Of course. From time immemorial, monarchs had instigated conquest to consolidate power. Shrub the First had finessed foreign conflict within the first year of his reign, initiating a hate campaign against a former Murican puppet named Madman Insane, dictator of I’mcracked, who had the planned misfortune to invade his tiny but wealthy neighbor, Heywait, right when the elder Shrub sought an international demon to crucify.

The timing of this hostile action was no coincidence; Insane had innocently made his move with false assurance, from clandestine Murican authorities, that they would not interfere with Insane if he took Heywait. Naturally, there was no one to complain to when King Shrub welshed on Madman and used the incident as an excuse to begin the prolonged and expensive Golf War, the centerpiece of his brief reign.

At first, this strategy was successful; the Muricans, always needing someone to hate, took immediately to Madman Insane, with his swarthy desert features and alien-sounding moniker. King Shrub was suddenly quite popular.

But as the Golf War approached the eighteenth Hole, it was obvious that most Muricans were dissatisfied. Sure, Madman had been driven from Heywait, but he still held power in I’mcracked and looked to do so for some time to come. The Murican people, robbed of their bloodlust, felt vaguely duped and subsequently dumped King Shrub, for the Lord Horny Hick from Ark and Saw, who ruled reasonably well and kept the people entertained with his sexual antics.

The economy, which had seemed so hopeless under King Shrub, was miraculously restored without special measures, and grew steadily until Horny Hick was forced by statute from the Throne. Weapons contractors screamed bloody murder at the draft-dodger’s cutbacks, but most Muricans were out shopping and ignored the missile-mongerers’ moans.

The fact was, the Murican people were disillusioned with foreign war, particularly when their massive armies displayed an embarrassing reluctance to win. Too often they found themselves peeling off bumper stickers and lowering flags with gritted teeth, as once again their vastly superior military effected an equivocal withdrawal from a much smaller territory where the enemy would continue to rule as before.

Even Horny Hick-who was much more interested in domestic affairs- had tried his hand at the meddling game, agitating against the genocidal Sloppy Don Lousysonofabitch in Yourup, the latest in the procession of demons promenaded before the Muricans’ Magic Mirrors for hate purposes, but, finding little interest in the intervention at home, he allowed the issue to quietly drop. Ratings were not good, even though the headlines screamed, “Systematic Rape” and “Ethnic Cleansing”. Halfway around the world, who gives a damn? Besides, there’s plenty of sex and violence in the local news, thank you fearless leader.

A war? Yes, certainly! But what foe? They were running out of bloodthirsty foreign lords with funny names. The senior Shrub had won the Throne originally in a contest against the hideously named Duke Cockkiss, which sounds like shit in any language, while summoning up equally disturbing images of fellatio. And the King had learned from his father the vital importance of having an enemy with a funnier name than yours.

Mr. Pink was waiting impatiently for the glassy look to leave the King’s eyes, tapping his fingers on the armrest of the Throne. “We need another Oyster Bay,” he said carefully. The King needed his explanations in slow, short words. “Something to whip up a frenzy. A war even long- haired radicals would be ashamed to protest.”

There is no answer, and I am about to turn away, go back down to the Row and find a glass bottle to break, when I hear the faint rustlings of a magazine and zipper being closed. The door opens to reveal the sweaty beady face of a small, older man with ridiculously anachronistic spectacles and thin white hair. His white clerk’s shirt has a pocketful of pens, complete with plastic inkguard, and a shirttail is hanging loose from his trousers.

“Come in, come in,” he implores with an intensity that makes me reconsider being on the same side of the door as him, but I can take the little pervert, if it comes to that; I probably outweigh him. Besides, he looks
pathetically harmless.

“Well,” he says, “I have to say, you don’t look like a very good bet to me. What are you, twenty? But maybe you know something I don’t know.”

