Correction and amplification (5/4/96)
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I deny everything. — Or almost everything. — My connections with The Firm, The Company, The Guys In The Back of the Plane, and the Four Marx Brothers are of course known. But you ought to ask why you’d be permitted to discover them so easily. Or for that matter why I’d be permitted to discover them so easily. For we can trust no one. Least of all ourselves.
Again: A.’s address book is a forgery. — I thought you knew this. -- Still, it has served our purpose. The Dog’s henchmen wasted six months trying to crack its code, only to discover that the purported Lost Equations of String Theory were, in fact, plot summaries for the next six months of
Days of Our Lives. — They have yet to realize that the plots of
Days of Our Lives encode the recruiting strategies the Huskers intend to employ over the next three years. — And that the cartoons that their players watch ... but you knew this too.
Of course the relationship between the Dog and his henchmen is not what it seems.
101, 103, 105, 107, 109. 211, 205. 247, 222, 239. 132, 125, 138, 123, 122. 323. 273 [on vacation.] 262. 165, 152, 153, 161.
In Monte Carlo, in the spring of ’86 ... but you knew that as well.
In the Spring, one may throw the windows open. One may walk barefoot in the grass of Chautauqua Park, and admire the mysterious Babe With the Yellow Walkman in her baseball cap, her shorts, and her jogbra. One may throw the animals out of the house, and take breath that is not heavy with the odor of catshit. It is warm in the Spring, and the pipes do not burst.
What was it he said? I think it was this:
“After all, one man, trying for the Pole, in the dead of winter. They thought I was insane. Possibly I was, by that time. But I had to reach it. I had begun to think that there, at one of the only two motionless places on this gyrating world, I might have peace to solve Vheissu’s riddle. Do you understand? I wanted to stand in the dead center of the carousel, if only for a moment...... I’d begun to dig a cache nearby, after planting the flag. The barrenness of that place howled about me, like a country the demiurge had forgotten. There could have been no more lifeless and empty place anywhere on earth. Two or three feet down I struck clear ice. A strange light, which seemed to move within it, caught my attention...... If Eden was the creation of God, God only knows what evil created Vheissu. The skin which had wrinkled through my nightmares was all there had ever been. Vheissu itself, a gaudy dream. Of what the Antarctic in this world is closest to: a dream of annihilation.”
Obviously this weather is getting on my nerves.
____________Exile on Main Street (1/19/96)
