The Country/The Country: A serialized novel by Robert Knox

“The County/The Country,” a serialized novel by Robert Knox, author of “Suosso’s Lane”

“One of the things science fiction does… is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire.” — Ursula Le Guin

1. Pigglies

He dreamed he was Atlas, shifting the country in the direction he wanted it to go. He possessed no enormous, spectacular tools for the job, and he lacked an extra-terrestrial Archimedean place to stand.

Still, he pushed.

Keel called the others “Pigglies.”

You saw them on the screen all the time, you could hardly avoid it, lording themselves all over the landscape like conquerors. They lived in the same towns, often on the same streets as their opponents. He saw their signs in the windows of the houses, or planted on the lawns in his own neighborhood. Keel planted a stick in his front lawn supporting the printed slogan “Tax the Pigglies.”

The common word for the others was “pigs,” in satiric deference to their candidate.

Rumors began of incidents in the districts where the Voting Days were taking place. Trash thrown out of car windows. Graffiti scrawled on building walls. It was called ‘defacing.’ It was criminalized as ‘vandalism.’ But Keel knew it was really the release of bottled-up emotions. A cri de coeur. Those guilty of defacing bland, blank surfaces of their own cities and towns had reached an end of tolerance for the preening celebrants of Big Self-ism, the blunt calling card of the victors, the all-but-triumphed party in the recent parade of Voting Days that so divided the populace of Keel’s own medium-sized city of Monro in the broad middling district of Platow, and all the other districts in his sprawling, bipolar country.

What the graffiti scrawlers were signaling in their slashing spray-painted cries of rage was what many felt in their hearts:

“Kill Mr. Pig.”

No one had any doubt who the slogan referred to.

The person whose murder was being publicly, though anonymously, advocated (the advocating itself a criminal act) was Karol Pegasso, that bellicose, fulminating artist of himself. Everybody, except perhaps members of his own family and a few intimates, called him “Pig.”

The name seemed to fit.

The skin of the new favored candidate was very pale. Pink-tipped around the ears, the scalp (bits of which shone through his thinning hair), and on the tip of his nose, the skin surrounding his nostrils.

Keel did not take to killing, as a matter of principle. It was a bad habit for a people to form. He thought the solution to the problems, everybody’s problems, was to ‘build down.’ They had ‘built up’ too much in this country. He preferred the company of birds and butterflies to the golden temples of consumption erected for the wealthy. You could ‘look at’ such places, they were visitor attractions, you could acquire there, but you could not experience such places. There was nothing to experience there but a replication of self.

On the other hand, Keel could not step into a waste lot of tall weeds and broken glass without feeling the damaged life there that went on living there, hoping anxiously to heal itself.

The people, the country he was part of, needed to undergo a sea change — what an odd, old metaphor! — to reduce not only the endless round of consumption and exploitation of resources, but also to prevent what Keel preferred to call by older, more concrete words: rot, decay, flood, wildfire. He believed his country should un-pave every parking lot and let paradise find its own way back.

It was a time of crisis, Keel thought, possibly the last of such times. What others would denigrate, or perhaps applaud, as retreat or dissolution. He saw it as rebalance.

But what if this downward swing of the seesaw would not take place naturally? What if somebody — or something — large; an Atlas, a titan of the old gods — had to sit down on the weaker side to restore the natural swing?

Who could do that? Were the zealots who snuck about at night autographing foundations and store windows, in black marker or spray paint, with their demands for rash, violent action aware of something, some higher order of “truth,” perhaps, that he was not?

Still, he did not like killing. It was the tool of degenerates. It had always played a major role in both the rise and decline of historical movements of dubious value. Keel believed, or hoped, that killing belonged to some lower stage of social development, and that his world, and his country, would survive without it.

Yet he could see the appeal of extinction. He could understand the wish to have “the pig,” in particular, made extinct. He could even experience the desire to extinguish him. He shared the impulse, the craving of the fanatics. He felt a thrill when the black-marker graffitied slogan appeared in his neighborhood, scrawled on the side of a city bus. Over a speed limit sign on a street corner. In the blank window of an empty storefront.

He had no idea who put it there. But as for sentiment, he was with them.

2. Something Would Happen

Later he would wonder at how naive he had been, cheering the “Kill the Pig” graffiti.

How innocuous the gestured, the emotional release it provide, had seemed.

It has aged him.

Days later somebody, maybe the same graffiti scribe, maybe some new provocateur, grew bolder. Somehow the letters on the signboard outside the city’s liberal Universal-Goodness church, where the weekly update messaging that told not only the time of the service but the theme of the sermon, were rearranged, repurposed, subverted, pressed into service for a new cause.

The message board had been lettered, Keel was sure, to say something broadly spiritual in line with the church’s optimistic teaching such as “Keep Peace in Your Mind and Heart.” Or perhaps something about “great” or “goodness,” because where else would the ‘g’ have come from? Universal-Goodness churches were not fond of spelling out the word “G-o-d” on their public statements. “Give” was a better word for a Universal-Goodness church.

Nevertheless the redactor, to use an ancient word applied to those who rearranged for public consumption the teachings of ancient texts, had found sufficient letters for a new message. Not “Keep Peace in Your Heart.” Or “Give to the Needy.”

The new message bluntly stated: “Kill Mr. Pig.”

Keel thrilled to see it. Not happy, but stirred. That thrill, he would remember later, when things grew complicated, was his initial sensation. It meant that something new was happening.

The church would be badly embarrassed, he thought, spying the tampered message board on a late Saturday afternoon walk through the center of his neighborhood, the ‘village’ as some people referred to it. Not much foot traffic in this village any more. It had never been anything special in Keel’s time. A gathering of small stores at an intersection, one of the city’s larger roads running through it, dividing the neighborhood into east and west. Keel lived on one of the side streets on the west, or lower, side of the avenue, notable only for their worn, peaceful sameness. He was content with sameness. He had come to the point in life when all change was threatening. None of it more so, of course, than the anticipated accession to power of the candidate Karol Pegasso and his Cohorts of Anger. Anger was a dangerous commodity, he reflected; you could not contain it. You could not keep it all to yourself or deny any portion of it to your opponents. In fact, once you proclaimed it yours, that pronouncement — less a declaration than a summons, an invocation — drew the same flame from a thousand other sources.

One of those sources happened to be the seat of passion in the aging Keel, a man who for a lifetime had guided a temperate vessel of heart and mind through remarkably calm waters.

No more. The waters were stirred.

Seeing those words appear, as if etched by lightning, on a church message board loosed a power surge inside him.

The words “something will happen now” appeared in his thoughts, spoken by a voice that was not quite his own.

He walked past the church without altering his pace, as if sheltering his own neuro-physical response in a muffled layer of normality. As if the letters on the board merely spelled out the expected message: “Love is the Light within,” perhaps. Or “Listen to the Still, Small Voice.” Could some church member have posted the redacted transgressive message? Keel wondered whether it was time to question his understanding of how the world worked.

He continued down the sidewalk, consciously maintaining that forced, regulated pace out of fear that the new commandment was so blatant — such a break with the conventions and laws of civil peace — that all by itself it called into being a new calculation of civil threat.

Was somebody watching for a reaction?

How could some human being install so inflammatory a message in so public a place and not wish to see what effect it had?

Would shots ring out? The idea pushed itself into his thoughts with an irresistible immediacy; as if his nerves could hear them.

The old, stone-front church had been built so close to the sidewalk, its bulk consuming all available yardage, that no pleasant green space separated the message board from the public way. If the ‘village’ had ever possessed such a green, that time was long ago. It was an urban square now. Cramped parking lots. Sidewalks, curbstones, regulated parking signage. Signs and traffic lights furnishing the public way.

Someone could stand (or kneel) behind a window in a building across the street and watch who passed the church. Across the way, Keep knew without turning his head, a low apartment building bordered a short row of storefronts. A watcher could stand somewhere within that the four-story building , the lights off, and survey the traffic, vehicular and pedestrian, going past the church.

Late Saturday afternoon, the cold of the year digging its spurs into yielding flesh. The light already in its last slanting hour.

Keel glanced about furtively. No other pedestrians before him, or on the opposite sidewalk either. Nevertheless the sensation of being watched, or of the possibility of being watched, persisted. He would not allow himself to stop and peer scan the windows of the buildings. That gesture would tell all; reveal him. Assure anyone watching that the words of the daring, dangerous message had struck home.

Keel walked on, taking his usual route. Whether he was observed or not did not change his internal calculus. Something would happen.

Some result would follow from this blatant call for redress — this demand for the most defined, determined, unrecallable of acts. Posted in the most public way.

Someone would do something.

He little suspected that he would be among the doers.

3. “Have a good day.”

Keel walked regularly to Independence Square, the place the neighborhood’s old-timers still called ‘the village.’

For fresh air, fitness, a change of scene; also because as an early retiree he needed a routine to fill his solitary days.

He walked to feel alive, stretch his legs, enjoy the rhythm of bodily movement, the mental effects the movement produced: the lifting of mood, the distraction from self, the quotidian pleasure of stimulating heart and lungs. It amazed him that so many people never did this, never discovered this simple, inexpensive (as in ‘free’) pleasure. People walked to and from the bus station; you could tell their destination by the time of day you saw them passing. Quite a few people walked dogs. He wondered if they knew their ‘pet’ was the excuse they discovered for taking themselves where they needed to go: outdoors.

