a moment I thought of the Bee Guy in Bowling Green, with the immaculate white truck. Could this be him again? Was he out for blood this time?

As the car approached very quickly, I froze and tried to make eye contact with the driver. It was a guy, wearing black sunglasses with thin metal frames, and a big grin. As soon as I recognized him, I knew that I wasn't going to be deliberately run over, and I decided that rather than risk the embarrassment of doubting his driving ability, I would jump up just before the bumper hit me, and roll up the hood of the car. Maybe I would even dump hurl my pseudo Jade significant other skyward for effect. The way I figured it, if you're going to be injured, the important thing is that you dramatize it and make it memorable for everyone else too. Scars are always better with stories to accompany them.

It became obvious that this wasn't going to happen. The car kept coming, full speed, and I heard the engine whining higher and higher, louder and louder until the little car was about twenty yards from my flexing knees. At the last moment I heard the sound of the redlining engine suddenly drop off to idle decibel, and immediately be replaced by the light screech of sliding rubber. A half instant later my view of the car changed from hood, grill, and windshield, to hood, grill, windshield, Beamer rims flashing above the pavement on the left side of the car counterbalanced by a grinning face sticking out at me over the right side of the car; then it was hood, grill, and windshield again, then the other Beamer fender; then the Beamer door going by in reverse, with the still grinning mug hovering over it.

All of this happened in about a second.

I didn't really notice the intense screaming of the tires until it had stopped, and a faint cloud of blue smoke wafted by me in punctuation of what had just happened.

"'Sup my honkey?" said my would-be involuntary manslaughterer through the pungent fumes.

I took this to mean "Greetings my friend, to whom I am close enough to not only joke racially, but also do so in a manner which pokes fun of those who take such inconsequential things as skin color seriously. It is a very dangerous thing to trust another with one's making light of racism, for the world is full of people who take skin color very seriously, and they are dangerous when challenged by any insinuation of their being a racist for being so racially centered. By my use of this treacherous genre of wording, I expound my continued faith in you as a compassionate and understanding fellow. How have you been? As was suggested by my ruddy flirt with the derrogation of what others would emphatically call our "race", I am in good spirits; and intend to make you the same way if you are not already. And by the way, it is in no way out of the ordinary for me to suddenly bring myself into your presence on a secret government facility after not having seen you for roughly two years."

God he was good with words. Efficient and personal as ever!

"Rick!"

He just grinned back at me, moved his sunglasses toward my arm briefly, then back at my face.

"Doing a little home decorating?" he responded.

"That's what it looks like doesn't it?"

We stared at each other for a minute in the scalding heat.

"What the hell are you doing here?" I finally asked.

"You're going on a field trip."

"Oh?"

"P?"

"Should I?"

"Hey, it's your prostate buddy . . ."

"Well you know I keep it in good shape for you thweetie!" I said with a faux fag drawl.

"I ulways knowed you was a damn queer." He shot back with a deep, redneckey accent that made his lower lip stick out.

It's great to see your friends from high school after you've grown a bit. It could just be age, but I think it is more likely that it is education that leaves one savoring life with a more intense flavor of bittersweet. The things that used to get us fired up when we were teenagers- homosexuals, status symbols, politics, religion, authority; with education they all become things to laugh at. Somehow, when you learn just how big and crazy the world is, your life becomes almost meaningless in every way except one- your friends. They alone become your reason for living.

Right now Rick was saying this by removing his sunglasses and squinting at my face, a face that reflected his age as it perspired beside the plastic jade plant.

Ironically, he was driving the ultimate driving machine/status symbol, his father was a Senator in Pennsylvania, and we both had bumper stickers on our cars that read "Thank God I'm an Atheist". Also, over Christmas Break one year when we were twenty-one, Rick and I taught Rick's mentally handicapped older brother who had, among other problems, terrets, to say "fucking pigs" every time he saw a Police, Sheriff, or Highway Patrol car. We tried to teach him to say "looking for truffles" whenever he saw the blue lights flashing, but he didn't have any idea what truffles were and finally began screaming "goddamn army" whenever we would try to get him to say it. As a result, Tommie (that was his name) now mumbles "goddamn army" whenever he sees any flashing lights. This makes for very interesting times for the volunteers at the Easter Seals Camps around the world who not only have to deal with the campers with epilepsy conking out whenever anybody takes a picture indoors, but with Tommie mumbling 'goddamn army' until somebody can distract him with 'Nilla wafers directly out of the 'Nilla wafers box, topped with Skippy Peanut Butter directly from the Skippy Peanut butter jar.

Picture it-

"OK now everybody smile!" say the undergraduate volunteers from IUP.

