“Okay, I want to talk about Ireland. Specifically, I want to talk about the Famine. About the fact that there never really was one. There was no famine. See, Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes. All of the other food, meat fish vegatables were shipped out of the country under armed guard to England while the Irish people starved.

And then in the middle of all this they gave us money not to teach our children Irish. And so we lost our history. And this is why the thought is still hurting me. See, we’re like a child that’s been battered, has to drive itself out of it’s head because it’s frightened, still feels all the painful feelings, but they lose contact with the memory. And this leads to massive self-destruction, alcoholism, drug addiction, all desperate attempts at running, and in it’s worst form it becomes actual killing. And if there ever is going to be healing, there has to be remembering, and then grieving. So that the then can be forgiven, there has to be knowledge and understanding.”

-Sinead O’Connor, “Famine,” Universal Mother EMI/Chrysalis
Records, c. 1994

I spot my friend sitting alone at a corner nook in the Cafe Ennui, staring morosely at the table. “Crazy Bear!” I cry, walking over to greet him. “How are you?”

He eyes me suspiciously. “What do you mean by that?” he demands.

Taken aback, I mumble, “Well, just that-”

He cuts me off. “How am I supposed to respond to that vacuous question? Do you really care, or should I lie to you and preserve the rose- glasses illusion? Medically, I’m sound, except for the lurking killers they haven’t detected yet hiding in my organs and bloodstream. I’m terminally afflicted with life, of course. Financially, I’m worth a third world nation, which gives me nightmares. Emotionally, I feel like the inside of a turtle’s ass, and I know I have absolutely no good reason to feel bad, which makes me feel even worse. Existentially, I’m a washout. I can’t escape being a parasite.” He manages a weak grin. “Why do you ask?”

I return the wry smirk. “It’s a custom on my planet,” I say, mocking Mr. Spock. “The traditional rejoinder is, ‘fine’.”

He rolls his hollow eyes. “Do I look fine?”

As a matter of fact, he does not. He has adopted both the manner and garb of a street person. His long brown hair is in severe, matted disarray beneath his smudged Bear totem hat, and he looks and smells as if both beds and showers have somehow been inaccessible to him, despite his royal credit rating, for several days now. He’d have probably been ejected from the cafe on the basis of his appearance, except I think he owns the place.

Diplomatically, I offer, “You look like hell. What gives?”

He shakes his head. “That’s just it. I don’t know. I realized that I was the most selfish person in the world. Just buying whatever I wanted. So I went out giving away hundred dollar bills on the street, to all the spare- changers. ‘Spanging,’ they call it, for SPAre chANGE.

“As per my standard policy, I read much more into the grubby street ethic than was actually there. I saw ghosts yellow-robed samadhis with their humble begging bowls leaning over the shoulders of the ill-tempered gutterpunks and sneaky street heads. The homeless, I decided with manic obsession, were holy renouncers of the corrupt materialism I wanted so desperately to free myself from. I pledged to devote myself to their support.

“That seemed noble to me, supporting the spiritually entrepreneurial. They were going back to basics. Offering absolutely no product except human sympathy. Selling kindness. I saw the derelicts as martyrs to the unfairness of the system, staking their whole game on the notion that even avaricious America could not ignore a needy hand. Merchants of mercy. So I bought.”

Talking seems to cheer him up, so I carefully maintain the illusion of interest with well-timed non-verbal cues, brief nods, widening of eyes, showing of teeth. “The kids all loved me. They’d take me off and get me high, I’d hang out at their squats. The girls would offer me their bodies. I felt like one of them, even though I’m really this multimillionaire. I wasn’t worried at all about being robbed, even with five grand in my pocket, because these kids knew better than to kill the goose laying all those gold eggs. I was an industry. They could invest the cash I’d lay on them in the street medicine game, and come up quite a bit.”