Keel’s own, pet-less daily route was down Pike Street, a roadway he imagined had once been important because it was clearly part of an older village layout. You could tell from the bends. It curved slightly around some physical impediment from a time when it was easier for people to work around a landscape than to simply flatten it as they would later do in the machine age. He suspected Pike was a cart-way when animals were driven through the village (now modest city) of Monro. Today it was just another residential neighborhood street, houses fronting all along its progress as it doglegged from the village square into a network of wider roadways that led in turn to other parts of the city; and then to neighboring towns and cities. Keel walked Pike Street simply because it was the quickest route into the square, and also because it was his habit.

There, he dropped into General Purchase, the square’s biggest shop, to look at the news-sheets on sale on the racks and see whether the headlines told of anything different from the stories he glanced at that morning in the news-sheet delivered to his front door.

If he ran into someone he knew, the headlines would give them something to talk about.

As a rule, he did not run into anyone knew. Why would he? Who, after all, did he know?

A college teacher at a private institution in a neighboring district, Keel had retired some years before, when the college asked him to. Lost touch with his colleagues. This did not feel strange to him. Keel has always lived alone. Walked alone. Thought alone. He was brought up by his grandparents after his mother died: a strange prematurely scholarly boy. No siblings, more interested in books and his hobbies than in the other kids. He learned people’s ways; he studied them. Learned the rudiments of behavior. Forced himself to get over his shyness sufficiently for polite conversation. Learned the buzzwords.

“How ya doin’, what’s up, nothing much, what’s new with you, same old same old.” “Have a good day.” A good night. A good weekend. A good vacation. “Yeah, wuddya do?”

“Just took it easy, mostly. Visited the old folks. No, no thanks, I’m a little busy this weekend. Tonight? No, I’ve got some work to catch up on. I have to do my taxes. I’ve got some papers to grade. “How about those Cougars?” Those Bluebirds? The Coyotes?

His grandparents grew frail. Died the same year, within months of each other. People said that was usually the way it went. He had always visited on the holidays. When they were gone, of course, he stopped visiting. Once he drove all the way to see to the old place, rode down the street, cruised slowly past the house where he grew up — it look different (new owners painted it sort of pink) — went to the cemetery to visit their graves. What did he feel for them? The same embarrassed absence of emotion he felt at all social occasions, planned or unplanned interactions, standing on the outside of conversation circles at faculty gatherings, neighborhood encounters.

“Hi, neighbor!”

It’s the woman two houses down. He recognizes her face. Her name? Can’t remember. He stops, smiles. He taught himself to smile decades ago; practiced in the mirror. ‘OK, how are you? Guess I’ll be going.’ He does not look back. He tried to learn to tell jokes, but gave it up since something more than rote memorization appeared to be called for. He tried to have opinions: I think people should obey the rules. I think the law should be the same for everyone, rich or poor. I think we should all look out for others. Other people have rights too. Do unto others. It’s a free country, but that doesn’t give someone the right to do something that messes things up for everyone else.

Keel walked on alone. He was a day dreamer. His thoughts took off and went where they wanted to. He assumed this was normal. He did not see anything wrong with it. He did not miss running into anyone he knew. After all: who did he know?

One single element in this pleasant ritual he did not enjoy. The house with the dogs.

4. Hark! Hark! The Dogs Do Bark

As a rule, Keel had no problem with dogs. His grandparents owned a couple of them when he was growing up. Walking the dog had been a childhood chore. As a young adult he watched his peers manage their dogs and picked up some useful habits from them as well as from his own experience of hiking country roads. If an unknown dog approached in an aggressive manner, barking and growling and making an ugly face in obedience to some cave-beast instinct of its own nature, he stooped and pretended to pick up a rock. The animal shied away. He also learned, if necessary, to tense his body into fighting posture, point aggressively at the dog’s gaping-ugly jaw and shout a command.

“Eat Chocolate!” he learned worked as well as “Go home!”

It was all in the body language, in the tone of voice. Keel could turn nasty — or at least look and sound nasty — if he had to.

Such encounters with territorial-protecting dogs were more likely to occur in rural or open districts than in a densely developed neighborhood such as his own. Yards were small in his west-side ‘lowlands’ section of town. Most of the houses were built during an era when demand for housing was high and expectations modest. The big house, large-lot developments built in more recent times in the areas outside the city were an abomination, Keel thought, consuming huge swaths of open space. In contrast, the small lots and modest quarters of his city neighborhood caused residents to be more aware of one another and curtail any activities neighbors would likely find bothersome. Proximity encouraged consideration. No loud family fights with the windows open. No raucous TVs laughter despoiling the soft evenings of summer. The activities of children were generally monitored by adults.

Disturbances were rare, and life was civil.

Except for the Dormands.

Their corner lot was larger than anyone else’s; their house twice the size. The place had a classic ‘American farmhouse’ look to it, with cute touches. Pink window shutters. Bits of faux ‘Colonial’ molding or ironwork. A wrap-around porch no one used. A large patriotic flag flying (or, generally, hanging limply) in the front yard every day, as if one could never love one’s country enough. Political signs, always for the wrong candidate, blazed. On one occasion, at least, Lady Dormand ran for a local office herself unsuccessfully — happily for Keel, who made certain to vote for her opponent.

These days the Dormands were, inevitably, “pigglies.”

None of this was a crime. The Dormands’ crime — against public order, as Keel saw it — was their determination to keep a pair of bored, uneasy canines penned up all day outdoors in a side yard along Pike Street. Where Keel passed by.

Today the dogs were out.

No surprise, they were out every day.

By the time he woke from his day-dream and realized where he was, it seemed cowardly in addition to inconvenient — an absurd surrender of a basic human right — to cross the street and continue. Why should he be forced to give up his citizen’s right to walk down a public way unmolested to avoid becoming the object of a nasty display by untrained, uncontrolled animals. He walked straight ahead. The dogs roused themselves from their canine stupor and began barking and snarling even before taking their first mad-dashing leaps toward the wire fence that separated yard from public space. Whoever approached, man, woman, child, or domestic mammal received the same treatment. The larger of the two enraged mutts, mostly white, semi-longhaired, threw himself at the chain-linked fence and tried to scrabble up it, all the while attacking the universe with bared teeth. The smaller, blacker one, leapt at its side, snagged the links with his claws and screamed its canine outrage. This display took place in exactly the same way every time Keel passed by.

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark. The beggars are in town!

Keel was a peaceable, but not a passive person. And he was a citizen, not a beggar.

Nor was he an intruder. Who did the Dormands, master and mistress, think were walking past their house? Who were they to claim possession of the public sidewalk?

All this had happened dozens of times before, Keel determined to maintain his peaceable citizen’s right to walk down a public way, the dogs screaming their vile warning hatred, throwing themselves at the wire fence, trying to climb it to — apparently — get at him. Attack him.

“Fucking beasts! Fucking assholes!”

Oh, well. Too late to take it back.

He did not (not really) mean the dogs. Oh, he disliked them well enough for their mindless, machine-like conditioned responses. But it was the people, the so-called human beings, who allowed them to molest the innocent passerby in this way that he hated. Especially when that innocent passerby was Citizen Keel.

It was an engagement now. A quarrel.

He did what he never did before. He kicked the wire fence.

The fence rang out its complaint. The noise gave the dogs something to think about, a very brief pause for animals that were not strong on reflection. Soon enough they were barking again, their scrabbling claws against the metal diamonds of the fence, as they realized they had not been hurt by the blow of a kick against a fence. The smaller, blacker dog screamed a higher-pitch threat. The bigger, whiter dog snarled.

Keel stared at a line of round white landscaping stones, about the size of a baseball, lining the bottom of the fence. Thought of picking one up, but decided against it.

He swore at the dogs, not loudly. Aimed a few more kicks at their claws, then walked on, his mood thoroughly spoiled..

The next day, when he walked the same route, and when the same exact thing happened, Keel not only kicked the fence, he shouted.

“Keep your dogs inside! People have a right to walk on the sidewalk!”

No response came his way. He had no idea whether he could be heard inside the house. The day was mild, but the Dormands’ windows were closed. They probably had central A/C, one of those needless luxuries by which humankind was destroying the earth.

He shouted it again. “People have a right to walk here!”

The day after that when his eye fell on the white stones along the base of the fence, he picked one up. Maybe he would throw it at the dogs. Or, maybe, if he pounded it against a metal fence post, it would frighten them. The dogs saw him and bounded up and raced, howling their threats, throwing themselves against the chain links. Keel looked at the fence, he looked at the dogs. He raised his arm above his head, felt a brief spasm of resistance from a seldom used muscle, and hurled the rock.

His shoulder squealed with pain. He heard the rock hit.

He listened for the uniquely satisfying music of destruction. The chime of breaking glass.

Didn’t hear it. Paused a second, though the dogs still rioted, straining against the fence.

Strange.

He was sure his missile had struck the house.

Keel walked smartly away. His arm hurt. The rest of him felt good, though a little voice told him what he had done was wrong, foolish.

And would have consequences.

5. ‘Nothing Is Sacred’

The weather intervened, interrupting his feud with the dogs.

Cold rain, occasional hail. The weather was more and more like that these days, Keel mused; the seasons increasingly mixed up. The storms stronger. The weather pattern changes more abrupt. Keel kept indoors, planned an early supper. He would take his book, a large tome about an ancient general and a war between two factions of a divided nation, to bed.

The day after that, with the weather improved, he allowed himself to take a slightly different route to the town square. Once again the message on the church message board had been tampered with. A tainted campaign, he thought, and a tampered sign.

