The Process

7. SHE

She just took her money and went away, didn’t she … not one word out of her, did you notice? Typical … isn’t it? That old Berber witch … or whatever she is … seems to think this is her cave and I’m paying her rent for it. Well, never mind … one pays for being an American, I suppose … and we do screw them in so many other ways … all the time, don’t we? Calypso’s Cave! You can feel this really is Calypso’s old cave, can’t you? To Homer this was the end of the world where his little wine-dark sea ran away through these straits into nothingness … the Maelstrom … America! That fabulous coastline of southern Spain, strung out over there through the blue, must have looked just about the same … except for the lights, I suppose, that frame it … and this same big yellow balloon of a moon sailed up there between Gibraltar and Ceuta, the Pillars of Hercules. Funny, isn’t it, to think that our dollar sign comes from a snake wound around those two pillars … the serpent Baby Hercules strangled in his cradle. That’s a really mad image for money … now, isn’t it? What does it mean, Hassan … or don’t you care, really?

What do you care about, Hassan-Ulysses … only your keef and young dancing boys? Well, don’t fret … we have more and better of all that down in “Malamut” than even the Old Man of the Mountain ever dreamed a hashish-dream about. Why, all this cool green and blue country north of the Tropic of Cancer is nothing compared with what I’ve got going down south. You know it, yourself … the Sahara’s pure gold! You’ve heard of a people called the Foulba, of course … the Peuls … the most beautiful boys in the world, bar none. You must, at least, have seen books of photographs of their ritual beauty contests for which the young men begin preparing at puberty … when they’re first allowed to wear makeup and start earning their jewelry. Along with huge Floradora Girl ostrich-feather hats and a little leather apron they take off for the contest … that’s all they do wear … their jewels. Well, they’ll be holding their finals this month … and guess where! … in the courtyard of my castle down there. You see, Cape Noon is their capital rock and on that rock I built my house: “Malamut” … where the Tropic of Cancer cuts out across the Atlantic on the map. The Foulba first got there about the time anyone’s worm-white ancestors … and I’m afraid we’ve both got them Hassan … by the time those whites were first grubbing their way up out of the caves, the Foulba had written their own lengthy literature on several hundred long miles of mountain before the Sahara began to dry up all around them. Driving their lyre-horned cattle ahead of them, the Foulba went west … and wandered on out of history. When they did find the water they were looking for, it stopped them … the sea … the Atlantic. On the low, level shore they saw my big rock sticking up in that landscape as sudden as Mont Saint Michel on its tidelands. The Foulba say “Malamut’s” head touches heaven. Cape Noon, they call: Heaven Rock. “Malamut” is my secret garden. “Malamut” and the Foulba, today … nearly two million in all of them … belong solely to me, Hassan: I own not only the Foulba … we’re absorbing new ethnic groups of previously nameless nomads in the southwestern Sahara every day. How many of them could you possibly have in a lifetime Hassan … or would you prefer to possess what’s left of your old enemies, the Blue Men? I’m telling you, Hassan … in Present Time, I am the most powerful woman in Africa!

The Word, Hassan! All you have to say is the Word … when you know it … and you can be Emperor of Africa! Emperor Hassan the First! You do understand … don’t you, the move Thay has made … was obliged to make only today at noon? You must, after all, because Thay laid his last words on you, my dear … not on me. That transfer of the Saharan Seal to you could make you the Master of Words when you know what to do with it … and no one on earth can tell you but you, you know. Thay calls it the Roller, rolling out all the words in the world over and over, again and again, since the first Word was spoken. What you hold in your hand is the emerald Beginning and Ending of Words, Hassan … as a woman, naturally I fear you! As a woman, too, all I can tell you is what not to do. … That’s my nature. Don’t … for example … don’t press the Seal into wax or putty or anything soft … you haven’t tried doing that, have you? Don’t do anything silly and artistic like inking the Seal and running it onto paper. Just don’t, that’s all … don’t! That’s printing, you see … rolling out replicas. We’ll go into that later. In Present Time, down on Cape Noon, we’re fed up with replica Foulbas, you see. They’ve bred true-blue for so long that they’re all practically identically beautiful! The one perfect specimen multiplied to infinity … and why not? … in some sort of biological barbershop mirror. Dr. Francis-X. Fard has produced a little prose-poem pamphlet praising the Foulba for being the one people we know in the world who have come up with not one single object of culture in all their lone history … not even a knot, let alone the cord to tie one in … not even a pot! They boil things by dropping a red-hot rock in a leather sack of water or milk. The Foulba have known exactly how not to let them themselves be tied down by things! They’re innocent … beautiful … pure! Until I laid hands on them, they’d always been as free as the wind. Long, long ago they gave up their writing … except just for fun and to teach the young ones … they write in the dust where the wind will be sure to erase it. So much for the Word. The one big problem with them is the one you can guess … over-weening vanity! That’s how I was able to grab them up cheap … the whole lot. When I buy, it’s always in lots … things come so much cheaper … and the cheapest one can get something for in this life, after all, is for nothing, don’t you think? That’s what I like to pay, really … nothing at all. You see, I have my own little ways of getting what I want in life. I have a trick or six I picked up right here in Africa.

This particular, ah, product … I owe to Dr. Pio Labesse, an Old African Hand who was … well, really … my second husband and not the sixth as the newspapers always say. I’m his widow … or was. I’m sure Thay has painted you the worst possible picture of Pio but, truly, I owe him a lot … poor Pio. He had all the lore of North Africa at his fingertips, literally … but he lost it. He left it where he is, now … in the Past. This one, ah, product … is something I’ve gone into scientifically … chemically … and refined it out of all recognition, you see, but … perhaps, essentially … it is the same thing the original Calypso brewed up when that other Ulysses dropped in. What I’ve done is bring the whole thing up the time-scale to bring it in line with Present Time, so … Hassan-Ulysses … in Present Time … Look!

The lady who owns this cave is a nymph … a very wise nymph who knows not just a thing or two but … at least … a thing or sixteen! There are also thirty-second degree nymphs and she may well be one of these … or she might be of even higher rank, who knows? For the moment, that doesn’t matter because she’s … well, how shall I put it? … a fairly simple provincial nymph, in her own way. She doesn’t have a villa with a swimming pool on Capri, like Circe, but she’s doing all right … right here in Africa. There’s a full moon … it is night. Straight down there … right down where those Arabs are night-fishing … there, you see it? … a boat. She sits here, perfectly still on this rock, interviewing the moon as it crawls on its knees across the floor of her cave to her feet. Down there … rooting around in the brush under this cliff, she hears what might be a boar … a wild boar or an even more dangerous animal … Man! Nothing happens for quite a while and then … abruptly … there is a real man peering over that ledge!