I know a whole world of things you don’t, I think; but ask, reasonably, since I haven’t got the most fucked-up idea what he means: “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Well, family history of premature demise. Deadly genetic diseases that turn up early in life that you currently don’t show signs of. Someone out to kill you. I’ll take out two policies on you if you can show proof that you’re the target of a mob hit.”

“Well, I just escaped from a mental hospital, and I have a lot of thoughts about suicide,” I offer. “My, uh, friend killed herself.” No need for this creep to know I’m a lesbian. It might turn him on.

He shakes his head. “Suicide’s no good; everybody knows they don’t pay on that. But perhaps you could make it look like an accident? Some policies pay double for an accident.”

“Say, how did you get a lease here, anyway, selling insurance? I thought you had to be non-prof.”

He chuckles. “I am non-profit. Haven’t made a dime yet. Anyway, I don’t sell insurance; I buy it. I take out policies on my clients, and they take out policies on me, and whoever doesn’t die first wins.” He winks. “I come from a long line of old people. No heart disease, cancer, diabetes, nothing. I can retire by the time I’m fifty, for sure, as soon as I can cash in someone’s policy. I plan to live at least until I’m ninety.”

“You’d better get on it, then,” I say irrelevantly. “Not much time.” This is probably insensitive, but I’m surprised to hear him talk about his fiftieth birthday as if it lay in the future. He looks at least sixty.

“What do you mean? I’ve plenty of time. I’m only thirty-seven.”

Something else bothers me. “Isn’t it dangerous, letting random strangers take out life insurance on you? Aren’t you afraid something might, ah, happen to you?”

He looks thoughtful. “I’d never considered that. I suppose it would be a problem, if I had any clients.”

“Look,” I say, getting to the point, exasperated by this ludicrous exchange, “I’m not here to buy insurance, or have you buy some, or whatever the hell you do. I came looking for the prior occupants of this suite. The Institute for Genetic Notification.”

Melvin draws a blank. How am I going to find a secret society without giving up the secret? But maybe they’ve gone public by now. I try again. “The Order of the Wheel.”

He brightens. “Oh, yes. Some sort of hoax, wasn’t it? I recall a scandal, fifteen years back or so. Promising people they could help them carry their memories into the next incarnation, or some such swill for the gullible. What are you, doing some kind of research paper on metaphysical fraud?”

I glare at him. “I’m a member,” I say tersely. “I’ve recovered my memories.”

Melvin mulls on this paradox for a moment. “Well, Carmen Reece was involved in that, but I don’t know if she’ll talk to you about it. The whole thing is a bit of a sore spot with her. She testified against the others at the trial.”

I grab Melvin by the knot of his tie and bring his pallid, wrinkled face close to my own in a gesture no one but a dom-and-sub freak would mistake for amorousness. His sallow eyes bug with fear.

“Where is she?” I growl, practically asphyxiating him before remembering that the poor old twerp is trying to be helpful. I let him go and take a deep breath.

He steps back, pulling his shirt straight and adjusting his tie, eying me nervously as if I’m a rabid dog.

Mental hospital, I’d said. Escaped, I’d said. I can read his mind.

Maybe the insurance business is too dangerous after all. Deciding that telling me is the surest way to be rid of me, he stammers, “She’s the editor of the Snake-Oil Chronicle. They have offices down at the other end of the Row, on Objective Blvd. She’s not very popular with the most of the locals; they’ve done a series of exposes on nearly all the groups here, at one time or another. Even ran a piece on me, which is one of the reasons I don’t have any clients. You’re going to blow her head wide open.”

When Melvin says this, it doesn’t even sound like attempted slang. It sounds like a suggestion to be taken literally.

Apparently he’s not a fan either.

I take the address and realize Carmen’s new racket is directly across from Cafe Ennui, the last commercial enterprise before the realm of Crazy Bear and his nutty non-profits begins. A border, of sorts. The boundary between Babylon and bohemian heaven. Right back to where I started.

I storm back down Religion Row, building a nice head of steam and bile for Carmen Reece. Boy, has that bitch got some explaining to do!