He saw the words in a different way this time. Surely, the original outrage had been discovered by the church, and the letters rearranged to some more spiritual, or at least civil, use. Yet the provocateur had struck again, restoring his work — “Kill the Pig!” — though some of the spaces between the letters were different, wider. Was this the work of a single hand? Keel asked himself. ‘Graffiti Prophet’? Has he heard of such a figure, read about him somewhere? Or just dreamed him up. But there was no signing, no tagging, here. Just a few bare words.

An invitation to murder. A command? An appeal?

A portent… A kind of seduction? A subornation?

Seeing the message formulated a second time also suggested the possibility of a team at work. A group, an underground. A campaign pursuing a dangerous, extra-legal strategy. It was like putting a classified ad in a news-sheet: Dangerous Party Needed. No Questions Asked.

If he saw it, others were seeing it too.

On his way back through the square he walked on the opposite side of the street, his senses tingling. The presence of the message, the words he knew without looking were still there, heightened his sensory awareness. He fought the urge to examine his surroundings with every step. Was anyone else was passing by, anyone lingering outside a store, at the bus top, or in a car? There were always cars parked in the square! If you desired to watch what was happening in the square, you sat in your car without much likelihood of attracting attention. Were ‘they’ (the mysterious message-placers) watching to see if anyone showed interest in their advertisement? If anyone might be looking about for a way to apply?

Keel risked a glance across the street. Though he could not clearly read the words on the message board from that distance, he could tell from the pattern, those three short letter-groupings, space between them. No one was reading it. No one passing by.

He could not tell if any other eyes were trained on the sign.

He walked home a different way to avoid the Dormands’ dogs (and his own guilty conscience).

The next morning, as stories began to appear in the morning news-sheets reminding citizens that the Voting Days would soon be coming to Monro, he armed himself for the confrontation on Pike Street.

Keel did not possess anything like a weapon. But his eyes scanned sidewalk, the yards, the houses he passed, alert for the possibility. Another stone? Or a fallen branch this time. A discarded toy? Even plastic, he noted, handling a toy in the General Merchandise could be made hard these days. A child’s bat; would that do?

In this state of unease his thoughts kept drifting back to the terrible imperative on the church message board, and the irrational suspicion that his own thoughts were being articulated

— publicly — there. Why would anybody post a message on a church front? Who vandalizes a church, even if the violation, a re-arranging of letters on a sign, could easily be erased and the worlds put back to their former, harmless shape.

Nothing is sacred.

The words appeared in his thoughts, almost as if they had been put there by someone else.

But wasn’t that part of the message? Nothing is sacred, now that Mr. Pig is gaining control of the country. You think a little graffiti is bad? Wait till you see what happens when this guy, and his army of thugs, get rolling.

Still there was no sense of public awareness, was there? That people were waking to the danger? If such a thing as a national conscience existed, it had not stirred. That was the absurdity, the senselessness, of the way people lived, wasn’t it? Keel reflected. Something was coming, everybody knew it, and still everybody carried on their lives as if their way of life would never be challenged. As if they themselves would live forever.

Keel stopped looking for a rock or a piece of wood to pick up. What good would it do? Was he planning to defend himself from the pigglies with a stick in his hand? Besides — has he forgotten? — the Dormands’ house, the house of his enemies, had unbreakable windows.

On the news, that night, the remote camera delivered what, judging by the correspondent’s fraught expression, was judged shocking news. The local news station that — incredibly, yet routinely — occupied a full 24-hour schedule with breakdowns, bad moments, vehicular collisions, tragic accidents or various kinds, amateurish criminals, and the lowest common denominator observations and ‘chat’ available from gleaning regional events, had apparently sent a location crew to the site of the old church in Independence Square and was transmitting an image of its message board.

Somehow, Keel was surprised to see, the station had ‘got the story.’

Nothing alarming appeared on that board now. A new message, this week’s message, was declaring the theme of Sunday’s service, at the usual time, to be presided over by the parish’s own minister: “The Kingdom of God lies Within You.”

“But that’s not what this message board said,” interjected a voice from beyond the screen, “when Mrs. [Bridg? Keel didn’t recognize the name] passed by here last Saturday evening. According to Mrs. [name again; probably garbled] when she walked past the church the message board was stating something she found highly disturbing.”

The camera swung abruptly from the board to the upper body image of a blonde woman of middle years wearing a fashionable dark cloth coat. This must be Name. The microphone and the hands and a bit of the head of the ubiquitous on-location journalist also appeared in the shot, and now the camera shifted to catch the profile of the reporter’s features, a not very tall man with a youthful-looking brush cut and a slightly frantic determination to keep smiling.

“Was it, Mrs. Bridgler-er — ?” Brief hesitation.

Camera on her. Hint of surprise on local woman’s features.

“No, it wasn’t.” Spoken rapidly, as if to make up for the awkward pause.

“Tell us what you saw there.”

“Well.. the board… said..” Words slow now, as if remembering this advice to conceal nervousness. “Something that was…”

Search for more words; abandon search.

“Well not very nice. It said ‘Kill Mr. Pig.’”

A silence. As of letting the distressing encounter sink in.

“That was all? That was the whole message?”

“Uh-huhm.”

“And what did you do?”

“I reported it to the police.”

“Thank you.”

Moving the microphone away from name’s face.

Omitting attempting the name again.

The camera obediently cut away to show us, instead of Mrs. Unpronounceable, the open-faced correspondent, hair trimmed neatly above the ears, standing bravely outdoors in the unmediated night.

Viewers may draw their own conclusion, his report seemed to say: Having seen something, she said something.

“That’s the story here, in Independence Square,” the reporter concluded. “A disturbing message, Darlen, to be found written outside a church.”

Darlen, in the studio, shots quick-cutting now, was prompt with her own observation. “That is disturbing, Chucker. Any response from the police yet?”

“Uh.” Blank look. Not expecting this? “They say they’re looking into it.”

“Thanks, Chucker.”

In the studio, the camera remains on Darlen.

“So that’s the story tonight, from a quiet neighborhood in Monro. A disturbing statement to find on a church in Independence Square.”

The briefest of hesitations.

“‘Kill Mr. Pig,’” she recites, with a slight shake of the head, wings of dressed waves settling back over her ears, like obedient doves.

Her co-anchor, a guy (though he has seen him a thousand times, Keel cannot tell you his name) launches into a promo for the next story. The fire somewhere else.

But Darlen, surprisingly, interrupts him. “Sorry, Jax. but I think we’re hearing something more. Back from Independence Square again… Where that disturbing message was just found.”

Back to the square?

Keel, about to click off, enough screen time for one night, arrests his thumb. More graffiti?

A few seconds later, some slightly frantic ad-libbed stalling by Darlen, the screen does go back to location. But that location is different. The face and voice on the camera do not belong to ‘Chucker,’ the nicely coiffed little fellow Keel saw moments ago outside the church.

This time a woman is holding the mike.

“Mally,” the anchor says, “what’s happening there?”

She points the mike, the camera follows her gesture, zooms in.

It’s night. But the light is sufficient to show a house on a residential street.

“We’re here at the house on Pike Street where the incident took place.”

Pike Street? Keel goes rigid.

“…a disturbance… of some sort. Police are calling it vandalism.” .

The camera zooms into the shadows. The image takes a few seconds to sort itself out in Keel’s consciousness. A window.

A broken window.

He knows who broke it.

But then, he remembers. It didn’t break.

6. “We were targeted”

In the morning news-sheets, Keel read, leaning on the round kitchen table where he took his meals, city authorities appeared reluctant to draw any connection between the vandalism done to the church message board and the window broken a handful of blocks away. The mayor’s spokesman acknowledged that the Dormand family was known to support the leading candidate, Karol Pegasso, in the Voting Days for Chief Xec, but cautioned against any conclusion from that fact alone.

“It could be a random act of vandalism,” the spokesman said.

Asked how often residents of the city experienced rocks thrown through their windows, the spokesman replied (according to the news-sheet) that he had no figures to answer that question.

A local news-sheet, however, Indie Nooz, quoted the ‘victim’ of the window-breaking, a Mr. Gerald Dormand, as insisting that his home was intentionally vandalized. “We were targeted,” the paper quoted him. “I’m sure of it.”

When asked why he was sure, the response was less definite. Mr. Dormand, the sheet reported, decline to discuss the incident any further.

Local TV, however, was keeping the story alive. Having switched the machine on at a much earlier hour than usual, Keel watched with some emotion as the face of a man identified as Mr. Gerald Dormand appeared on his screen while the reporter posed the same question to him.

“You don’t think this was a random act, Mr. Dormand?”

Keel had caught a look at the man once or twice, a bulky figure with his back to the dogs, but always at a distance. He saw a white-haired man with a rectangular face about the size of a shoebox. His features did not look angry, or threatening; but rather glib. Keel sensed an aura of superiority, someone not intimidated by a TV camera, or a microphone. Some men, he knew, have hair that turns white early. The ‘gray eminence’ was a sign not of age or weakness, he reflected, but of status, authority.

“We know who did it,” Dormand told the reporter. “But we’re not saying, publicly.”

“It’s a private matter,” he continued, with the mild confidence of someone putting a matter to rest when asked the obvious question.

“It should be addressed privately.” His tone was conclusive.