“I am the nymph Calypso,” she says, drawing herself up. “Who are you?” The intruder is somewhat taken aback. He gulps and gives her what sounds like a phony title: “The king of Ithaca,” he mumbles … taking a good look around. When he spies all the edible goodies she has stored up in the back of her cave, he calls up his men to share in a good hot supper at her expense … with champagne! Charles Heidsieck champagne, as a matter of fact. Here, Hassan … just let me pour some more of my wine. … So! She takes out a vial and pulls out the stopper with her teeth … like this … and drops three drops of a magical elixir into his glass. “Here, drink this up, my Lord Emperor of Africa!” she says. Here, Hassan … cheers … drink up!

Nothing happens for quite a while, of course … the stuff doesn’t take effect immediately, naturally. He wipes his lips and hands his half-empty cup on to his second-in-command, who drinks deep and passes it on around the circle of men, who finish it up. Calypso looks wise. I don’t suppose we could get your magicians … I mean, your musicians to share this champagne with us right now, could we? … or I’d show you what I can do with this stuff. This is Borbor, Hassan … and you’ve just taken a dose. No, don’t worry … so have I, so I’ll be along on the trip with you. Wait! Nothing at all happens to Ulysses, Hassan … that is the trick! Borbor makes him more than ever what he really is … every inch a king! His followers, now … well, that’s something else again. My sister Circe used to turn them into what they are … into pigs, for example. My caretaker … Calypso, here … might have more mangy dogs to feed and fend off if we gave your musicians some Borbor, tonight. On that other occasion … or so I am told by my potty professor from Oxford … Ulysses threw back his big black burnous and, under it, he was wearing … not a UHER tape recorder … my dear … but a breastplate looted from Troy, made of purest soft-solid gold. In Present Time, I propose you hang this Order of the Golden Fleece over the microphone around your neck. This chain was made by Benvenuto Cellini for the Habsburg Emperor Charles whose Spanish grandmother, Queen Isabella, had been far-sighted enough to pick up the Americas for him … quite cheap … he lost them, of course. This valuable bauble once belonged, too, to the Rothschilds, who wore it to fancy-dress parties in Paris. You might attach the Emerald Seal to it with a thread or a fine thong. Don’t use a gold chain … it would cut into the stone.

What happens … Now? why … in his case, that first Ulysses took seven long years … so the story goes … to find out who he really was … not the lady’s husband at all! Now, Thay Himmer the Seventh, last White Rajah-Bishop of the Farout Isles, and I … although we’ve known each other for seven years … have been married just seven weeks! That leaves me an American Ranee … if I want to be! But, shucks, that ain’t nuttin’, no more! Ranee of a long-lost kingdom the size of a coral atoll on the other side of the world, lost in the middle of the Pacific? Thanks very much but no thanks! I mean, I simply adore Thay … who wouldn’t? … He is such a child … besides, it’s very handy in Present Time to be a U.S. citizen BUT … I have my eye on much bigger game right here in Africa. Africa, today, is where it really can happen. … Watch me! On the other hand, I wouldn’t dream of divorcing poor Thay … he’s an absolute elf! And, he’s quite right: It’s going to suit me to have a husband who never talks. … Poor Thay, he’s so helpless. …

Thay Himmer was brought up helpless, like royalty … until Japan overran the Farouts when Thay was just six. The Himmers had founded the Farouts when the first Bishop Himmer of Hyannisport, Mass., got himself there first on a Clipper … and waded ashore with his Bible and his wife. I’m sure you think you know the rest of the story. … “Stop the music, stop the dancing, wear Mother Hubbards and get down to work. …” but, no! The Himmers were different. In the next generation, the family went native to conform with some local prophecy which allowed them to crown themselves rajahs with full native pomp. They introduced sugar-planting, built a refinery … a bakery, a brewery … and grew very rich. Always under the American flag, of course, and … while they married no native girls … the Himmers were always very much of the East. They shopped in Singapore instead of San Francisco, for example … things like that. Black sheep of the family, like Thay’s queer Uncle Willy, fled to Hong Kong and Macao before settling down on a remittance in some super-civilized place like Peking. Girls of the family were rather more spartan. They ran away to spin in an ashram in India with Gandhi … or took vows as Buddhist nuns at the court of the Queen of Siam. Thay found himself in the ashram of Sri Auribindo in Pondicherry with his grandmother, the old Ranee, when the war broke out. He had to burn the old lady with his own hands, eventually, on a funeral pyre by the banks of the Ganges … very bad for his asthma, he said.

Thay’s mother, the young Ranee, was prisoner for a couple of years in Japan and then … after V-J Day … Thay joined her at a Brain-breathing establishment in Carmel, California, where she was killed by a hitchhiker, eventually. Thay was terribly upset. He was madly in love, at the time, with a middle-aged Hindu Swami … in a purely spiritual sense. I never laid eyes on his guru, myself. … But I’ve seen photos in which the Swami seems to be smiling sardonically at some sinister private joke as he chews away on the end of his own long hooked nose. You can picture him selling you … and for a whole lot of money! … a very wrong rug. After some silly old stock-market crash swept away the Swami’s first fortune, the Swami snapped: “Money talks! I don’t need to talk!” Whereupon he took a vow of total silence which he’s kept to this day. I think that’s influenced Thay, too. From his Shrine of Silence, the Swami launched his “Ten Million Dollar Nirvana Fund” … which was to “Build the Invisible Temple of Love in Everybody’s Heart.” Thay tried to give his entire inheritance to the Swami but his brother-in-law, Renfrew … he’s a big lawyer in San Francisco and one of Thay’s trustees … called in the cops. Thay fought them tooth and nail on it but the family finally got the Swami deported before they actually had to fork over any property. Thereupon, Thay refused to have anything more to do with the family or his money and took off alone for New York … on his own for the first time in his life.

Wandering about New York the first day, like a tourist from another planet, you can imagine! … Thay thought he heard the … to him … all too familiar droning of monks mumbling mantras on the corner of Fifty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue. Like a man in a trance, Thay made straight for this old rotten building … 563 Madison, I think it was … it’s since been torn down. What Thay really was hearing was the first murmurings of GRAMMA. You’ve heard of them … No? Well, if Thay Himmer and I hadn’t put a spoke in their prayer wheel, GRAMMA might have swept the U.S. with its simple techniques for creating human ability out of … so to speak … nothing, nothing at all. Any two humans you put into communication can create this increased ability to a measurable extent! Human ability could put the atom back in its place … if we harness it … and the fact that GRAMMA techniques really do work. I’ll have occasion to show you, Hassan, GRAMMA really had something going … so I took it from them. That’s one of the power factors I’m depending on right now in Africa. Empires are taken … not given. Nobody ever gives you or even sells you power or special knowledge in this world … or the next, I suspect. You have to take it … steal it to make it your own. That’s how the Masters play the Game. Real Players don’t need any Guides. You grab what you want in the Big Bazaar: if you’re feeling good you toss out a buck, saying: “Keep the change, my good man! Keep the change.” Thay didn’t do that: instead he joined up with GRAMMA and was playing their game, until I came along and snatched him up out of there … out of the marketplace of Madison Avenue where Thay Himmer the Seventh simply didn’t belong!