Flash! Goes the camera.

Slap! Go the foreheads of the campers with epilepsy to the floor.

"Oh my God!" Say the new Easter Seal volunteers who didn't know that you can't go around flashing things in front of those with epilepsy.

"Goddamn Army" mumbles Tommie, repeatedly, from a trance-like gaze toward the floor at nothing in particular.

The heat from the parking lot was beginning to radiate through my pink dollar store flip-flops. Rick appeared to not be ready to take no as an answer to my invitation for a field trip, and I decided that I would have to save the Kama Surtra of sphagnum for another day. I wanted to go, really. Though I did notice through the window of TeleCommunication Bunker, Yellow that Marie was wearing her office, rather than her field uniform. Her office attire held special appeal in respect to the amount of time which it took to get the shoes, and consequently the rest of her clothes, off. For a moment I imagined Marie wearing nothing but those progress-hindering, tall, black combat boots and maybe a white scrunchy on her head. Nice. She looked back at me through the window and after a moment shot me a half Mona Lisa and raised one eyebrow.

Ever since I was a kid, I have suspected that women could actually read men's minds. I considered it again for a moment.

I returned her a goofy, tight-lipped smile beside the Jade plant as the neon footwear spanked my heels in what I imagined to be a rather seductive counterpoint.

She swept a long strand of wavy dark hair from her face with her middle finger and pressed it behind her ear as she turned her head to observe the white BMW Z3 creeping along the scalding pavement behind me. In the large storefront window I could see Rick's reflection. He had his shades back on now, and I saw him turn his head to look into the store toward Marie. Marie looked back at me, blinked in noncomprehending acceptance of the perpetual weirdness of the Farm, then returned her attention to the clip board in her arm.

Epilogue

I don't write well.

I am aware of that.

However, I have observed that many published writers ("Authors" I suppose they're called) are absolute nit-wits who not only write on an absurdly self-indulgent and sensationalistic level, but actually believe that those 'qualities' are what make them such good writers.

When I write like that, I do it for lack of a more socially acceptable way of putting things. I.e. I do it out of my own stupidity. BUT I AM AWARE OF THAT. Not only am I aware of it, but that is in essence, why I write. I enjoy attempting to figure out how to put words to things beyond words; so that others can criticize my inefficiency at it.

I have found that the most difficult thing about writing, besides forgetting all of that junk that they teach you in school about run-on sentences, is getting over the possibility that a. the events of your life are really not all that interesting to anyone besides yourself, and b. even if the events of your life are interesting to others (relatives not included), can I find the presumptuousness to divulge them to total strangers in a manner that I would not even inflict upon my closest friends? The latter of these problems, I believe, is solved by the device of fiction. Fiction allows the author to effectively thwart all flack from both relatives and real readers alike who, for reasons of their own, conclude that what you have written about your life is somehow offensive to their own. No matter whether your writing is deemed vulgar, dumb, verbose, presumptuous, immature, pointless, plotless, too linear, too twisted, too much like real life, improperly punctuated, too predictable, too crazy, ignorant, colloquial, fluffy (high-brow jargon for not so high-brow jargon; those witty so-and-so's), or just plain boring, one can always enjoy the psychotherapy of being a misunderstood genius atop the ivory tower of fiction. Perhaps there is no greater joy (next to, of course, sex, and possibly fried food) than to engage the "art clause" as an excuse for any shortcoming one may have as a writer.

The former problem, the one about your life not being interesting to anyone other than yourself, must simply be overcome. That is to say, write first; as if in some Dickesonian fit of egocentrism, pretending all the while that you are only writing things down so you can remember what your personality is when you wake up tomorrow morning.

-I'm profoundly depressed, and to prove it I'm not going to show you my poetry about it- that's the sort of attitude we're striving for here.

Then, once what you write doesn't get published, (or even better, gets trashed by those whose creativiety only extends as far as revising the sentences of others) you should devise a method of converting your feelings of inadequacy into units of resentment, and promptly unload them onto the faction of society which you most envy.

The path which I have chosen to implement the scapegoat function is by the submersion of my writing in a sea of information only referenced by students who don't want to go through the hassle of finding a book in the library, persons looking for an easy buck or an easy answer, 'gamers', and those looking to heighten their sexual frustration. Realistically, if one is to be a successful writer in the world, this is the population to which they have to appeal, and to be perfectly honest, failure in that light does not look so tragic.

Problem solved! As they say, it is better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all- unless you are trying to appeal to "the people", in which case failure may just mean that you don't appeal to people who don't read.

There seems to be a flaw in that argument somewhere, but I will worry about that after I finish relaying to you the fictional version of my life.