Fact: The refusal to join one of the country clubs is a judgment of the traditions of the island.
Fact: There is the matter of his own house, which is in the Japanese style, low and squat, with only tiny windows facing the road and large hedges covered over in bittersweet. I was long repelled in my attempts to lay eyes on the structure, until late in one off-season I sneaked onto the property to assess its ugliness and vulgarity. I’m sure he used chopsticks when dining and served paltry vegetarian fare like bean curd and chickpeas.
Fact: All of his designs, or many of them at any rate, featured the architectural form known as the loggia. What are these loggias but ways to insist that persons go outside, and once they are outside, are they not susceptible to any airborne virus that should happen by? Such as bovine herpes mammillitis? Or vesicular stomatitis? Or Newcastle disease? Weren’t the loggias attempts to create a vulnerability in island dwellers such that they were helpless in the event of foreign attack?
Fact: The modernist architect (I remember now, he does have a name, Gerald F. Laughlin IV) occasionally wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo CCCP. Frankly, I find T-shirt wearing dubious among middle-aged persons, but that is neither here nor there. For those of you who have followed me so far, it is without doubt the case that the T-shirt in question signifies allegiance to the former USSR, or Soviet Union, as these are the letters, in the Cyrillic alphabet, for that despotic regime. On several occasions, he was seen wearing this T-shirt on the ferryboat, in full view of impressionable young people. The Soviet Union? They killed millions! Millions of people were starved by the thugs of the Soviet Union, and the modernist architect had the audacity to wear a T-shirt with this acronym emblazoned upon it? The CCCP was experimenting with biological agents to be used against our nation as early as the 1950s. Naturally, it was necessary for us to experiment to keep up, especially in the area of biological agents intended for use against livestock in their country.
I concede that this evidence about the architect was circumstantial and would remain so, unless I was able to procure a photograph or perhaps a video recording of him delivering nautical maps and site plans and so forth to dark-complected persons. I had as yet no such material evidence. Furthermore, it would be difficult for me to obtain such things in my present condition, viz., reliant upon either a pair of canes or the dreaded walker, at least until I should recover a little from my seizure disorder.
In the absence of direct evidence, I will confine myself today to a brief overview of modernism in general and its links to, well, if not terror, suspicious political behavior. According to my analysis, the kinds of personalities who would practice modernism, as I’m defining it, would certainly do such dreadful things as tip off dark-complected persons to the presence of a biological-weapons laboratory within six miles of the island on which I was dozing (on an outdoor bench) and waiting for my wife. There was that poet, for example, the fascist one; and there was that other poet, the father of so-called modernist poetry, a vicious anti-Semite; there was, as well, the Irish novelist, alcoholic with a schizophrenic daughter; Thomas Mann, definitely a homosexual if not a Communist, and he abandoned his own country during the war; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, certainly opposed to the czar, and thus a Communist. French artists and writers, that’s like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel. You have Sartre, certainly a Communist, his wife, certainly a Communist. Anyone who is French is Communist. If they aided the Vichy government, they were Communists, and if they opposed the Vichy government and aided the Resistance, they were Communists too. Anyone from Africa is a Communist, because all postcolonial writing is proto-Communist or pro-Communist or crypto-Communist; any Muslim artistic endeavor, such as the writing of African Americans, if it’s in support of the Nation of Islam, might as well be Communist. Anyone who is tenured at any of the Ivy League universities is a Communist, and so forth. I could go on.
Suffice to say, there is a direct linkage between the hallmarks of modernism as I understand them and murderous, barbarian thugs who would do us in because they hate us and our freedoms.
When my wife arrived at the end of the hour, I was feeling a little tired, and I made no attempt to bring her up to speed on the developments of the case. As long as she believed I was incapacitated, there was little danger of her taking note of my political activities.
8. Online Ordering as Part of the Resistance
Because I am a man of dignity with many important activities to pursue and enjoy in my twilight years, I had as yet failed to take advantage of the so-called online lifestyle. The online lifestyle, in my view, the Internet, the Web, however you might call this thing, was just a highfalutin set of Yellow Pages. Mainly, I allowed my wife, Helen, to do any and all Internet surfing, while I watched television and, where necessary, used the phone to upbraid employees and other hangerson who were not producing results for our family in a timely fashion. Helen would explain to me things she had seen on the Internet, and I’d have a good chuckle. However, once confined to the canes (or the walker), as I was after being restrained by government-employed medical experts, I found that I had more time on my hands. Accordingly, it became important to gain Internet facility on an accelerated schedule. I am not much of a typist, and in the past I used to pay people to type for me. But there was no getting around the fact that I was going to need the vast Internet databases to facilitate my investigation into the Omega Force and its dark-complected conspirators.
How I did this, initially, was by ordering any number of common household items through so-called online vendors. In fact, when I got home from the meeting just described, after a short nap, I fetched my son, Skip, who’d been watching the afternoon light on his sneaker, and I invited Skip to come upstairs with me to where my wife kept the extra computer, an old machine with few bells and whistles upon it. I promised Skip that we would select some toy or other for his occasional amusement.
“You do want a toy, don’t you?”
It was difficult for me to get these words out, as I have explained, by reason of traumatic neurological event, and Skip, since he was not the sharpest of the Van Deusens, though a fine rhymester, was stricken with the recognition that something was not right with his father. I could see that he was overcome with confusion. In fact, Skip began dabbing at his eyes. He had a nervous way of doing this that was often embarrassing to me, though I had long ago resolved never to be embarrassed by my son. He was worried about his father, who was normally so robust. His father could not speak clearly, was not moving easily, and he could not even have a glass of wine with dinner.
“What about a beach ball? Here, look at this one.” I pointed out a beach ball that had the whole of the earthly globe printed on it, and I instantly realized that this would make a very fine purchase for my son, Skip, who sometimes did not seem able to discern between various countries. For example, he was unable to locate Myanmar, though this may have been because he’d never really made the transition from Burma. And what about the Congo? It’d been Zaire and now it was the Congo again. I had Skip read my credit card numbers to me, and then I hugged him. At least I could still do that.