GRAMMA was a splinter-group of something called “Logosophy” … a do-it-yourself psychology system put together by a group of more or less anonymous professors working for the Ford Foundation … who later disowned it. Essentially, it was … is, rather … a compilation of simple-sounding communication techniques which can be exercised by any two people willing to play. You can do “Gramma-calls” … reciprocal word combinations batted back and forth, even over the telephone, for hours. You can do “Gramma-rubs” … two people touching each other in turn … at home or even in the office. As a weapon of wordsmanship, too, Gramma is great! You can “grammatize” people in business … at home in your family … or out at the beach. GRAMMA founded itself as an organization when a group of go-getters on Madison Avenue read the book. They tried the techniques out on each other … and were absolutely overwhelmed … as I was to be later in Switzerland where I first came across it. In New York, they rented this condemned building and … by the time Thay Himmer happened along … they had the entire office-space humming like a Tibetan lamasery. They needed competent new operators to handle the hundreds of people who came in at fifty dollars a head for a twenty-minute half hour of chanting back and forth at each other: “Hello Yes Hello!”

It’s so simple, it sounds almost simpleminded but “Hello Yes Hello” is the ineluctable law of all verbal communication which most people fumble just as your Moroccan did with me on the phone, tonight: “Halloo Yass Halloo!” … he said it so loud and so often he couldn’t hear one single word I was saying. Just think how often that happens! Haven’t you noticed how often the people you talk to don’t even hear a word that you’re saying … really hear you: take it in? People just rattle on about themselves like squirrels in a cage … and you know it. Most people communicate very imperfectly and some not at all … like my first husband, Peter Paul Strangleblood. How do you get them into communication? Well, it’s so simple, it’s almost … sinister! No … I’m only joking. You do it like this:

First, I say to you, “Hello” … that’s to initiate this particular communication. What I do is I offer to communicate.

Now, you must answer back to me: “Yes” … a signal which shows you’ve accepted my offer. This move … in our discipline, Hassan … constitutes the first half of a Link.

Then, you say back to me: “Hello” … to show me you are willing to communicate … to go on communicating with me.

Therefore, I accept your fine offer very positively with: “Yes.” The First Link, Hassan, has been made in a chain a lot longer than from here into any next week. All Eastern philosophies are hung up on the Word … “In the Beginning was the Word.” Well … I’ll tell you the Word, Emperor Hassan! The Word which created the world is Hello!

GRAMMA initiates … and I use the verb very thoughtfully … initiates anybody and everybody into an area where communication is clear … and very often for the very first time in their lives. The results are usually spectacular yet it’s really quite simple:

You sit like this … face to face, toe to toe … no creaky old Freudian couch in the corner … I ask you to situate yourself spatially … to look around and see just where you are sitting right now. You’ve done that? Good! Now make yourself aware of the two corners of the cave above and behind your head. Take a look around, if you like. You’ve got them? Good! Now, we start in with “Hello Yes Hello,” and we’ll run it back and forth for the next twenty minutes … half an hour. When I first tried this on Peter Paul Strangleblood, he screamed right away: “I can’t take this! I can’t take any more of this! Stop!” Now, just from reading the book, I realized Peter Paul had coughed up one of his “ingrams” … the ingrown word-clots which made it impossible for him to take anything out of life … and, partly, because he put so little into it, he was simply not in communication with life at all. That therapeutical side of the business is what first got GRAMMA in trouble with the AMA … and then they had a rumble from Internal Revenue so they incorporated as a church: The First Grammatic Church, practicing Grammatology. That’s when Thay walked in. He saw right away what brand of word-magic they were up to … and he laughed. He laughed to himself just like one Farout magician laughs when he meets another Farout magician coming down the Farout jungle path. They both sit down … facing each other … and have a contest to see which one can make the more horrible scary face. When Thay began showing them their own business at GRAMMA, they sat back simply stunned. It was like a bunch of businessmen watching someone spread out a million-dollar invention with no possible patent protection. Thay assured them he couldn’t teach them to walk on water in a week but he could and would teach anyone in Grammatology who wanted to know, how to walk over fire … they did it all the time in the Farouts as the very first lap of any initiation, he said.

GRAMMA was claiming to create human ability? Well, fire-walking and faith-healing and a few other things he knew how to do might qualify as unusual human abilities. They agreed to see fire-walking first. Their publisher had a place down on Long Island … Locust Valley, I think … and they all moved down there for a weekend with lots more people to follow on Sunday afternoon … to lay on the media. Thay went to work or, rather, Thay had a gang of workmen he’d found … all handsome brutes, I’m sure … who moved onto the poor publisher’s lawn like a butch ballet or some nightmare machine which hewed a hole … a long trench … right through his croquet lawn! Thay filled in the trench with I don’t know how many hundreds of little bags of barbecue charcoal which he laid down in a bed and sprinkled with gasoline. Then he set it off with one tremendous great whoosh which nearly set fire to the publisher’s home. By the time the crowd had assembled, Thay tells me, he had a nice stretch of satiny braze about fifty feet long. He’d been soaking his feet in a bucket of alum as he sat in a deck chair ordering his workmen about. He says it doesn’t help much. He put back on his running-shoes over heavy woolen socks and ran a bit to get up a good protective sweat, then he went barefoot to meet the press. Everything went off just fine. There were pictures in the papers … all that sort of thing. Thay’s full identity came out, of course. He might no longer be a white rajah but he still was a bishop! Neither the Japanese invasion nor the new Farout Federal State could take his hereditary bishopric away. The very idea made GRAMMA greedy. In the peculiar branch of the game they got themselves into when they incorporated as a church, only a bishop can roll you out replicas in order to make you more bishops. The Grammatological Church had it made … if Thay would only start smearing them with his chrism and his unction and I don’t know what all! At that point, I dropped out of the sky crying: “No! Don’t do it, Thay! NO!” … and I swept him off to Switzerland with me to treat my poor husband, PP. Thus, at one single swoop, by snatching their bishop I won the whole GRAMMA game in my very first move. … Are you following me?