* * * * * * *

~ )))0((( ~

A dozen or so sleeping kids are scattered across the room, passed out on various couches, mattresses, bean bags, and each other, in spite of the deafening beat. Well, devoted religious vigils can be exhausting, and the extremely pious are in no condition to move after a long night of partying/worship…

The dancers are in worlds of their own, oblivious, and it seems both futile and bad form to disturb the clergyman in the midst of administering the rites, no matter how small his flock. I play tourist, this being my maiden visit to the sanctuary. At night they have to check ID, to qualify for the noise permit, but no law bars me from entering now. It’s just there’s normally no point in showing up during daylight.

Fortunately, the church part of it is set up like a museum, with placards giving the lofty designation for each item, as well as a brief description for the uninitiated like me, or perhaps merely for the author’s own amusement.

A variety of capricious idols span the rear perimeter, sculpted in cartoonish, drug-induced gaudiness that reminds me vaguely of ventriloquist dummies: Discowood, the gay patron god of funky beats and sparkly clothes; Vibia, the holy goddess of group energy; Emceemion, the dusky god of hip-hop; Euphorias and Expansia, god and goddess of being high, portrayed as intertwined, blissful mates charged by their followers with providing heavenly intervention to ensure highest quality for the lowest price.

And in a pantheon equally diverse, but populated by grim, hideous figures instead of plastic-jeweled, friendly caricatures of the ravers themselves, lay the demons of the cult, perhaps not honored as greatly, but acknowledged equally in all their bare evil: Addictica, with a monkey’s face and bearing a chain; Policius, tapping a baton against his gloved hand; Avaricius, symbolizing the greed that ruins a party from within; and Skankhoe, the hated succubus of sexually transmitted disease.

Between the two rival camps, and directly opposite the actual set currently in use, sit the Turntables of Truth. On the left pad, closest to the gods and goddesses, is a white vinyl record which reads, “PLEASURE”. Its counterpart is black and reads, somewhat predictably, “PAIN”. I lift the near disc to peek beneath it-mostly to see if this relic is an example of the fabled Technic 1200-and discover to my somewhat enlightening surprise that the flipside is black and marked “PAIN” as well. These kids aren’t as dumb as they look.

Intrigued, I lift the icon and inspect it closely, wondering momentarily if I’m not committing some kind of blasphemy by handling it, and deciding it will be all right as long as I’m careful not to scratch. After all, if the record weren’t meant to be removed, it wouldn’t have an instructional message on the other side.

The grooves begin at no particular point that can be discerned close to the edge; or I should say groove, since as I understand it there is only one on each side. I have, of course, seen a vinyl record before, but not for a very, very long time, since before I had evolved from taker to giver. This transformation changes the way you think about everything. For instance, as a man I had only the most peripheral awareness of the monthly period and chiefly regarded it as a bloody inconvenient hiatus from sex, or, occasionally, with relief, subsequent to some careless unprotected implantation. My world has doubled since then.The blood flows from my source as the world within me mirrors the moon as she grows and diminshes. The universe has subtler, lusher layers of meaning now.

So with feminine fingers I caress the vinyl with fresh wonder, and see in its parallel lines a truth I have been struggling to comprehend: my relationship to Victor. We are different tracks on the same album.

And the ego, the “I” of self-awareness-that is the needle, moving ever forward in time despite staying in the same place. Wherever metal meets vinyl is the only song that matters. What’s playing right now is Amanda, and what I do is the melody.

Sri Lakshmi, Goddess of Fortune, be my DJ now.

I promise myself I will return at a less hectic juncture to explore the electronic mysteries of the techno-music cult; but I am several years late for a vital appointment, and am eager for my rendezvous with the only group of people that won’t think my head is cracked. I have things to figure out.

The church has an exit-only side door toward the back (actually, a disabled fire-alarm door), and I avail myself of it without arousing the claxons of hell. Frankly, I doubt it would be heard over the music, anyway; the kids would just think it was something on the next cut.