“Then one day I went out to see a friend, and I didn’t have much cash on me. This weaselly kid, who I didn’t really like, came up to me and gave me this whole cock-and-bull story about he was getting thrown out of his place, blah, blah, and I was getting impatient, and I told him flat: I couldn’t help him that day.”

“And this kid, to whom I’d given probably twelve hundred dollars over the past two months, just to get him to leave me alone, really, started swearing at me and accusing me of lying to him. ‘I know you’re holding out on me, motherfucker.’ Then he threatened to kick my ass, and all the other kids, my friends, recipients of my manna from heaven, were nowhere to be seen.”

It feels good to walk out of prison, even after only an hour. Bad vibe doesn’t begin to describe it. Penitentiaries, are, after all, the closest thing to Hell which actually exist.

I remove my cell phone from its hiding place under the seat-the parking lot is constantly prowled by newly freed convicts on the make for a quick score-light my joint, and dial my voice mail as I merge onto the highway. I have eleven new messages and eighteen saved messages. Must clear those out.

Predictably, the first nine new ones are from my agent, who prefers monologue to dialog, at least in dealing with me. The calls started coming in precisely at 10:02, immediately after I was due in class, so missing me is no accident.

My agent contrives to avoid any direct conversations between us, perhaps out of deference to my own style as a novelist, which is the extreme example of one-way communication; or likelier out of disdain for my well-known “mental eccentricities”-what in a less successful personage would be called, “craziness.” I personally don’t think much of the mental health of a man who endures the same voicemail greeting nine times in a row, just so he doesn’t have to talk to people, but this oddity suits me just fine, as it insulates me from making snap decisions.

He may not like me, but he’s making us both wagonloads of money off the product of my diseased mind and his own psychologically questionable persistence. The studio, he informs me in crackling, excited tones, has made an offer on Desert Trance. One million. In-house screenwriter; I won’t be needed on the set, but I should make myself available for consultation calls if I expect it to be true to the original. The succeeding eight calls detail the arrangements in full, legalese not excluded. I erase/advance past them.

I sincerely, if dubiously, bid my unknown heir good luck. I’m not sure if I should be skeptical or impressed at the chutzpah of whoever agreed to undertake this project. If Desert Trance were meant to be a film, I’d have made a screenplay of it myself instead of tearing my hair out in the much more demanding medium of print.

How did they expect to convey the self-conscious stream of consciousness, the subtle symbolism, the nuances of delusional abstraction, the word games? The puns, for chrissakes? Had any of them actually read the thing? Did those illiterate studio hacks realize that ninety percent of the action happened in the protagonist’s head?

Not my problem. I don’t have to be there. Afterward, I can get even more sympathy and sales for the original, by denouncing the desecration of Hollywood. I can hear thousands of moviegoers, advising their friends, “yeah, but the book is better.” And I can look angry and aesthetically wounded all the way to the bank.

Barnum, that great theoretical physicist of human nature, fixed the constant ratio of suckers born per minute at one to one; but that was over a century ago, and the birth rate is much higher now. I thank the Goddess for filling the world with fools, and blessing them with bounty for me to tax.

My communications with Divinity have been increasingly more financially oriented, and lately as one-sided as my agent’s messages to me. I used to sit solemnly down to my ficting, lighting a stick of incense and praying for a good, inspiring chapter of prose, which She would whisper into my ear; now my literary demands are much more meager. All I crave now is a signature on the check, and the only place it really excites me to see my name in print is immediately following “Pay to the order of…”

If incarceration is the best nurturer of literary proclivity, then sudden wealth can be the worst. I can barely write a letter on time these days. Why bother? There’s no particular shame in being a one-hit wonder. Look at Kesey, look at Heller. The hunger that drove me to inscribe Desert Trance, with the eagerness a of prophet taking dictation from Gabriel, the unheated apartments, the unsexed nights, the menial jobs, the seedy pot-all seem part of someone else’s life. I was writing for my life, for my freedom, staving off exhaustion throughout the night with acid and amphetamine before forcing slumber with Soma or Trazadone; and having won the Game of Life, I see no real reason to break myself again, just so critics could say, “none of the spark and energy that so distinguished his debut effort,” or some such snotty shit.