I got onto Grammatology, first, by attempting to absorb their sacred best-seller in Switzerland. The book’s as thick as a pillow, I might as well warn you … and just about as digestible. It’s got kapok in there instead of prose! It was first thrust upon me with almost psychotic intensity by a slightly psychic Swiss fraulein stenographer I had in the house in Basel … doing some tri-lingual work for me. “You’ll find it worthwhile, Madame,” she kept insisting. … and, believe me, I did! In the end, I simply devoured this dreary word-paste because it was the only book in the house in English … if that’s English it’s written in. I was living in Basel with my first husband, Peter Paul Strangleblood. We’d been married less than a year … straight out of college … but PP and I weren’t even on speaking terms, at that point in the game. PP was suffering from an acute case of what I call “Dollar Disease.” In his case, it came from too many oil wells, too early in childhood. PP had oil wells like other people have boils. What communication there had been between us had completely dried up over money. I knew Peter Paul was so sick on the subject that the mere mention of the word “money” could make him actually throw up, so … I went out without saying a word and started making a few million dollars of my own with something called mutual funds.

Oh, I didn’t invest in one. No … I started a fund of my own … Fundamental Funds … and the money rolled in at our good Swiss address. I’d taken this magnificent old house overhanging the Rhine with big grounds all around it … we were living in style! A young Swiss lawyer named Rolf Ritterolf came by our house one day, selling mutual funds. That drove PP out of the raftered room right away but I held onto Rolf … picking his brains. He’s still with me, today. … In the end, I hired him to run my own fund. In the meantime, if you please, PP had gone down to the banks of the River Rhine with his air rifle … taking pot shots at the plastic sacks Swiss workers from Basel stuff their clothes in as … swimming in groups … they drift down the Rhine-current, home from work. Daily, I had to fear scandal from PP … and just at a moment when I needed some respectable Swiss names on my Board of Directors! I had some trouble about that. Without securing his written permission, I put down my own Herr Professor, Dr. Karl Forbach … you know: the LSD, DMT, STP and mushroom-man … with whom I was working on the structure of hallucinogenic alkaloids in his lab on the out-skirts of Basel. I’m a very cunning chemist, too, you realize … that’s why I was there. I could see Dr. Forbach needed the money … he was building a house in the country. When I told him more or less what I was doing one day in the lab, he said: “Go right ahead, my dear … anything you say!” He’d had quite a crush on me until this money thing came up but … and I’m not trying to be vulgar … when I walked into the lab that day with those shares all printed up and bearing his name on the Board of Directors … why, the shit … as the vulgar really say … hit the fan. For the first time I understood what the Freudians meant with their equation: money equals merde! Here, I was giving the man money and he was giving me back merde! I realized that my communication with everybody was completely fouled up!

That’s when I really got onto GRAMMA. I’d suspected that even Peter Paul had picked up the book and was fumbling through it when I wasn’t around … “Hello Yes Hello” might be just the right way to get back into communication with him. I was hardly surprised when he agreed. Yes, he’d try a little, “Hello Yes Hello.” He’d been trying to do it with the gardener’s boy but it hadn’t worked out. When the two of us tried it … golly … it really worked! In a minute or two … it couldn’t have been more … Peter Paul broke out with: “I can’t take it! I can’t take any more of this shit!” I caught his “ingram” … the operative word was take! I decided to run that word “take” on Peter Paul, again and again … as the book suggested, thus: I pushed him gently back into position with a big friendly smile, saying firmly: “Good, Peter Paul; good! Now, what can you take from this room?” and PP … of course … snapped back automatically: “Nothing!” I pressed on gently but firmly with “Good! and what else can you take from this room?” For a long time, he made nothing but negative noises but … finally … as I went on softly insisting: “Good! Peter Paul; good. And what else can you take from this room?” … thus running his “havingness’ over and over again … he had to admitted … he had to admit that even his “Nothing” was very much something … a thing! That flipped Peter Paul … he literally, flipped! Before even I realized what it was doing to him, there he was flat on the floor … in some kind of a fit! It was two o’clock in the morning, besides, so I called in a Swiss doctor who gave him a suppository, natch! Those European doctors! Well, maybe it’s not exactly lady-like of me to joke about it but … poor PP could be a bit of a pain … in the ass!

You see, PP turned out to be suffering from money-poisoning, in just about the worst way there is! He had money-mold growing all over him, that boy. I noted it the very first time I ever laid eyes on him on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Sask., but I didn’t know what ailed him, at first. I guess I thought it was just dirt. … PPS Blood, as he called himself there, was disguised as a beatnik in those days. He had a hangdog look and I saw at a glance he was Indian so I felt sorry for him … you know, Hassan, what I mean. PP looks like a Redskin while people take me for, oh, just about anything … Italian, Greek, Arab, anything … any nationality at all. PP’s features are … well, rather marked. His people were Athabasca Barter Indians in the Northwest Territories, who were just stubborn enough never to sign any treaties with anybody. They just stayed out of sight in the wilds throughout the first half of the twentieth century, so … when their time came, right after the war, they found they still owned all their subsoil and mineral rights which all other Indians … like my people … had long since signed away! Overnight, the Athabascan Bloods became as rich as Croesus on pitchblende, petroleum, platinum, uranium … the works! It didn’t do them much good. By the time he was six … picked up by the red-coated Mounties, half-starving and covered with lice … PP was the only member of his tribe left alive. All the rest of the Bloods had frozen to death in their cabins … been eaten by their own sled-dogs … mangled by their own bear traps … or they killed each other with axes as Peter Paul’s parents did, over a bottle of whisky in a motel.

You simply must have seen somewhere a picture of wee Peter Paul when they found him. It’s been trotted out for reproduction time and again … every time they do a story on him. There is this pathetic little pot-bellied wolf-child in rags on the prairies, with the subtitle: Peter Paul Strangle-blood, the Richest Little Boy in the World. Poor little tyke, he lost even his name in the deal … it still makes him sick. His real name was Strange Blood but it became Strangleblood by somebody’s typographical error somewhere along the line and that’s how it went into the books and the courts where he was declared a public ward. Peter Paul … as they called him … was put into what looked to him like a series of gilded jails … with guardians named by the court to administer his almost incalculable fortune. When Peter Paul was fifteen, he had an allowance of one dollar and twenty-five cents a week! “Home” was a huge big old house and garden where he simply skulked around in the basement or drew himself up through a trapdoor in a bathroom ceiling … into the empty attic where he spent most of his days … doing nothing, he claims. In my day, as I said, he turned up at Saskatchewan U. disguised as a beatnik by the name of PPS Blood. All you could see of him … winter or summer … was an old red-and-black-checked Mackinaw with the collar turned up so that only a tall bristle of shiny black hair showed above it. When you got a good look at his face you were actually sorry he smiled … when he smiled. The whole campus called him: “Coyote” because he had a full double set of much too-white teeth. I’ve seen lots of other Indian boys with maybe six or eight extra teeth like that … or even just four upper canines instead of two … but Peter Paul looked much better when I persuaded him to have the one set pulled out. He looked actually quite handsome, then … but no one else in Saskatoon thought PPS Blood was a catch!