As my eyes adjust painfully to the midday glare, I note with gratitude that the cops have vanished, and with mixed feelings that the boy I owe a kiss to has gone as well. Of course, he didn’t fulfill his end of the bargain, and I had been viewing the payoff with trepidation and revulsion in any case; but I am somehow miffed that he had found something else to so easily distract him, demonstrating how transient and superficial, perfunctory, even, his interest had been. I had puffed myself up quite a bit on his shallow display of lust.

Here. Now. Focus! I command myself. This is no time to get distracted by ambiguous emotions like a silly, sexually confused schoolgirl. I have to rise above what I am.

I am about three blocks from the Institute for Genetic Notification- also known, but only to members, as the Order of the Wheel. Quite possibly the only legitimate institution left on the strip.

Triskaidekaphobia Anonymous, at 1313 Illustration, seems deserted; but the Arthur J. Fonzerelli Teleddiction Recovery Center, which consumes the entire rest of the block, is packed, the line of tube junkies seeking help curling off into the street.

As is the Chris Farley Memorial Center for Compounding Corpulence, a fatties’ club that takes up the complete fifteen hundred block of Illustration. The banner overhead the specially widened doorway
proudly announces, “Working ÔRound the Clock to Make the World a Fatter Place” above, “all- you-can-eat, 24-7. (Members Only!) The bigger you are, the smaller we look!”

The Row appears to have become a thriving venue since my last visit before I was born, and it strikes the old capitalist in me as somewhat sad that no profit is permitted to be reaped from all this traffic.

Then again, maybe old C.B. isn’t keeping a proper tab on his tenants these days, after all, and black-market trade in currency is rampant under the guise of altruism. How else to explain the hawker outside of something called the Cult of the Day Cafe, mimicking his sleazy forebears from evangelical revival tents, vaudeville and burlesque productions, practically kidnapping wandering pedestrians and inducting them, bewildered, into today’s special: The Moonies, according to the chalkboard easel.

Tomorrow’s feature: Narcotics Anonymous.

The better portion of the first floor of 1620 Illustration Avenue is, as I remembered, home to the Radical Front of Shiva’s Sword, a nuclear-war advocacy group remotely related to Hinduism. They rent the space primarily because it includes what was originally the basement and is now, of course, an impressively stocked bomb shelter. I peer inside the giant ballroom-originally intended to be a J.C. Penny’s-and spot the poster proclaiming, superimposed on a dramatic image of Ground Zero’s ballooning mushroom cloud, the common-sense slogan, “WHY NOT JUST GET IT OVER WITH?”

Why not, indeed. Images of pale, skeletal girls with acne on their faces and razor slashes on their forearms and rope burns about their necks.

Join us. Why cling so hard to life, when, as Buddha say, existence is suffering? If, as Sarah insisted, we are tied to the world by only a crass addiction to flesh, why not…kick the habit?

Just why was I in such a big hurry to come back here, anyway? She’s gone. That pretty much makes this spin around the Wheel a write-off. If I want to be anywhere near her age in the next life, it’s time to clip my thread short. Isn’t the duty of a lover to follow, like Orpheus, into Hell itself to recover a lost soul mate? And the worst that might happen to me is New Jersey.

No, the worst would be growing up right next door to each other and never knowing who we’d been. Flying off randomly onto the Wheel will only ensure losing each other again.

But the Order can tell me, I realize. They can tell me where she’s gone and where I’ll go, just like before, and this time I’ll do it for love not money and maybe it will it work better this time. The karma will be cleaner.

I bound up the stairs with renewed enthusiasm. Sarah! You silly bitch, if you’d just waited, we could have done this together. When I finally catch up to you, I’m gonna smack your shit upside your head for leaving me like that.

But that won’t be for at least another fifteen years.

