1968 (interlude)

It ended up being a slow summer. Ken and the little girl would pass endless hours playing mostly cards. Sometimes she would watch him play solitaire for hours on end. For a small child, she was surprisingly uninquisitive and restrained. Ken had to give explicit instructions for the simplest task. When he said "come in", it meant just that. She would stand perhaps twenty centimetres inside the door. He had to further instruct her to sit down, take food, eat the food, and so on, frustratingly. So they naturally settled into a pattern that involved games with explicit rules. It gave the little girl a degree of freedom. They rarely talked; Ken would have liked someone to talk with, to distract from the almost daily (probably exaggerated) marches and parades, where slogans were belted out of megaphones and bounced several times off the apartment buildings, upward, upward. Sometimes, mercifully, it would be patriotic music which was entertaining--if one ignored all the lyrics.

Elsewhere that summer the world was blossoming and dying. The people of the world stood up against injustices and mildly acquiesced to a platefull of new ones. Summer storms batterred the coasts of the northern hemisphere: monsoons bringing floods and desolation, high pressure areas bringing stickiness and sweat to millions of overcrowded rooms in hundreds of cities. In the southern hemisphere, fishermen living in Tierra del Fuego huddled together and burned whale oil for warmth while taking turns to see whose tall tales would be most unbelievable yet undeniably entertaining. But this is the story of those who were, after a leap of the imagination, connected to our protagonist by unlikely networks whose operations were decidely not random.

The summer mugginess tormented Pavel (a throw-away character we will not dwell too much on). But it wasn't just the mugginess; he had spent many summers lying in dried-up riverbeds in the countryside with his multiple nameless lovers, all with hyacinths in their hair. He would spend those summers drinking the fine domestic beers and belting out the new music trickling in from the West on a falling-apart gramophone, boisterously talking with his friends into the endless nights, saluting the moon and wishing he knew more about the old lost Slavic pantheon. But this ummer was not like the other summers. Two days ago, the soldiers had come. They were nothing but ruffian work gangs, overturining news kiosks, smashing the improvised street art of the Prague Spring or covering it with hopeless bureaucratic tarpaulin, splashing their classless pictures of Brezhnev on every store they passed. There was no point leaving his apartment. He had not heard from any of his friends, becuase he had not had the energy to leave bed ever since he went to the window two days ago and saw the endless line of identical humans march past. He contemplated the coolness and the feel of the gun lying on his desk, the light coming in through the slats framing the entire scene like a still ife by some mediocre painter. He turns to us and speaks his last grand sermon, in the style of his speeches in the riverbeds to admiring girls:

"They've come to take our turnips! We spent our youths tending to these gardens, and when the buyers finally showed up, they "accidentally" trampled them! O mad angel of mercy! What did we do that was so horrifying? Did we listen to too much Elvis? Was it a health and safety risk? Did our pelvises pose a flying-off-and-hitting-innocent-children risk because of our mad gyrations? Did we hat the capitalist enemy with too little fervour? Did our old mothers coddle our generation just a little too much? Was it that our corpses did not fill up enough trenches during the war or that our women were not rape-accessible enough after? Were our cahthedrals a little too preserved? Did me and my friends pose a direct threat to the chairman of The Party? Not our party. All we ever did was drive motorbikes. All we ever did was pose three questions. And yes, we did smoke grass once. But we showed the proper respect to the peasant women passing by our Bodhisattva copse."

And with that he moved towards the gun, picked it up, but collapsed into bed and let the gun drop, feeling his last spoken testament was not forceful enough.

Elsewhere: demons were pillaging the Costa Rican countryside. At least according to the locals. The Arenal Volcano was belching out its sulfurous anger at the planation owners, but even this brutal giant was no match for the concept of absentee slavedriver. In Chicago, the high winds were blowing in change as kids in colours, kids like Pavel, went up against the endless indentical military people, with slightly better odds of making it. They trashed some politicians, threw flowers and custard and then dispersed to the afterbars where they spent three days digging the bellows of the negro trumpets of the downtown.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Consider: "..our goal was to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all."