You see … my people were Bounty Indians who had signed away everything forever … about the year my youngest great-grandmother was born … all in exchange for one bright red Hudson Bay blanket a year and two one-hundred-pound bags of flour. We had to scramble for the rest … a houseful of women without men, living in Edmonton, Alberta … on the Flats! We used to make money by wandering along the banks of the Saskatchewan River picking wild berries to sell. Clear bright-red chokecherry jelly and plump-purple ripe Saskatoons! We could put them up only if we already had money for sugar and Mason jars. One old granny of mine and I used to toddle out in our moccasins culling herbs which she taught me. With my eldest granny nearing ninety, I went hunting mushrooms and edible puff-balls we sliced to fry in butter. You had to be sure to be right about them … and even more sure about the other mushrooms we took home and dried and made into a tea which we drank on an empty stomach … all of us generations of women … on late Saturday afternoons. No one else but us ever came to our house … I found out when I grew up that the neighbors all called us witches and it’s true, in a way. In winter, it could be sixty degrees below zero … Fahrenheit, of course … and we’d all sit in the kitchen in front of the fire … all my grannies and me … and we’d wait for the mushroom tea to work and, when it did, why, it was true! … we used simply fly away to another land that all those poor white people outside … those palefaces, never knew. As I sat on the worn rag rug like an island in a sea of cold linoleum, looking into the eye of the fire with my head on a granny’s knee … a pair of hands as soft as old doeskin would reach around to pick up the reins of my eyes and gentle me easy down along a long trail that all young Redskin-Indian ponies should know.… Oh, I’ve been on trips in my childhood … such trips!

I was “other-directed,” I think … from the start. Thay thinks I was poisoned once by some mushrooms and I’ve let him go on believing that story because he’s really rather hostile to drugs … did you notice? … Right from the start of high school, when I first took chemistry, I knew at once that chemistry would always be my love! I had a hard time in school … oh, I don’t mean scholastically: I was brilliant … I mean with the kids. My maiden name was Jackie Mae Bear Foot. That became Barefoot and … on the way from school … Jackie Mae Bare-ass! You can imagine! I was always a big girl and grew breasts before anyone else did, so … when all the boys ran after me … I became the Bad Girl of the neighborhood, I guess. I’d have been asked to leave school if my grades hadn’t been good … always the best! Home was another world. We were seven generations of women … believe it or not … the night my daughter was born and died, the summer I was twelve and passed out of Grade Eight … I didn’t lose a day of school, either. My mother had me when she was thirteen and my first grandmother was only fifteen years older than her … about forty … and there were three more generations of great-grannies in the kitchen, going back to the oldest gallant old gal of them all … going on ninety and not seeing so well. There were no men of any kind around our house … ever. Greatest Granny, as I called her, insisted that men were bad for the mushrooms … and she knew all about them. Dream-mushrooms always came up out of the ground when she called them by name, she said. She called them.… I picked them. I learned about mushrooms from her but later I learned their lovely Latin names.… Candida Albicans, for example … wouldn’t that be a lovely name for the heroine of a novel? I learned Latin at school and I tracked down the mushrooms in the Carnegie Free Public Library in Edmonton but I never read anything in those days that told about the Great Dance of the Mushrooms … constellations of dancing mushrooms filling the whole interior universe. As a mere child, I’d already seen that … before I was into my teens!

When I won a scholarship to Saskatchewan U., my majors were Chemistry and Cybernetic Psych. There in Saskatoon, a young Psych prof was the first to use mescaline to show his class what he thought schizophrenia might be like. “If that’s what it’s like to be crazy, what are we all waiting for?” I remember somebody saying. Our chem lab was churning out mescaline to such an extent that reports of our experiments attracted figures of international renown who were floating around Saskatoon on supervised mescaline experiences … people like Aldous Huxley. Huxley added tone to our trips by suggesting that we be given cultural stimulation, as well. As a part of my experience, I was taken to a concert given by Gieseking playing the Brahms Second Piano Concerto … and did I ever have a strange contact with him! Years later, I read a profile on the pianist which quoted him as saying that, in any concert, he always looked around first for his “receiver” as soon as he walked out on stage. He went out of his way to say that he sincerely believed in magnetic emanations … ESP, mediums … all of it. Once he found his “receiver,” he played all the rest of the concert to that person … while the rest of the audience simply assisted. And was I ever his “receiver” that night!

Gieseking hopped out of the wings … smartly flipping and smoothing his tails as he flitted through the twittering orchestra perched on the edge of their chairs. Applause … a sudden sharp hail of applause crashed down so hard on my head that I thought all these blackbirds were rising to flap away offstage as they got to their feet to greet the maestro. A great billowing gale of applause … a wavelike ovation rolling up, nearly lifted me out of my seat in the balcony. Gieseking bowed … cocking his head as quick as a cockatoo and his brilliant black eye caught in mine. I felt like the Early Worm … practically plucked out of the sea of seats and people surrounding me … caught by the gills right away. If he’d pulled in his psychic line, right then and there I’d have flown over the heads of the audience to flounder flat on the stage in front of him at his feet. When he turned to the coffin-like grand piano, I noticed his hair was gray feathers fluttering about his head. The maestro was a bird!

Gieseking, the world-famous piano player, was a simply shameless gray cockatoo as big as a man dressed in a loose-fitting frock coat. When he flipped up his tails to sit down in front of the keyboard, it looked like a feeding-trough or a giant corncob of white and black pearls. Under his coattails, I caught a flash of his tail feathers … gray and bright red! When he did hit the keys, he didn’t play music … he talked. Gieseking began talking about a mile a minute without punctuation … and he was talking to me! He rambled on about his early childhood … all those hours of practicing, beginning at three … his debut at seven … his international triumphs at twelve … a worldwide celebrity before he was twenty-one and how very bad it all went on him, after … critics, audiences, himself with himself and the music. He was talking so much that I heard not one note he was playing until I noticed that the orchestra had disappeared. In its place, the maestro was conducting an atomic pile of precision machinery packed into the proscenium arch about and above him. “They down-graded me once for not playing all the notes!” he tossed at me over his shoulder as he prodded and pushed the machine into shape. I believe he went back to school … after fifty, I think he said … “and I taught myself to play it like THIS!” He whammed the piano … plunging on into Brahms.