I check the office directory in the lobby for nostalgia’s sake. The owner, who in addition to his other virtues is a superstitious numerology- conscious kook, lets the tenants choose whatever suite number pleases them, without any reference to floor or order. “Significance,” he would pant in a tone which dripped with an amplified sense of it. “Only the significance of the number should matter…”

Suite 42 is still the headquarters for the Children of Dent, a Douglas Adams fanatic club; suite 49 is occupied by the offices of the Tristero Postal Conspiracy, while suite 23 is now rented by something called the Bavarian Illuminati, since the Discordians have moved into the Robert Anton Wilson Conspiracy Complex. Must have something to do with donuts. But they can’t be a donut company, because how could that be non-profit? Maybe something to do with the historical preservation of donuts.

There’s a problem, however, when I reach number 18 at the end of the familiar lonely hall. The door reads, to my extreme dismay, Melvin P. Utz, Mutual Life.

If you’ve been following, that’s not what I expect to see.

~ )))0((( ~

ALERT!
Homo Sapiens has evolved right out of Evolution!Whereas genetic engineering has produced virtually every variety of plant and animal we associate with and exploit, we practice a bizarre, reverse g.e. process on our own population, by nullifying congenital flaws.

In nature, asthmatics and myopics die before breeding, unable to outrun predators or find food. Now they are called nerds and become high-priced desk jockeys, breeding with genetically pure office help.

Saving the weak and sick is destroying our bloodline! And ensuring a future of weaklings!

The practice of corrective medicine MUST BE STOPPED!

We are promoting the proliferation of nearsightedness, diabetes, heart-valve defects, etc. by taking the sting out of the deficiencies, artificially compensating for nature’s screening process, allowing the afflicted to breed (with my wife!) and thereby ensuring that a future generation of humans will someday be born, all with a predisposition to lens distortion and pancreatic malfunction and so forth.

Eventually, every baby will be born and immediately whisked away to surgery to correct universal birth defects. It will be a nightmare world of modified cyborgs, needing constant care, from birth to death.

LET THE UNFIT DIE!

Fertility research must be immediately halted. It is an abomination, with a world census of over eight billion gluttonous bipeds.

LET THE STERILE ADOPT!

The only way to save our species is to line up all the doctors and pharmacists and biological researchers and greasy, four-eyed advertising reps, up against the wall.

Once we have them all there (the Great Wall of China will need to be used), we should calmly and rationally explain the scientific aims of our organization.

Then we must blind them and cut off their nuts.

Though some of this nihilistic rant strikes a guilty cord, I was a man too recently to have any sympathy for anyone advocating the systematic castration of any class, and I know from experience that the ill don’t care whose air they’re monopolizing, the unfit don’t care about passing on their lazy, irresponsible code. And while the numbers of toilet-flushing entities are dangerously out of control, I somehow suspect that this Nazi-like strategy of unilaterally pulling the plug to purify our species would be, if taken seriously, a greater menace than overpopulation itself.

Perhaps the best approach to the problem would be to promote these ideas widely, let the membership balloon, and execute everyone who joins as an agitator for genocide. I wonder why Crazy Bear tolerates them, and remember: he lets everybody have their say, so long as the bottom line is red. That surely explains the Rush Limbaugh Museum on the second floor.

One night while tripping on Orange Sunshine Acid with him, I had waxed hateful about the constabulary. “No, no,” Crazy Bear said, rising from his bean bag to retrieve a well-worn copy of Be Here Now, by “Baba Ram Dass,” who is one of the other guys that got fired from Harvard with Tim Leary. The two men were like John and Peter as far as he was concerned, and the hippie regarded strange book, with its fine ink illustrations and cryptic mantras filling its brown pages, something akin to Gospel.

“Here,” he said, finding his page and thrusting it at me. “Be Here.”