Did he really know? Keel asked himself. How? Or was he bluffing, to discourage a second attack? It would be no surprise if the Dormands had connected the thrown rock with the ferocious barking that signaled a passerby. Did they know that the passerby was Keel? Had his passing already become a feature of idle conversation in the Dormand manse.

It was certainly possibly, he reflected with some embarrassment — the unease of the chastened — given that he had shouted angrily at the house. Something about the sidewalk. But had they seen him? He had certainly not seen them.

Once answer, of course, was surveillance.

But even that did not explain the unbreakable window. And, last night, the false claim of broken glass… But it should have broken, Keel thought, remembering the panic that filled him the moment he saw the stone hit glass.

Keel left the house earlier than usual, having decided on an errand.

The word ‘errand’ came from an old word meaning to “go out” into the world. That was what was meant by the phrase “knights errant,” dispatched into the world by (in the famous example) the legendary good King Windlesauce in order to confront injustice and put things right. So he gave himself an errand. If Dormand, he reasoned, knew the attack on his house related to his dogs, why did he persist in telling reporters that their house was “targeted” and imply they were being singled out because of their support for the popular candidate Karol Pegasso? He wasn’t shy about putting that big campaign poster in the front yard. Was he not clearly suggesting to the world (because that’s who watched their screens: the world) that supporters of ‘Mister Pig’ were under attack.

Or was it to divert attention away from the behavior of their unrestrained, aggressive dogs?

A universal perspective? Or a very small one? Maybe the real explanation was simply that annoying, day-after-day ‘private’ matter.

Not many public phones, Keel knew, remained the in the city.

These days people carried their own phones around with them. Much of the time they stared at them, even while crossing a busy street. Keel knew that he stood out by not owning a hand-held phone. His only phone connected to a wall. So what if that made him different? No helping it. Even if he owned one, he would not use it now.

Nor would he use his own ‘private’ home phone, long reduced in public parlance to the sub-normal generic ‘land line,’ as if the mobile, wireless phones other people carried on their persons had no connection to earth whatsoever, but merely floated around in the stratosphere. Perhaps they did. (Keel was not technically minded.) Perhaps their users floated around in the higher reaches of the firmament as well.

Perhaps, to continue the speculation once known as “idealism,” what the senses perceived was only a skin-deep apparition of their true selves floating about in the lower regions.

Nevertheless, assuming that some reality remained in the material world, where Keel’s body and mind spent most of their own time, he required the anonymity of a public phone because he did not wish anyone to know who was making this call.

Last time he looked there was a pay phone or two outside the bus station downtown. A lot of buses came there, a big transfer spot, so it was a useful place to put a public facility. He wasn’t sure how many people rode the buses any more, every year more cars clogged the streets, but the public phone might still be there. He liked that phrase: ‘public’ phone.

A public phone in a public place for the use of the public. To which he now walked on public ways.

Keel was standing up for the rights of the public.

This way of thinking was exactly opposite to the vision of the soon to be elected Pegasso and his band of oligarch gangsters, who wanted to privatize the country. They would own it. It would become the wholly owned entity of Pegasso Enterprises. His cronies would take their share. Between them all, their share would be all there was, he thought. We will all owe them money for walking down the street.

What else did Pig stand for? Cracking down on the ‘flexibles.’ Why did the public, or that part of the public roused by Pig, care so much about what people did in their private lives? The flexibles went one way one day, then perhaps went the other way the next day. Who cared? Men lived with men. Women with women. Why not? Some men managed, through processes Keel never spent any time seeking to understand, to turn themselves into women; and then, sometimes, back into men. And the reverse was true as well, he believed. But it was really none of his business. Some of the flexibles, he had read, signified who they were (at present moment) by painting one side of their face and leaving the other side in a natural skin tone.

Lighter skin tones still dominated his society, of course, a preference Keel failed to understand. In fact, if he were honest, persons of a very dark skin tone often stimulated in him a profound urge to weep with joy and desire. Emotions he automatically repressed, because Keel was a wholly undemonstrative person.

But while skin tone was rarely mentioned, the behavior of the flexibles was a continual source of discussion in the media. The same flexible individual, he read, would unpaint one side and paint the other side instead. Color choices could be involved as well. Keel did not see how anyone like himself could be expected to keep these possibilities ‘straight,’ but maybe the point was if you were not a member of that psycho-sexual universe you never would know what was going on.

That was fine with him. He had no desire to know. It was none of his business!

Leading Candidate Pig wanted to put a stop to all of this.

It would be illegal to paint your face, he vowed, when he was in charge. Processes leading to transformational gender would all be banned. Instead government policies would promote traditional inter-sexual pair bondings, including bonuses for producing children within these bonds. One of his key supporters’ proposals, in fact, called for requiring couples seeking legal recognition of their bonding to sign agreements committing themselves to producing the national average family size. The average bonded family included 2.4 children, Keel knew. Who was going to be responsible for that .4?

The campaign’s bad ideas bedeviled his walk-a-day thought stream even when he tried to stop thinking of them. Keel was day-dreamer, and his regime of daily walks generally launched flights of musing fantasy. This day, however, he had business to do, and the business weighed on his mind, causing his thought balloons to plummet.

The public phones, two of them, were still there, bolted into the concrete outer walls of the bus station. No pretense of privacy was afforded their users any longer. No ‘booth.’ (A booth afforded privacy; did human beings no longer seek privacy?) No plastic roofing shell. Only a thin shelf made of what appeared to be a mottled aluminum, or some such alloy, installed directly beneath the wall-mounted push-button phone, furnished the user with a surface to put a piece of paper on and read or write a number. Or an address book, perhaps; a folded newspaper. Any of the paper-based products of a pre-digital world. Only holdouts like himself made use of so old-fashioned a utility as a public phone.

Keel put a coin, five times larger than what the calls used to cost, into the slot. Then, as people still said, he ‘dialed a number.’ How odd; how quaint. People used to say “drop a dime.” Do they still say that?

He called the city police department and asked the dispatcher (another old term? did police still use radios to ‘dispatch’ patrol cars?) if he could find out whether any complaints had been lodged about the behavior of dogs at a certain address.

The dispatcher’s voice, suppressing a sigh, told him that question would have to go to the department’s animal control officer. Keel, prepared for something like this, promptly told the man that he was at a public phone — the dispatcher appeared to be surprised: “a what?” he asked — and requested the dispatcher to make the transfer to the animal controller for him. He suspected that the police, like most arms of government, preferred you to make the second call yourself.

It made them appear busier than they actually were on a Wednesday afternoon.

Keel kept his voice humble: poor old guy needing a little help. The dispatcher agreed to transfer his call.

“I don’t know if they’ll answer,” he cautioned.

The call was answered.

A woman, by her voice. It was interesting, a fleeting thought registered to be scraped for meaning later, that Keen could almost always correctly identify a female voice. If people merely “texted” each other all day, instead of actually using their voices, did that make them less adept at identifying the gender, age, status, and role of unfamiliar voices?

When he posed his question

— “Can you tell me if there have been complaints about the behavior of the dogs at 228 Kent Road?” —

the officer, or assistant, who hadn’t self-identified beyond a rapid mutter, replied that she didn’t know.

“Can you find out?”

There was a pause, then something like a mumbled expletive, and then the voice confided to him that she was busy doing her job.

“The police told me, when I asked them, that I had to bring this matter to the animal control officer.” He was careful to keep his voice plausible, matter-of-factual.

“That’s not me.”

“But this is the animal control department, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But she’s not here.”

The animal officer was a ‘she.’ It surprised him, for some reason.

“When will she be back?”

He could wait around. Get a coffee somewhere, then return and call again.

A sigh, wholly audible this time. “Who knows?”

He was a little shocked. Did underlings routinely share their frustrations with their bosses to the general public?

“Ah. Then when should I call back?”

The voice volunteered, in the tone of someone offering a rare favor, to take his number.

“No thanks,” he replied. “Can you just tell ‘her’ what my question was? You took down the address I asked you about, didn’t you?” When she did not reply at once, he gave it to her again. “228 Kent Road.”

The Dormands’ corner property bordered Pike Street, where they kept their dogs, but fronted Kent Road. He had looked up the street number.

“My question is ‘any complaints about the dogs there?’”

The assistant murmured. Hmmed. He was tempted to offer to help with the spelling.

She breathed.

Keel reiterated his intention to call back, and thanked her.

Then he ‘rang off.’ Where did that expression come from, since nothing ‘rang’ when you hung up the phone, did it?

As he walked away, a bus pulled in thirty feet away, and two or three people stepped down and scurried into the station, where it was warm. It was winter, Keel reminded himself, though not that cold. He made a casual scan of his surroundings. The backs of a block of shops that fronted on the avenue. Side roads on either side of the station.

No one around.

A second bus, a thing of grimy metal from another part of the city, pulled slowly into the drop-off circle.

But he could spy no one who was merely standing around, waiting or appearing to, with a view of the public phones.

What, he asked himself, was he worried about? Surveillance? A camera?

It was the graffiti. The feeling he had of being watched when he walked through the square. Or the window that didn’t break.

He shook his head and walked off toward a dismal looking coffee spot on the other side of the parking lot. It was the Dormands, he decided, their claim of being “targeted,” and the tenor of the times that was getting to him.

After a few minutes sitting over coffee in a largely deserted shop, one of the dying BuckStir franchises (the coffee was two bucks now; their day was over), he walked back to the public phone and fished another five-dimer piece from his pocket, dialed a different number, and took a deep breath.