The great pianist and the orchestra receded a long way away from me … down the wrong end of the telescope. I had an exquisitely jeweled mechanical toy in my sights … a musical carousel … a pie-dish of platinum from which crystal canaries were escaping. The whole scene was darkening as the orchestra swelled up and burst like volcanoes in a land of lagoons, dissolving into puddles of power through which the fiddles sent up swarming clouds of golden bees. The bees were all numbered, flying to their appointed dots in a screen that was run through and rent by great golden pistons of fire every time the brasses rolled over in unison. Somehow, it came to an end. When Gieseking … still a gray cockatoo in elegant Italian tails … briskly hopped out in front to take his bow, there was a little old lady, all dressed in rusty-black with a Victorian widow’s bonnet on her head, who bobbed up and down under his elbow … his wing … for less than the sixtieth part of a second … for a mere n microseconds, sharing the applause. “I thank you!” he bowed deeply. “We thank you! My old mother … I practiced for her!” And, with that, he shot us all a real old show-business look … a long liquid-eyed look like Svengali … or Paganini … counting the house.

Aldous Huxley himself was next on my list of “stimulations” … and, with him, I got off on what looked at first like a very wrong foot by trying to tell him about what had just happened to me with Gieseking. I’m aggressive, I guess. I hadn’t learned yet that you don’t … simply don’t … talk about one “star” to another. Mr. Huxley looked at me blandly and blindly as he asked in his most English voice: “Do we really need mescaline?” I learned later that he had four hundred and fifty milligrams in him that night, himself. In the Saskatoon sitting room, the Northern Lights were playing about Mr. Huxley’s head. I gulped back a little wave of nausea and … when I looked again … he was my oldest great-granny … the mushroom one. She looked just as she used to look long ago by the campfire on Hog’s-back Ravine back home. There in the leaping shadows behind her was our old torn tepee sheltering our pine-bough beds. I caught the smell of earth through the sharper smell of the pine as I said: “No, Mr. Huxley … not if we’ve got mushrooms, instead!”

That shot him down, right out of his tree … that old British bear! As a matter of fact, he carried it off jolly well … when you consider that up until then he was sure that almost nobody else in the world knew about the Sacred Mushrooms, but him. A banker friend’s Russian wife had assured him that Siberian nomads partook of a hallucinatory mushroom as a part of their shamanistic religion. He had just received their first private report on the mushrooms in Mexico. I tried to come on … of course … like I was reading his mind. I told him a thing or two he never had heard about! How to make a Shaman … for example … that’s a woman’s secret, all right. Of course there was mushroom-magic, I assured him … right all the way across the North American steppe. He asked me to write him a paper on it and I did … for only his eyes: Sight Without Glasses you know … he practiced it but that meant he had to put my paper right up to his nose, poor man … but he did have another kind of sight, like my grandmother had. Later, he asked my permission to send on my report to another old friend of his: Dr. Forbach of Basel, the biggest chemical man in the game. LSD, you know … DMT, STP, BRB … that’s my Borbor in a very unsophisticated form. I’ve been all the way up to BRB 144, I think … or more! Permutations of the formula I first worked on with Dr. Forbach in Basel during my post-graduate year. That was all thanks to Huxley, I guess … and thanks to him, too, I suppose that I got a fat letter one day just before graduation … air mail from Basel, Switzerland … a rather business-looking envelope printed with the name of a famous pharmaceutical firm. There was no letter inside but a flat packet of very tiny pink pills marked: PSYLOCIBIN. I’d picked up a paper on psylocibin in the lab … “extract of mushrooms.” It had been a long time. I could hardly wait to try them to see if theirs were as good as my old granny’s and mine.

At the time, I was living in an off-campus rooming house run by a terrible old woman who called herself Mrs. Murphy. Whatever she was, she wasn’t Irish. … I’ve always thought she must have been a fence. She lurked in her kitchen like a fat old spider with crippled legs, brewing coffee in a blue enamel pot day and night because she slept in her chair … from where she could reach the key in the back door and the key in the door to the basement. People came in and out down there all night. She never got up to my room and that just suited me fine. … I liked it that way. Up there, I knew I always could be alone. I had the place pretty shipshape. … I’ve always liked building. I’d made all the shelves and the work surfaces on weekends myself. I had my own little world up there and no one had even the right to come knocking on my door except Peter Paul … who wasn’t even attending classes any more but just darting in and out. When the reporters came around, after PP and I got married, Mrs. Murphy told them that I’d always been known as “Hamburger Mary,” because I slung hash in a hamburger joint … an absolute lie! Nobody ever called me that. Thay Himmer first called me Maya and I changed it to spell it my way: M Y A … but in all those damned newspapers, that dreadful nickname has stuck to me: “Hamburger Mary,” well …

Automatically, I took off my dress to put on my work shirt and work pants. Sitting in front of my broad black desk, I stared at the tiny pink mushroom pills … as tiny as seeds. There was no posology … no dose prescribed … the whole packet must be the dose. By accident … by some very strange accident except that there aren’t any accidents … the pharmaceutical firm in faraway Switzerland seemed to have duplicated the dose. I mean … the first envelope came air mail, unopened by Customs … no letter attached, as I’ve said … it looked as though they were merely filling an order at someone’s request … it didn’t say who. But, on the following day, another identical letter had come. I had the two packets of pretty pink pills in front of me on the top of my black-painted desk. What did I do? I decided to change my clothes, first … put on something more suited to mushrooms, a gown. I picked up one single tiny pill … touched it with glue and stuck it on a card on which I wrote: “I’ve taken this. In case of trouble, the phone number of the maker in Basel is on the envelope. Call them collect.” I know my mushrooms, I thought. I took the rest … the other twenty-three milligram pills at one gulp. I put out a tube of barbiturates as a possible antidote and turned to make some herb tea I always had with me from home. A knock on the door: One One-Two! Peter Paul the Coyote in his old rotten Mackinaw was already inside of the room. “Whzzat?” he asked, pointing to the pills. I told him. He picked up the other full packet and pinched them. “Can I take some? How many d’ja take?”