A naked man is pictured, enveloped in a swirl of Yin-Yang symbols. To one side is the accouterments of law enforcement: uniform, jackboots, gunbelt. On the other is a standard head outfit: frilly shirt, tight slacks, beads, leather. The text reads, ouroborically, “Cops create hippies create cops…”

“Never hate your enemy, for he is you. We all wander a hall of mirrors, disgusted at some twisted reflections, admiring of flattering ones, never realizing, the whole time, that there really is only One of us…”

Jesus, who according to Crazy Bear, was the premier hippie, exemplified this attitude. “The only ones you can help, the only lives you can really change, are people you are inclined to dislike. That’s why he went hanging out with fishermen, when he obviously preferred the company of hookers.” I reflect on this as I notice the United Sex Workers of America, local #69.

Then the NORML offices, with the predictable whiff of patchoulie and pot flowing from the gang of retro dreadheads camped out in front; I skirt quickly past something called the Sacred Heart Aztec Sacrifice Temple, whose doorway is ominously clear of any traffic, though the odor of roasting meat is thick from inside. Yuk. Meat is so gross.

Then it gets sort of weird on the Row.

~ )))0((( ~

After all, I did walk out the front door without stirring the sleepy guard from his psychically induced tete-a-tete with Isis O’Rourke, and that was supposed to be impossible, too. Of course, I cheated. When the game is fixed, there’s no other choice.

I put myself in my potential pursuers’ pennyloafers and decide that Amanda must be a low priority. Actually apprehending runaway psychotic teenagers surely ranks below hanging out in strip clubs or designated dickhead police-themed bars while on the clock. Goddess willing, the constables on my case are staking out my friend’s houses or some other moron’s destination, playing crossword puzzles and munching cream-filled pastries while waiting for me to flee starvation, sexual predators and streetkid lice into their clutches by dark or so.

No doubt that was the fate of most of the girls who fled unfair confinement and realized, alone and adrift, that the odds were not good for getting through a day on the streets without being hit with a big dose of something ugly. If you were lucky, it would only be some debilitating drugs and semi-consensual sex. If not-well, the streets eat stupid girls the way mantises eat wasps. Everyone knows that.

I mumble the mantra: move fast, blend well, and carry a broken bottle. There is a species of street predator adapted specifically to consume my kind, hungering for tender nubile meat. I was safer from bodily rape, at least, at Fairfield; there the monsters were clearly identified by their staff ID clipped to every lab coat or casual flannel, the sex blanched out of their eyes from addiction to a much greater thrill.

Those demons wanted only to rape my soul.

Which is why the watchman was watching winsome women. The real security guard is the lonely fear of dependence. The hospital, after all, is a nice enough retreat for Sylvia Plath wanna-bes and the wounded victims of tampon tragedies, if your agenda is confined to biding those agonizing years between puberty and majority with as little parent as possible.

Preferable, for nearly every inmate, to the madhouses we claimed for permanent mailing addresses, not that we were consulted about our wishes. But I have business to take care of, an upside-down life to set right, and the unsafest thing I could think of was one more night in the dungeon with the Suicide Clique.

They were starting to get to me. I’d been thinking of joining, especially after she told me…

Enough of that. Time’s a-wasting. If I get caught before reaching the Order of the Wheel, I may as well have stayed in the unfunny farm.

Finding it should be no trouble at all; I remember the golden Post-It on which the address had been scrawled over fifteen years ago, as if I still have it in my suit’s lapel, though both the note and the fine tailory I wore that day must be dispersed dust by now. Certainly the fleshbag I had on that day has long since been integrated into the digestive systems of various nematodes and fungal agents of simplification, though I am more curious about the whereabouts of the suit than the body, since I had no say in the design of the latter.

I’m losing the referent. I, who? The security of a world view where the first person pronoun has a static, singular meaning drifts away like the diminishing shadow of the last scrap of flotsam from a storm-shattered hundred-thousand dollar yacht. Perceptions quake and flutter from the struggle to define the world through the competing filters of rival “I’s”.

This is why they locked you up, girl, getting confused, and you know that it’s going to do no good to let him take over.

~ )))0((( ~