A recorded message answered his call, offered a menu of options. Keel chose one and punched the numbers. He was not sure it was the right one, but it would get him into the nooz-room.

A human voice answered, female once more. He asked if he could speak to the reporter (he remembered the byline) who had written the story about the vandalism to a house on Kent Road.

The woman asked him to wait a moment. Fifteen or twenty seconds later her voice came back and told him that Mr. Ross was not at his desk.

He asked her to take message.

“All right. If it’s short.”

It was. “Tell him to look into the dogs at the Dormands’ house.”

But he declined to leave his name or number because he did not wish to be connected to any inquiry into the Dormands’ dogs. Was he afraid? Or just being cautious?

Nor did he mention — to anyone — seeing the tampered message on the church message board.

Anyway, who would he tell?

7. “Crimes against property”

He was glad that evening that he had merely left a message at the Monro Daily rather than spoken in person to the reporter. He was cautious by nature, but his loss of composure around the Dormands’ dogs resulting in a childish indulgence of temper — disgraceful act —

made him anxious. Was something happening to him?

Watching Pig denounce “crimes against property” on the TV-nooz only made him worry more.

“Crimes against property,” he heard a bland nooz-room voice declare on the Headline Nooz, “should no longer be considered minor infractions.”

The local source for this point of view, someone the station considered worthy of interviewing, did not bother to credit this point of view to candidate Pegasso. He made it sound as if he had just arrived at the viewpoint on his own.

Waking up from a post-luncheon nap, pounding on the desk, and uttering a blast against the depravity of ‘crimes against property.’

Keel didn’t recognize the man, but he knew he was one of ‘them.’ He could tell from a glance at the man’s little pigglie eyes, which never moved, never looked directly into the eyes of whoever was looking at him or gauged a response from reporter, cameraman, anyone in the studio, but gazed persistently at the unseen, but logically deducible thousands of viewers.

Middle-aged, graying at the edges, features frozen except for the mechanical movement of the mouth offering its dull, depressingly rote-learned train of tortured syllables, whipped into shape by some planful hand behind the scenes.

After the brief interview with the Pig supporter — Bent Snudrich (could that really be his name?), city councilor from some other district — Headline Nooz went directly to footage of the rally in which the Pig’s own voice could be heard just beyond the range of easy intelligibility, hammering home the enormity of crimes against property in his characteristic aggressive staccato.

It was clearly Pig, though his face, of course, was never seen in close-up. It never was. Everyone was used to that by now.

“Crimes against another person’s property,” the anchor (Keel could not remember his name? Jecker?) now reported, speaking over the unintelligible ranting, “leading candidate Karol Pegasso publicly declared today at a spontaneous rally in Bellesview” — a district that not very far away, especially as the campaign was heading north — “are just as serious as crimes against human beings, because….”

The newsreader paused, as if he too was wondering what the rationale would prove to be. A light went on in the man’s features: Here comes the answer on the teleprompter…

“they undermined another home-person’s ability to take care of himself and his family. Personal responsibility for one’s own well being was a fundamental pillar of any healthy community.”

There. The face looked relieved.

The nooz-reader composed an expression of conscientious approval of received wisdom. But then, as Keel watched horrified, the man’s face twisted into an approximation of the leading candidate’s own denunciatory certitude and delivered Mister Pig’s concluding coda:

“A crime against one man’s property underlines the security of all! We stand for security! Property! Prosperity! The people want change!”

“A strong country,” the face on the screen wound up, morphing back into something of its former banal benignity, “requires strong laws.”

Keel found himself wondering what sort of punishment Chief Xec Pig would consider appropriate for throwing a stone at a neighbor’s window. Considered abstractly, the act struck him as more nefarious than it had felt in the moment: an act of spontaneous payback, striking back at a house-owner’s repeated acts of negligence in allowing his dogs to set themselves on a passersby.

It had felt like “rough justice.”

Yet judged by itself, the act appeared to be a sort of invasion of privacy, a kind of break-in, almost a home invasion. Not merely a destruction of private property on which you could put an appropriate price tag and make the necessary amends, but more like a violation of a sacred principle. A man’s home — a family’s home — was its sanctuary.

What, Keel asked himself, was so enduring about the concept of ‘home’?

It was the idea of safety. It was where you felt safe, with the drawbridge up. Where you should feel safe.

That night he had trouble falling asleep. Still bothered by what he had done, even more than the day before, he insisted in his thoughts (as if to shout down the part of him that kept objecting) that he should be able to feel safe walking down the sidewalk. For that matter as a citizen he should also feel safe supporting one candidate for office, and criticizing another, voting as he wished, speaking out when he wanted, petitioning his government, and opposing policies or plans announced as the goals by a putative (‘inevitable,’ everyone was now saying) new administration.

Did he in fact feel safe doing any or all of these?

What was keeping him awake, he realized, was not the image and voice of the leading candidate Karol Pegasso, neither of which were ever clearly or completely projected over the airwaves, but his supporters’ notions of what he stood for.

Pig was not even in office yet, but the climate of his once proud country, the Commonhope of UZ, had already changed and was continuing to change, worsening, throughout the voting year. And was getting still worse now that the nation’s chief electors, the Sacred Commission, appeared to be getting close to proclaiming a victor.

Maybe, Keel brooded, it was the candidate’s treatment of opponents during the campaign that worried him. Frightened him.

Pegasso openly impugned their character. He accused them of breaking laws, even obscure laws: Jay-walking on the way to their Assembly offices. Hiring unregistered persons to cut their lawns or paint their patio a trendy antique green.

And it was not simply the opponents themselves he attacked, but members of their family, slandering their parents, close friends, staff members, law school classmates, neighbors.

The father of a candidate from a district far to the south (one of the many Keel had never visited), so Pegasso imperiously declared, was implicated in the assassination of a national leader many decades earlier. The claim was a fiction; a long-disproved calumny. But the kind of libel that could not be addressed legally because the victim, the father, was long dead. The assassination of a popular leader had been the subject of wild theories for many years, speculations that stirred a miasma of dark possibilities in the public’s mind. Had agents of a foreign government killed him? Had members of his own government, threatened by his policies, pulled off a secret coup d’etat? Had soldiers of criminal organizations, fearing the loss of impunity purchased by secret deals in previous administrations, decided this new president was too independent? Or had a single wealthy opponent, the opposing candidate’s father, perhaps, hired an assassin?

Or none of these explanation. Just a lone nut.

This dark deed, however accomplished, still disturbed the nation’s sleep after half a centur — and here was the proof: Keel lying awake thinking about this hoary national tragedy as if it were the sort of great theatrical work he used to teach in his Classical Studies courses.

An old anxiety stimulated by new fears brought on by the claims of a candidate for the nation’s highest office who seemed to know what ordinary people, plain unhappy people in their dull unsophisticated millions, were thinking.

A candidate whose public conduct suggested that only one person’s thoughts and ideas and opinions mattered. His. Pig’s. That there was only one right way to think about things, to talk about them. Only one direction to lead the nation: his.

Opponents, and organized opposition, melted away.

Competitors for office ran off to their own safe corners, their hideaways, whining like beaten curs. He showed them up for stumble-bums. They began to look ridiculous. They dropped out of the contest and you didn’t hear from them again for months at a time, as if they were now avoiding at all costs the very nooz media they had previously courted.

Had they been threatened somehow? Keel wondered. The national mood, the hunched-shoulder atmosphere in the media and even, he sometimes felt, in the air of the familiar streets he had walked for years, scented of unexpressed worries, inchoate trepidations, nameless fears.

And the winner of this disgraceful contest of denunciations and innuendoes has not even taken power!

Unlike many of his opponents, Karol Pegasso had no governmental power base of any sort. Where had his power to cow the opposition, to kindle dark emotion in his followers come from?

It was as if Meinstern’s theory of the relat-ability of time-space threaded its way through the psyches of millions of people. Time-space, Keel understood, bends toward the heaviest gravitational force.

The thoughts and behavior of millions of people now appeared to be warping in a single direction to accommodate the force, the presence, of a single man.

The new leader. The Pig.

8. The Fall of Kevin O’Rhule

Keel dreamed. He was a dreamer.

In his dream that night, he heard a voice speaking, telling a story. The dream intensified, drew him in. The deeper he went into it, the deeper he sank, drawn down as if into a whirlpool of magnetic imagery, sea monsters and old faces, spars from shipwrecks, treasure maps, undergraduate papers, hidden memories, seashells of desire taking him deeper, deeper, until — as if from the other side of some cataclysmic waterfall — the voice spoke, clearly…

… as if someone stood over him in a closed room and aimed words into his ear:

“Everyone was equal, but Mr. Pig was more equal than anyone else. He marched into the capital one day at the head of a vast army of the unappreciated and demanded to be given the keys to the sacred altar. He denounced the leadership of Kevin O’Rhule, and the era of peace and plenty that wise and modest man had presided over, shaking the order of the world like a giant shaking out a blanket. The pattern of light upon darkness was now reversed to reveal the checkerboard of the cloth’s other side, in which the dark squares now sat upon the light. That which had appeared fine and fair and upstanding was revealed to be poor and vice-ridden and driven by lower instincts. The lieutenants of O’Rhule were denounced and placed under guard; no one knew where the great man himself had disappeared to. Tribunals were erected, and many were imprisoned. Others who worked under the old regime, the now fast-tarnishing Golden Age of O’Rhule, were revealed to be profiteers, special pleaders, mere time-servers, men of lower character, and nasty women. They formed an unimpressive army of the discarded.