I was already so far gone by that time that I merely waved permissively at the psylocibin as I lay back on my bed and just floated away. With his coyote cunning, Peter Paul took just six pills the first time. … That was the proper dose as it turned out later. As soon as he’d dropped the pills, he cut out the door and out of my mind for the next couple of light-years through which I took off. As I went, I noticed that all the familiar fixtures of the mushroom world were flying past me much faster than I’d ever remembered them from child-hood. I reached out through space for the notebook on my night-table to mark something down and I never got there because so many other things were happening simultaneously that got in the way. I wasn’t able to make much of my notes, later … after all, I’d taken four times the maximum dose, as it turned out. That thrust me quickly into a very tricky world of prickly magic … magic-tricksters … mountebanks … Roger Bacon, Cagliostro … I saw them all and they all wanted something from me … maybe only my approbation, perhaps. I saw coffins and candles … I was in a crystal coffin with a sharp stake held to my heart … but no one was holding it there in the dark and, at once, the lights flashed up as monumental doors of polished black granite soundlessly turned on invisible pivots and whirled … twirling. They were trying to frighten me … trying to win me … to scare or to buy me with a pageant of paltry magical tricks! So I ran from them … whoever They were … down endless corridors of some old hotel whose wallpaper pattern of leaves was swaying and rustling an arm’s length away … while from behind every identical leaf was peering an eye … an identical eye to infinity spying on me. I ran on through the hotel hallway screaming: “The Management! I want to see the Management, right here and now!” I wasn’t afraid … I was furious! Besides, I could see They were worried back there … behind the scenery. There was rustling … anxious whispering in the wings. The houselights went down … the audience sat like a jury on the edge of its seats. I heard three loud thumps of wood onto wood flooring … the Divine Sarah stamping the stage with her famous peg leg. I almost saw her! The curtain was just about to go up … parting and lifting … when Peter Paul Strangleblood came bursting in through my door, which I’d forgotten to lock.

Peter Paul was as naked as an Ancient Egyptian wearing the jackal’s head of Anubis. “I’m down off my head … my high, I mean,” he said. He snatched six more psylocibin pills and ran out again. I got up without any difficulty although my bedclothes were on fire and the room had turned into a tank full of green and purple algae. I wobbled through them toward my gas ring … intending to boil some water in order to put out the fire but the whole scene changed in an instant … the moment I cracked a match and lit that little blue flame, I realized all my grannies were sitting around me in a circle so big that, in the brilliant blue starlight, our circle reached out until we might have been all the women in the world … ever! … guardians of the fireside … tenders of the flame. I was standing on a silver sickle of moon. A snake slid from my hand. The women were putting out bowls of blue milk for my snake. I looked up-out and over their crowd of bowed heads to where I saw the rounding horizon of Earth as a satellite sees it … all Earth seen as great muskeg of water and land … a few rocks in relief but all the rest steppe … prairie … desert … until suddenly everywhere a pattern of pinpoints of light began to sparkle up through the dark that had dropped again … whole constellations … a firmament of tiny lights toward which I hurtled out with no effort at all to a point where I could see that each little light was a fireside where a woman was offering a blue bowl of milk to a man turning his back on me. I reached out to tap at the back of his head … psychically … and the man turned around. He turned around, Hassan … with one identical lift of the chin and a flutter of nostrils, Hassan … I knew it the moment I laid eyes on you, Hassan: All those men turned around simultaneously, Hassan … and all of those men were the image of you!

All around and beyond you … all of you … was prairie or desert, I couldn’t really tell which … a primeval desert of stones like the Sahara, perhaps, with a skyful of stars tied down tight like a tent, to fit the rounding horizon. Campfires were extinguished … blotted out by a great storm of mushrooms blowing up like sudsy detergent … or a hail of pale pumice stones hurting me horribly as they hurtled through me. Nameless nomads went streaming past on the edge of the dark … starving. They flapped by like rags in the wind smeared over with blurry vague features which ran in the rain of mushrooms bleeding like ink. Doll-like dead pot-bellied children blew past like overripe puff-balls whose spores exploded in dust. Survivors struggled up to collapse at my feet like a muttering pile of old rotten sacks. The air was so sudsy and thick with transparent mushrooms dancing like jellyfish that it was getting harder to breathe. I sniffed the back of my own hand and … with horror, my armpits. My flesh was raw mushroom! When I tried to spew out the smell I saw I was all mushroom … even my lungs. I reeked from inside! In despair, I threw myself down on a bed of moss … mossy muskeg of North Manitoba … I was all sewn up in sour-smelling furs. I had all the flat places of Earth in my memory … snow fields behind me … Asian steppe … chains of deserts ringing the planet all the way to the south Saharan sands. From as far away as all that, a jackal came loping straight at me like a mistimed missile … from a long way off still, I knew who it was … Peter Paul. It took him so long just crossing that steppe that he had the time to grow up before he could get to me. You could see he was destined for me. He was lost out there, the last of his tribe but coming on fast … determined to hang onto life by all of his teeth … so deprived in his singular struggle to survive that it was costing him quite literally everything to get there! I was all for him … he had no other choice … but I did, I thought. There he was scrambling up that last cliff on which I was standing and, as I thought for a minute of kicking his head in, like a “punkin,” he suddenly came sliding down cascades of mirrors at me … on me … something was breaking.… We were together in bed.

Are you feeling the Borbor, at all? Or do you go on smoking your keef as an antidote, Hassan? Nothing will help you now, Hassan … you simply have to listen to the rest of my tale. Don’t yawn! Don’t you ever take off those dark glasses of yours?

Well, right after graduation, PP and I got very quietly married in Saskatoon … under the not quite legally correct names of Peter S. Blood and Mary B. Foote. I added that “e” to be fancy and it cost me a lot of legal pain later … when we came to divorce. I didn’t know a damn thing about PP, really, when I married him. After the mushroom-event I had an even later menstrual period than usual so I guess I mumbled something dark to him about marriage and PP just said: “Sure. OK. Why not?” I didn’t know, then, that his father had chopped up his mother with an ax in the shower of a motel near Medicine Hat and been mowed down by the Mounties. He said both his parents were dead, “in an accident,” so I guessed from that and some things he did that he must have some money … but I had no idea how much! In all the time I’d known him I’d never seen PP pull one single penny out of his pocket … never, under any circumstances did he touch money. We didn’t go Dutch: I paid for everything … everything! … out of my scholarship money or money from working weekends and nights. At the mere mention of money, Peter Paul used to pull out a switchblade he always carried on him, mumbling about how he was “going to take care of his guardians” … so naturally, I thought someone was keeping him short. That “someone,” I soon realized after I married him, was PP himself … and, after all, I didn’t really know who he was!

That came out when we went to apply for our passports and were told by some little local official in the capital city, Regina, that Blood Indians and their spouses were not eligible for passports at all! We were members … and in Peter Paul’s case the very last one … of an independent but unrecognized nation which had never signed treaties of reciprocity with the Canadian government. We had no status at all. “Are you trying to tell me I don’t exist!” I menaced the man. “Oh, no, Madame,” he protested. “You can have bank accounts, driving licenses, dog and hunting licenses but no liquor license, nor even a permit to drink liquor at any time; neither vanilla extract for cooking nor after-shave lotion are you permitted to buy or consume, nor wood alcohol nor anti-freeze may be sold to a Bounty Indian but you can get onto public relief at a pinch, since you’re residents, or so I think. Here, let me just look that up in the book a minute. In any case — and I’m quite sure of that — passports, no!” Peter Paul was so cowed, he didn’t even want to go to the papers with this. He was ready to call off the whole trip to Basel … my post-graduate year of fellowship study with Dr. Forbach, imagine! … not me! I simply sailed into the offices of the Saskatoon Sketch with the story and it hit the front page. It hit the front page not only locally but all over the world as the wire services got hold of it. Peter Paul Strangleblood, the Richest Little Boy in the World Denied Passport. Deny Passport to Red Indian Oil Heir … and on and on … ever since.