The tenth call is from the doctor’s office; naturally I skip that. They still want me to call about the outcome of last month’s lab tests. I still don’t want to hear them. An impasse, though the nurse’s sweetly concerned insistence only encourages further delay. They don’t hound you like that to deliver negative results.

It’s not real if I don’t hear you say it. Like a child, I will clap my palms over my ears and blab nonsense noises until you stop trying to tell me the truth. I’m not too proud. Wa, wa, wa wa wah wa!

The final message is from Llewellyn Reece, postponing our appointment until five, which is okay by me. I can go home, order a thirty- dollar Vietnamese feast for lunch, floor myself on some superdank from Rug Country-I mean Afghanistan, then pick myself up with a thin line of ja-jo from Panama before heading down to the Row. I know it’s bad, but I do it anyway, because I have the money to waste and emptiness to fill or at least numb. An international afternoon of conspicuous consumption, with a theme: countries my government has invaded illegally.

I can be perverse like that.

* * * * * * *

“John Barth,” I insist. “We talked about fucking metafiction when we read fucking Lost in the Fuck-I mean, Funhouse. Metafiction. Who can tell me what it means?!”

Trombone turns to me. “What it means, teach, is we don’t need you telling us what to think about anymore. No offense, we know you’re down with us. You’re only here because you caved in on a pot rap. But the only freedom we’ve got left is between our ears, man, so do not fuck with it, okay?”

That shuts me down cold. The last crime I thought I’d ever be accused of is censorship, for which I have a lifetime of hate, yet here I am, in the heart of the gulag, telling the dissidents to hush, lest the guards overhear. And I don’t even live here. Where have my balls gotten to?

Rebellion is in the air. Rather than stick around for the riot that I smell brewing-if I were taken hostage, wouldn’t the cops take an extra sip of coffee and chow one last donut before lackadaisically strolling into the yard in time to watch me get stuck with a shank?-I issue an assignment and beat a hasty retreat.

Stephen King? More like Salman Rushdie. “Thank you, Trombone, that was…interesting.” Seditious? Libelous? Paranoid? A good way to get yourself permanently silenced?

“I think he’s right,” somebody calls out, earning a murmur of agreement.

I think so too, or at least I have to say it bears consideration, but I’m certainly not going to admit it to my class, every one of whom has a substantial sentence that might be reduced in exchange for juicy information, such as subversive comments by the instructor supporting a conspiracy theory implicating the President in the greatest crime ever committed in this country.

I’m scared to even know the kid, let alone to have assigned this spook-magnet of a fairy tale in the first place. CIA spooks, not “I’m an ignorant redneck” spooks.

Particularly if he’s right.

Naw, couldn’t be. Nobody’s that evil.

Except Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot…

“I like that line about ‘procession of demons,’” someone says. “Reminds me of 1984, how they put the mythical villain Goldstein on the screen every day so everybody could hate him together. Makes you wonder if these guys are even real. Like, if Hitler hadn’t existed, someone would have had to create him, to end the Depression. If the world ever ran out of real tyrants, they’d have to make them up in Hollywood. How would we know the difference?”

All of this is making me very uneasy. Sunny Oaks doesn’t seem to be an appropriate setting for the the founding of a revolutionary cell. At least, not my cell! “Now, back to techniques-” I begin.

A bald prisoner sneers impressively. “They don’t need to fake megalomaniacs. The world is full of them. They just have to give the nutcases they want to put in power an edge over the Extreme Liberation Front of Popular Music or whatever, riding the bill for coupe day tots around the world while making them unthinkable here, and let them individually flip their lids with power and ideology.”