“The new class rising, greeted by outpourings of the forgotten people, men mostly, though many women also displayed their mannishness by behaving more ignorantly and rudely than their male companions. Such women as these favored shirts and jerseys with the mocking legend ‘I’m with Weakling!’ and sometimes dragged small children behind them by their hair. They gathered, the followers of the Pig, in huge campfire rallies, consuming entire woodlots to keep their fires burning — the roadside greenie-thorny vines (it was said) pulled down trunks and branches at their command, cutting down the trees in the public parks — and trees could be heard crying out in the wilderness for the loss of their brethren. But the capital of UCanna, Heyfolk, where those who had grown fat and sleek in the prosperous days of O’Rhule paid little mind to the advance of the Pigsters, whose approach was rumored by flocks of angel-crows leaving early (as some observers noted) for their winter homes far to the south….

“The new man’s advance was funded by huge withdrawals from the fortune of Pigster-Procto Mega-Corp, known to investors as Animal Firm, but at first little attention was paid to this gathering danger in the capital. There folk turned up their noses, made jokes about the bad smells that sometimes reached their noses on the wind blowing from the prairies. The smoke of all those campfire thunder-fests, as they came to be known, at which the Pigster himself thundered forth denunciations, stuck pins in large mockeries of the effigies of Chancel-Hold Favus Fynes and his Counsel of Economies, of whom the mighty of Animal Firm disapproved, calling them betrayers, race traitors, Glad-fools, Weeping Innards, Despoilers of Racial Purity, and Drive-Heads and Dome-worshipers… even though the Pigster himself had erected many such domes, including Pig Tower, the home of the First Family of Animal Firm, Mister Pig, his pigstress, and his beautiful pink children.

“It was only when the fires of the Forgotten People smoked on the horizons of the Capital’s Zine Towne that the regime of O’Rhule began to smell trouble, and not merely the posturings of those who claimed to be ‘left behind.’

“That night in the garden of the Capitoline, the graceful retreat the aging leader had built outside the city, O’Rhule gathered his appointed successors, the great secular clan of praters and believers, fund-procurators, tribunes of the various peoples of the Diverse Collation, many Deep Pockets among them as well. There, among the formal flowerbeds and the charmed voices of the fountains, he asked them for their opinions of the danger.

“What did they make of this strange, ill-smelling phenomenon? What ill tidings scented on the wind?

“Refugees were pouring in, they told him.

“Villages were burned.

“Other nations across the sea have hitherto been overwhelmed.

“‘What should he do?’ the old Lord of the Realm asked the dour faces about him. No one had any idea….

“They avoided one another’s eyes and meditated on plans for escape.”

In the morning, the pre-morning, the hour before dawn, Keel woke, remembering the impression left by the voice of the dream very clearly, but not the words the voice said. He knew how the dream had made feel, however, because he still felt that way.

Disturbed. Frightened. In the grip of a malaise he could not shake off. Sleep-walking through life.

The dream, or its voice, had bored its way inside him. He knew he would not sleep any more. He lay in bed, trying to remember the particulars of the dream more clearly, willing the sky to lighten.

Keel dreamed regularly; every night, he believed. Sometimes the weight of his dreams left him sad, downcast, depressed for the first hour or two after waking. But his turned on the radio, made his coffee, and the fog of inchoate mental burden slowly lifted as he read the morning news-sheet.

This dream, however, the Vision of the Fall of the Capital, as he thought of it now, was more upsetting than any dream he could recall. The strongest echo of the sensations he had felt now lay in sounds. Some of the words — dream words; words that filled his thoughts once he woke from the dream — still lingered in his consciousness when he woke in the dark and he had scratched them on the back of a bookmark by the narrow light of a bedside table lamp, words pulled from the rush of swirling sensation that felt like a whirlpool dragging a ship to its underwater doom.

“What doom was that? That which the dream foretold? Or the darkness of time itself? That inevitable slippage of time that drip by drip dragged all sentient creatures down in the end.”

The tone of the dream voice and a vague impression of recollected images — mostly smoke and fire — suggested a kind of vision. Keel was not given to visions, at least not by light of day. He was a daydreamer, not a visionary. Today, by ‘visionary’ people meant anybody who came up with a new idea, generally one that solved a technical problem. He was certainly not that kind of colloquial visionary either.

Visions, as he once read and was persuaded to agree, had long ago disappeared from human experience, at the dawn of what was still called ‘modern times.’ Possibly because the ever greater concentration of human presence and activity in our societies — our industry, our science, our busy-ness — infringed on the experience of highly concentrated isolation required to produce them. Or perhaps the gods simply turned their backs on human affairs altogether, having lost interest in the unsteady allegiances of mortals.

Even the ancients had pondered this question, Keel brooded, over a morose breakfast of Krifties, his unsweetened regular day-starter. “The Gods abandon Anthony”: he recalled this poser from his long-ago studies of the ancient civilization, the ‘Classical world’ he had once pecked away at like a scientist of words.

Had any rationale ever been offered for this divine desertion? The assumption being that the gods had earlier ‘chosen’ Anthony. Why? Were the gods simply amusing themselves by meddling in human affairs. The gods, Keel took it, required entertainment. The ‘Rise of Anthony, Hero of Romulo’ (he speculated) was a series they had tuned into for a decade or so, then they got tired of him. He lost them with the tired ‘romantic destiny’ plot. Who was this upstart Cleopatra anyway? She worshipped other gods, not the right gods, and, besides (judging from her chroniclers), she talked too much.

That might have been reason enough to abandon their onetime favorite, back when the gods regularly meddled with human affairs. In these later millennia, when supra-human vision was denied all mortals by their indifference, humans were wholly responsible for the well-being of their society. Or its lack.

But if you couldn’t blame divine favor (or interference) for what happened down here, then what forces were driving Pig and his ‘Animal Firm’ irresistibly to triumph after triumph?

9. No Dogs

Of course, there was a simple, reasonable, psycho-babbling explanation for the state of mind that could imagine so dire a scenario as the ominous dream-vision inflicted upon the aging Keel, and that so disturbed his waking thoughts.

So later that day, around his customary mid-to-late afternoon departure time, Keel set off once more to confront the charged setting that had likely, in some complicated way, provoked his darkly visionary dream.

He squared his shoulders, closed the storm door carefully behind him, and set off down Yester’s Lane for Pike Street on his usual route.

Should he not alter his direction this day, and instead of turning down Pike Street take some other some street that would bypasses the scene of his crime? Change his routine? — if only by a block or two. He could walk toward the square on a parallel public way. It would take him only a few minutes longer to reach the square and might even prove stimulating in its offer of fresh, though likely modest, sights and sensations. Wouldn’t that be the sensible thing to do?

Of course, it would.

It would also mean that the Dormands had won.

That they had outlasted him and successfully asserted their right to let their indolent, irresponsible style of dog ownership control the quality of public use of the sidewalk adjacent to their property, reducing that quality several degrees below miserable and therefore rendering this piece of public passage way effectively unusable. And, therefore, also challenging Keel’s long-held assumption that free passage on public ways was one of those unenumerated citizens’ rights people were entitled to exercise simply by being human beings.

No, he decided, shaking his head, shouting down the inward voices of moderation that told him he had made a mess and now was preparing to step in it.

No, he would not give in. A citizen was entitled to think his own thoughts. And take his own walks.

Mind made up, Keel walked on, telling himself to expend no further thought on the impending contretemps. Letting his mind drift: His mind refused to drift.

He crossed a street and knew he was on the block where the lovely Dormands lived.

Of course, their dogs would be there. They were always there.

They were not there.

He stopped dead, without intending to.

No dogs!

He turned his head to stare frankly through the wire fence. Some toys; dog toys. Something made of red plastic, perhaps just small enough for a big dog to get his jaw around. A few black plastic pots, probably for garden use. The wooden railing of a low inner fence line that somewhat hindered a view of the lawn space reserved for the house’s human occupants, off-limits to the canine. And the sparse, flattened green space given over to the dog’s daily tedium, the ‘lack-of-exercise’ yard in which they waited all day for an opportunity to express their stored, anxious, neglected irritation on innocent passersby.

Their absence, it was clear, meant only one thing. Could only mean one thing.

They knew the dogs were the reason someone had thrown a rock at their house.

Did they also know who that someone was?

Once again that night the local network TV-nooz compelled him.

He didn’t wait for the news hour to show up on the ‘leets’ station — that new term of abuse the Pegasso party brain-washers used to deride people like himself — probably derived from the old saw “a leetul went a long a way.” People who had unusual habits and tolerant opinions of others’ life-choices. People who thought they knew better than ‘ordinary’ people because they read more. Because they had been educated more deeply. They read big city nooz-docs. They knew the names of famous (or once famous) writers, or social thinkers, or philosophers. They knew that cities had been designed with various kinds of green spaces because their presence soothed the spirit and inspired the mind. They knew that “scientia est potentia”; that thought, the life of the mind, made societies healthier, more alive, more active. They went to the theater, at least once in a while, and visited cultural capitals at least once or twice in their lives. Keel had once stood on line one day in the great capital city of UCanna for an hour to buy a ticket to see a serious play written by an author of national repute. The experience stayed with him. Keel had also once boarded a flying machine so he could go to the live theater every night for a week in Landivium, the old country across the water.