At least I knew who I was married to … at last! It’s sort of funny … now that I come to think about it.… I’ve often enough in my life found myself in quite deep with a man before I even found out who he was … really. The next one … a little over a year later … was Thay. I’ve told you how that happened: I simply flew over to New York to look into GRAMMA after I’d knocked poor PP flat on the floor with it … him and his lack of “havingness!” … and I swooped back with Thay Himmer to get him to “grammatize” my husband into some money sense. I felt at the time that he had to be cured even if it meant taking all of his money off of him. … It wasn’t doing him … or anybody else … any good … and I told Thay as much. Thay, as you know by now, loves to come on as a magician and … I must admit … he does pretty well. Can’t you just hear him saying: “A magician? I am!” He took hold of our household in Basel … but quick! Thay was “running” PP four to six hours a day on his “havingness” and he “ran” everybody else in the house: Rolf Ritterolf, my Swiss lawyer running Fundamental Funds; Fraulein Freulich, my Swiss tri-lingual typist: even the cook. When he got to me, he soon turned up the fact that I wasn’t in contact with Dr. Forbach … badly out of communication, in fact. Thay Himmer got Dr. Forbach to come over to tea and … like a good Swiss grandfather, come to make peace.… The professor brought along his unfortunate granddaughter whom Peter Paul had once slapped around in a rage … for making fun of his money, he thought.

Well, it couldn’t have turned out better … or worse. This time, the child got burnt! We were all having tea in our fabulous house on the Rhine and I had some nice things including a big silver samovar which Peter Paul somehow managed to overturn over the child. It got her one arm from the wrist to her shoulder.… The howling child was very badly burned. Thay jumped on her right away … slapping her face to get her attention. “Good!” he shouted at her to get her into communication: “Does it hurt here?” The surprised and suffering child shook her ringlets: “No.” Then Thay slapped her hand … passing right over the burn. “Good! Does it hurt here?” Again, she had to say “No.” Thay went on like that with her relentlessly … passing back and forth over the burn; making her, each time, negate the pain, you see. I hope you won’t ever have the occasion to try it but … I swear to you I’ve seen Thay do it … and it works! In the end, we sent the little girl home quite exhausted but with only a little redness on her arm.… Faith Healing! … It took Thay nearly an hour of utterly intense work to do it … but we’d all thought that poor child was going to be disfigured for life!

After that, Thay could do anything with Peter Paul that he liked. We were all driving to Freiburg im Breisgau one day, I remember, with PP at the wheel of our Mercedes-Benz. “Where do I turn?” PP asked vaguely and Thay, who meant a perfectly visible crossroads a few yards ahead, said: “Right here.” Instinctively and without one second’s reflection, Peter Paul swung over the wheel, turning us all over into a ditch. Luckily, we weren’t going very fast so no one was hurt but … it just goes to show you how blindly PP was following Thay. That night, Thay brought out of his luggage a Ouija Board which he and I had picked up at Hammacher Schlemmer’s in New York as we tore through buying silly Christmas presents on the way to the airport. I knew how it worked so … when Thay and I both put our forefingers on the planchette, the first thing it spelled out was SCRAM! “Do you mean we should all leave Basel, dear Ouija Board?” That was Thay talking to it. The planchette shot off under my reluctant forefinger to “YES.” “And where should we go, dear Ouija?” asked Thay. TAMANRASSET. The board painfully and laboriously spelled it out — and that’s your “Tam,” isn’t it? We all were ready to swear that none of us, Thay included, had ever even heard of the place. “And when, dear Ouija Board, when?” Thay insisted. ANTEXMAS, the ouija board said. That happened just three days before Christmas and … in three hours … we were off! Thay found where the place was on the atlas and Thay it was who simply dragged us out to the airport in Basel where he simply made PP Strangleblood write out a check for our own private plane.… We were off!

Just before leaving the house, I grabbed up a handful of mail to go through in the plane.… I had things to sign so, luckily, I took along my Swiss lawyer, Rolf Ritterolf, with the idea of sending him back from Algut. He carries around a dispatch case like a cabinet minister with a portfolio of all my affairs. Among other things was a letter from you to the Fundamental Foundation saying you were on your way to Algut. I had really … excuse me, it was true … I had picked you because of your photograph. It and your project: “The Future of Slavery,” both pleased me … but nothing was official, yet, nor had the Foundation informed you of anything. I happen to know! As I say … I laughed. I remember, Thay looked up from a crossword puzzle and remarked: “Laughter is refusal.” But I shook my head.… “Not in this case,” I said, and told Rolf to meet you in the Hotel Saint Georges and give you the money for your trip. He and the American Vice-Consul Knoblock met you, I know, or we wouldn’t … would we? … be here.

I’ve heard poor Thay tell such a different version … at times … of everything that went on after that! I won’t bore you with my version … except, perhaps, to insist that it was no fault of mine that your mission failed. Thay … he’s a darling but most unreliable, really, and at times an absolute liar … he’ll admit as much to you himself. Except … I forgot … Thay is not going to talk any more! I wonder how long that’s going to last? He’s gone through dozens of other self-imposed disciplines before. Well, Thay … who is quite capable of telling you that his Amos Africanus … and mine, too, don’t get me wrong … but Amos was never in Algut in his life as far as I know. We didn’t even meet him until much later on in our trip. We had hoped to meet you somewhere along the way but you took so long crawling across the Sahara just to get to Tam … that our plane had long ago left. What did happen … most unfortunate, really, for you … is that Thay interfered when he had really no right to … telling the captains in Tam to look out for you. As you saw, it had quite the opposite effect from what was intended … at least, so I hope … by Thay.

So.… really to make this up to you … we would both be happy if you would accept to come with us to “Malamut” … where we have some great plans under way … for Africa … for the world … for you. We feel you fit in. Thay … always excessive … says that you were heaven-sent. I always go along with his games. Besides, we’re a team and together we hold … as they say … a handful of trumps. When we get down there … let’s say we get down there tomorrow afternoon for a late Spanish lunch … I’ll have Rolf Ritterolf run through the whole portfolio with you and explain all the things we are up to. Hassan, you’ll come, won’t you? You have only to say it … you know … the word!