“I remember thinking, all those flags, it was like everybody was hypnotized. I knew this crazy hippie guy, on the outside, had this theory that the news was full of subliminal messages that patriots were sexier and flags attracted money. He also said that the Bush family was dedicated to carrying on Hitler’s work, which according to the hippie had nothing to do with racism. The real reason the Nazis were killing Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and drug users, was that these groups were likeliest to contain magical practitioners. Rivals, who could oppose black magic efforts to bring extraterrestrial psychivores-”

“What the hell is a ‘psychivore’?” calls out a grizzled old biker.

“A soul-eater,” the bald man explains. “The idea was that Hitler was into raising demons, but hell is actually this other planet. Enough simultaneous slaughter creates a vacuum here that can suck the psychovores through a wormhole,”

“Hey, where’d you score mescaline?” a young prisoner demands. “Swear to God I thought ‘bout shit like that when I did some mescaline!”

“Who can tell me what metafiction means?” I interject, hoping to return to the harmless topic of fiction theory before men in black step out of the shadows, but the class has tuned me out. They have a new laureate, one of their own number, and I am last week’s book review.

Another convict pipes up. “You reminded me of something else from that book, 1984, the way the three supercountries maintain a state of continuous war, so as to keep their populations tethered to martial-law conditions. When’s the last time, really, the U.S. was at peace? And now, can we expect to ever be at peace again?”

The people of Murica were duly outraged. They took to the streets and demanded the heads of Assume Ibeen Plottin’ and Madman Insane. Evidence emerged that these shadowy figures with the strange names had masterminded a plot in which everyone in or from Rug Country was implicated, except, of course, the Hash-fiends who had actually done the deed at Mr. Pink’s behest.

The Murican flag appeared all over the Kingdom, in stomach-turning ubiquity, as if people were now proud of their country for inspiring enough hate and bile to provoke such a vicious attack. Grumbling about the King diminished, and for good reason; peace protesters had begun to be jailed for insufficient patriotism.

Martial law loomed. The witch hunt for conspirators justified every type of privacy invasion, and, generally, the Murican people stood still for it. After all, they lived in the freest country in the world, did they not?

Hadn’t the barefoot Towelheads driven a couple of dragons into the Pair of Pavilions because they hated freedom? Murica stood for bare heads and covered feet, but so free was this glorious land that you could wrap your head in a roll of Bounty if you chose.

Mr. Pink again appeared at the Beige Palace, and this time there was no delay in being admitted to the Elliptical Chambers. The insubordinate squire had been dispatched as part of the package deal with the Hash- fiends; enough bonus points had been accumulated for a free “accident.”

The King was in much better spirits. He got to be on the Magic Mirror nearly every night; what’s more, the people listened, and not just because they expected him to make mixed-up comments for them to laugh at. “So what’s next, Mr. Pink?”

Pink grinned evilly. “Well, Your Majesty, I’m glad to report that the Society’s stock holdings in flag manufacture companies has increased fourfold in value since the Pair of Pavilions went up in smoke. The economy’s a wreck, which is excellent, but we’ve made a killing. No pun intended.” He smiled ruefully. “The Guarantee of Rights isn’t worth the illegal paper it’s written on. Murica is finally becoming the police state the founding fathers intended. We’re poised for martial law at the slightest provocation.”

“Also, I think now is the time to get people used to the idea of canceling the next elections. Such an un-Murican institution, don’t you think?”

The King was nodding. “All those people saying bad things about the King, making him leave the Throne! Who the hell do they think they are? I’m the King.” Shrub the Second had bitter memories of Dad’s experience. If only they hadn’t had that pesky election…

Pink refrained from rolling his eyes and produced a scroll. “Ah, yes, of course. Now, here are your orders from the Society. Do exactly as we say, and we’ll let you come to our annual party in two, maybe three, years. Naked and blindfolded, of course, due to your low status, but it can be fun that way, too…”