Of course not everyone had the good fortune, the means, the opportunity, to pursue such activities. But even his city of Monro had a modest symphony orchestra. Why weren’t all the seats filled for every single public performance? In recent years the orchestra had reduced the cost of admission to donation-only — pay only what you chose — in an effort to increase attendance. And still there were as many empty seats as filled. And you could see examples of all the arts on the screen. Everybody had a screen, didn’t they? Did the people who voted for Pig refuse to watch the stations that broadcast concerts and dance and works of serious theater on principle, simply because people they hated, people like Keel, did? The leets. Was it a crime against ‘the people’ now, the ‘real people’ of his once proud, no longer quite so flourishing nation to be interested in the greater world? In history? In the problems of the future? In what scientists (did ‘real people,’ however, still understand that scientia kept them fed and healthy) were learning from excavating the deep past of the people-species? Or in what they suspected might lay beyond our own planet’s cozy little neighborhood in a still expanding cosmos?

‘Real people’? Keel thought with a start. Listen yourself: Was he something other than ‘real’ himself? ‘Real people,’ he brooded, tuning in with new care to his cascading thoughts, hated people like him, people who (unlike them) knew that one’s own little planet held a host of different belief systems, values, ‘explanations for the existence of people-intelligence,’ the mysteries of which dwarfed the little that was known for certain.

So there was no hope, he decided at last, of learning about ‘them’ if he continued paying attention only to ‘us.’

He resolved to abjure the comfort of watching nooz on the sophisticated station (for people like us) with its international stories and ‘expert’ guest commentators in favor watching

local-people nooz, on the local TV station.

Besides, he now had others reason to tune in to local news. He wished to find out whether investigators had learned anything more about the disturbing graffiti on the subverted church message board. And were they still looking into the attack on the Dormands’ house?

That night Headline-Nooz was filled with local or semi-local disasters or near-misses. A man with a knife tried to rob a convenience store on a strip of relatively dark road between the city and one of its smaller neighbors. The clerk had only a few metrics in the register at that time of night but he was gathering it up for the man with the knife when a couple of customers entered the shop and spooked the would-be robber, who took to his heels. Words like ‘lucky’ and ‘happy coincidence’ were tossed about on the screen and echoed in the newsroom.

Then the show flew to another locus, where a smoky fire in a backyard shed drew firefighters to the scene, who donned their heavy suits of armor and put out the small blaze before it could threaten nearby houses. Neighbors speculated on the cause.

“Kids, probably.”

“Smoking in the shed.”

No political stories, Keel thought. Nothing about ‘real people’ versus the ‘leets.’ When, abruptly, the studio host-reader’s mien changed, as it the teleprompter was now prompting in large black letters, singed in their corners and smoking faintly.

10. “There will be change!”

“Everyone knows,” the studio reader intoned, “that change is hovering in the wings in the form of Karol Pegasso. Today a spokesman for the leading candidate promised that ‘Changes will come. You can rely on it.’ But, the spokesman said, it was not yet time to make to make any specific plans public. Details were still being ‘ironed out.’”

Did those details involve people like him? Keel wondered.

Would he be ironed out?

Then, abruptly, the camera cut to a crowded room apparently bursting at its seams with excited bodies packed closely together and making a lot of noise. From the look of the place, a bland function room, it was a convention of some sort. The camera, though evidently far off, focused on a few men surrounding a mike. Then a lot of chanting and foot-stomping told Keel he was watching another rally for the man now widely described as the ‘Leading Candidate.’ He missed hearing the name of the location (they all looked the same). The Pig’s bodyguards kept the cameras to the back of the hall, so the shots of the speaker at the podium were always a little vague, a little shadowy. Everybody knew of Candidate Pegasso, but nobody got a very good look at him.

Anyone who approached with a cameras in his hands found someone standing between him and the candidate. Now ‘the candidate on-verge-of-election.’ He was a voice, not a face. And the voice was a species of hoarse bellow, uttering a rhythmic staccato: words fired off like machine gun bursts.

“There will be changes. There must be changes. Change will come. The people demand it. So the change must come!”

A booming shout at the end of the cadence.

A lot of noise at these rallies, Keel reflected, but very little got said.

Then something, abruptly, without warning, something inexplicable happened inside him, and Keel heard what the others, the people at the rally, were hearing. Some force or power outside himself, perhaps emanating from the scene transpiring on his television screen, tore open an interior or liminal scrim, a protective boundary in his own mind, and the real words, the real scene, became clear to him, forming in his mind with no defending ego to keep them at bay. Stunningly, overpoweringly, heady beyond reason or restraint, an exhilaration that overwhelmed any checkpoint of his rational consciousness poured the hot lava of desire, of orgiastic Dionysian ecstasy, into his brain.

“We will take back what is ours! We will take back the flag!”

Huge booming shouts, waves of sound — was some noise amplifying device at work? Some reverb machine, like the device an electric guitarist controlled with his foot?

People shouted, but appeared also to laugh and cry.

“We will take back the mansions! The palaces! The chariots of power!”

Waves of hysteria.

“We will bring down the heavens and put them here on earth!”

Images of wind and starlight blew through Keel’s state of wonder.

“We will knock down the old walls that keep the people from the power — “

Shouts: “Knock them down! Knock them down!”

“ — and build up the new ones!”

Rhythmic chants: “New Walls! Build them up! Build them up!”

“Beautiful walls,” the speaker promised. “Filled with bones and skulls! With shining jewels for eyes that watch in the night and keep the shadows away!”

Hysteria. Swooning.
“We will take back our silver and gold! Our diamonds and our jewels!

“We will take back — ourselves!

“We want our humanity back!

“We know where it’s gone! Where they’ve taken it — and we want it back!

“We know who it really belongs to. It belongs to UZ!

“They stole it — And we know where they have it!

“They’re keeping it hidden, keeping it all for themselves, leaving us only our animal skins — our fingers and toes — !

“Those nails and teeth!” Still louder. “Show them to me, people!”

Teeth emerged from evil grins. Nails grew into claws as hands waved in the air.

“That’s right! There they are! You got ’em — We need ‘em! We need ’em all!”

Hands wriggled. Cheers ballooned. Bounced off the walls. Ricocheted. Echoes running into echoes, like waves in a tank of water.

“That’s how we tear apart the phony curtains and fake screens, the lying words they hide the country behind! The false fronts of the big shots! The leets!

“We knows it’s still back there! The big prize behind the curtains! Behind all the phony talk and the bullshit explanations! And we’re gonna take it back! UZ! Our country!

“The Country of UZ!”

Keel came back to himself, oddly breathless. He blinked. Felt an urge to drink some water; to urinate.

Is that what people watched, and heard, on their TVs every night?

He shook his head, in denial. He must have been awake-dreaming. He knew he did that. But when he tried to recall in detail what had been running through his brain, his senses,

he could not remember precisely what he was awake-dreaming about… It was often like that. Something took hold of his waking, front-brain consciousness while the rest of his body puttered along smoothly on automatic pilot.

Happily, it didn’t appear that he’d missed anything important. Nothing of interest was happening on his TV screen. He watched the local network’s ho-hum nooz a little longer. Nothing tonight about the disturbing sign on the message board.

Nothing about the rock thrown at the Dormands’ house.

Keel started to rise from his chair, slowly, a little stiff. But something stopped from leaning forward and turning the TV off.

At the very last-second end of the half-hour segment that inevitably preceded the extra-long commercial break, the screen stopped in its tracks — went black — and then instantly came back to a remote shot of a correspondent (Chucker?) standing beside a police officer, both figures posed in front of a cruiser that appeared to be parked on a tree-lined road.

The report (the correspondent explained) concerned a woman, presumed elderly, possibly clouded in mind, believed to be wandering after dark in the woods of Green Hills Park.

“Lost,” Keel heard the officer say abruptly, biting off the word as if regretting it. Then adding, “We think she may be lost.”

11. ‘Places That Aren’t On the Map’

Keel knew that park. He sat on his couch with the TV off, and his thoughts began to wander again.

He remembered that park because his grandmother used to take him there. They stayed to the paths, of course, as she pointed out different kinds of trees to him. Poplar, birch, beech, pine, spruce, cedar, oak. White oak and scab oak. Many of the big trees were oak, but only a few of the really big ones remained.

“White pine,” she said, pointing, “look how many all in a row. Somebody must have planted these. And maple. Red maple,” she said with a note of recollected delight, “with their shiny red blossoms in spring. Green maple too.

“No real sweet maples in here,” she said, hands on her hips; paused, looking about. “But it was still a good forest, a fine forest to have so close to a city. Not like a forest in the mountains, or up in the north. But a wonderful place to feel” — she paused — “alive!”

Then she shook her head and walked on.

Keel walked again in his thoughts with his grandmother on the dirt tracks in the Green Hills Park. He dreamed himself back there. Smelled the green, tangy smell. The piney smell of a side path that was crowded with that line of planted white pines, the fallen needles of the decades brown and soft beneath their feet. There were main paths, and side paths. Stick to the widest paths, she told him, until you know a place really well. Then, when you for sure where you are, you can try one of those little ones off to the side.

One day he did try one of the side-winders, its outline clear, at least at the start, a narrow lane between blueberry and shrub brush and the trunks of the taller growth. But the pathway became less clear the farther along it he went, and when he stopped to consider which way to go, and turned about to look back, the way to return was no longer clear either. Then he saw something, a landmark, that he remembered distinctly. He remembered it because it was different. A place where you could almost sit inside; as if somebody had built it.

There, he thought now. That’s where she is. The woman.

If she was still lost, still out there. It was a mild night, for winter. But still…

This time he used his home phone to dial the police business line. It rang more than once, then a dispatcher picked up. He wondered if he would be speaking to the same voice he heard when he called about the Drummonds’ dogs.

“Central Station.”

“The woman who’s lost,” Keel said. “The one the police are looking for. Do you know if they’ve found her?”

“Name?”

“I don’t know her name. I just saw the story on the local news.”

“Your name. Are you a relative?”

The voice sounded tired. Maybe his shift had been extended. He was tired of curiosity seekers. He expected to be home by now with his feet up, watching one of the late-night comedy shows.

“No.” How to say what he had to? “It’s just that I have an idea where she might have got herself lost.”

“Ahh. I see. Well, Mr. — “

The man seemed about to tell him to go to bed and let the police do their job.

“I know that particular area where they’re looking.”

After a pause, the tired voice said, “Hang on.” Presumably Keel’s claim merited a discussion.

“Well,” the dispatcher’s voice came back, “that individual is still missing.”

“Then you are still looking for her?”

“If she’s ‘missing,’” irritable now, “then I suspect we are.”

“Can I speak to someone involved in the search? I may be able to help.”

I’m not a crank, Keel wanted to say. I’m a person who has ideas. Who dreams things. And sometimes they’re true. But isn’t that the sort of thing a crank would say?

“I know that park really well,” he spoke once more into the silence, “Green Hills Park, where they’re looking for her. There are places in there that aren’t on a map. I used to spend a lot of time in that park.”

True, though a long time ago. He wouldn’t mention how long.

He could hear the man thinking. Should he go consult again? Better safe than sorry.

“All right. Hold on.”

On hold again. He guessed the dispatcher was making another call, on police radio maybe, to the patrol car stationed at the park. If the car was still there.

The thing was, the police couldn’t be sure the missing woman was in there. All they knew was the park was close to the rehab facility she had walked out of.

But he knew something more: he knew she was in there.

Keel held the line, but his thoughts slipped away. He began to dream. He began to see things.

He saw the wooded places where his country, the Commonhope of UZ, ends up… Or retreats to. The high places, wooded places, distant mountains with forgotten towns, lakes with islands in their center where people found one-time camping places; but now their whole existence was camping. Cold all the time, begging for the sun to shine. Making rafts, fishing lines, hooks out of bones, eating whatever moved; sampling whatever grew. Places where resources had to be harbored, exploited, but not killed off. Living on the edges of extinction. Worshipping fire. Following paths that led to lightning strikes to see what had been killed, or downed, or otherwise prepared for use. Examining, carefully, abandoned houses, making certain that no one was still about. Livable? Scoungeable? Taking down roofs and walls and moving them elsewhere. ‘Living close,’ as they called it. Sometimes, literally, underground. Where it was easier to keep things from the cold; and heat themselves. Places that smelled of smoke, of staleness, of bodies. Careful where they hid their waste; which bark of tree and root of plant they ate. Learning how to test water, boiling it to kill the parasites, listening for the sounds of automobiles. Machines of any sort. Learning to trap animals, though their numbers would quickly decline. Beaver, fish. Roots, mushrooms. Berries, in beautiful late summer, when a bare hillside bloomed with purple berries of a deep color not seen anywhere else. Always hungry. Experimenting with the seeds of wild grass, flowers. Volunteering to taste things; to become sick.

Some lived deep in forest. Some on mountains. Some clung to the smaller cities and towns, surviving between raids by the Pigs. Women dressed as men, hair cropped. Young men simply hidden away, in trap holes dug beneath floors. Boys hidden by their parents. They thought it was a game, when they were young enough. They loved surviving, to play again another day. It concentrated the mind.

Was this true? he asked himself with a start. Or was he just dreaming?

Keel heard a click and the dispatcher came back on the line and patched him through to a police officer, presumably on the site. Keel explained his theory of where the lost woman might have wandered to. The officer listened, then told him to wait. A patrol car would be dispatched to his address to pick him up. Sure enough, a few minutes later a young officer with the kind of skin color and features some of Pig’s backers claimed belonged to people who came from some other country and were not really UZ, knocked at his door, Keel stumbling into his coat, and drove him to the part of town where Green Hill Park was located. Finding the entrance, he drove slowly along a sparsely lighted rim-road until he found the sergeant with his flashlight pointing to the ground.

Standing in the near dark, Keel explained his idea to the driver and his sergeant, who shifted his feet listening.

“Well,” he said when Keel’s voice tailed off, “it won’t get any warmer standing here.”

They left the car behind and started along a footpath into the park woods, the two men in uniform allowing Keel to take the lead.

About twenty minutes later, aided (and sometimes hindered) by the bright beam of the sergeant’s flashlight, Keel brought his search party to the hump of a small scrub-bordered hillock off the narrow side-trail he had blazed himself so many years ago, before losing his childish way. Keel pointed, and the sergeant directed the beam of his light on the low cement storage bunker built into the side of the little swell of earth for a military purpose during a different era of the world.

His country had built it, and others like it, Keel knew, to store ammunition during an old war when national purpose had united in the cause of defeating a feared and hated enemy. Artillery munitions, he thought. Bombs. Possibly some other form of war materiel. He didn’t know anything more specific.

But that was what his grandmother told him when she found him huddled inside the place so long ago.

He had told himself he was resting. A lost little boy, decades and decades before.

“Mrs. Nathan?” the sergeant said. And shined his light on her face.

12. Mrs. Nathan

The woman addressed by the police sergeant as “Mrs. Nathan” was a small, silent, hunched human figure swathed in a dark-colored coat squatting in the cold on a stone beneath the partial shelter of the hillock. She old, alone and, Keel thought, and probably disoriented; half-asleep, but shivering.

“I’m all right,” she said, when the sergeant pressed his questions on her.

Her voice was soft, weak perhaps. But perhaps in the manner of someone saving strength for a more important task.

The sergeant stepped back after her assurance. She did not appear to be suffering from any wound. First-aid was the extent of his training, and he preferred to wait for the EMTs to make any deeper assessment of her state.

“Procedure,” he said to the others, as he placed the call for assistance to the EMTs.

He stood quietly beside the driver and Keel, looking at his phone from time to time, and the woman who had walked away from her facility-bed turned to some state approximating the stone she was sitting on, wrapped in the added layer of a police blanket, barely distinguishable in the dark from the hollow of the bunker.

After acknowledging that she was the person they were looking for, Mrs. Nathan did volunteer anything more in the way of information. She made no reply when the sergeant stated a second time that they would wait where they were for the EMTs to arrive.

In her eighties, Keel thought. Though it was hard to tell much about someone by flashlight on a winter night. She answered “yes” when the sergeant asked her whether her name was Mrs. Eleni Nathan.

The sergeant tried again. “We’ve been looking for you, Mrs. Nathan.”

Keel heard her sigh.

“And I was waiting,” Mrs. Nathan muttered when the sergeant turned away. “But not for you.”

Keel heard, though he didn’t think either of the policemen did.

Even with the blanket she was shivering, at least some part of her. What would he have done spending a night out in the woods like this? The overhang from the hillock provided shelter from rain but not from cold, or wind if it came up in the night. The night was still and clear now, and he could see some stars between the branches of the nearest trees. Hyperion’s Belt. A wintry constellation. Live long enough and you grew accustomed to its eternal presence. A clock face that never changes its hour, never winds down.

He could not have remained stoically out here in the woods alone at night. He would have been cold, frightened.

When the EMTs arrived they insisted on stretchering her all the way back down the path to the parking area. The woman protested, but quietly, and then let them do their work as they wished. They blanketed her. Asked her if her hands were cold. If she could feel her toes.

Yes, she could feel her toes.

Keel walked behind the men carrying the stretcher. The police officers walked in front of them leading the way. He caught glimpses of Mrs. Nathan draped in her medical emergency when the trail curved a little; otherwise he saw nothing but the long back of the young man behind the stretcher. Two strong young fellows, he thought, manfully doing their job.

It was a shame, he thought, that the destination for their patient would be another facility, A hospital. Then, in all probability, back to the center she had walked away from. He wished he could see her face better. Why had she done what she did? Where was she going? Where did she think she was going?

They did not get an opportunity to speak. It was not his business to speak to her. He had played his part in a ‘rescue’ that did not appear to please its subject very much.

The slow slog back reached the parking area.

The sergeant and the driver stamped their feet while the EMTs carefully settled their patient into the back of the van. Keel wondered when he had stopped feeling his own toes. More stars were visible here. He dreamed himself away, back into the dream of the rabble, the vast hoard of the Sons of Pigster working their way through the land, perhaps on the way to his own city now. Were those pitchforks on their shoulders? Or semi-automatic firing arms? He could almost hear their garbled speech, some raucous singing. Were they drunk? How did they keep themselves going, traveling all night on rough roads? They would be on drugs, he decided. Of course, if you needed to string along a group of blind ‘followers,’ you had to exercise some sort of mind control to keep them slogging through the countryside.

The reality, he thought with a shake of his head, would be no such thing. They would not be walking. They would be on buses, big tour buses like famous rock and roll acts used to travel in between cities. Do they still? The Blues Monarch had traveled in such a bus. Or in fleets of vans. Maybe some super-long trailer trucks, where they could pile in their stuff. What stuff? he wondered.

The ambulance was ready to go. The foreign-looking policeman told Keel to get in the police car, he would take him home. He was saying this a second time.

Seated, Keel watched the ambulance make its careful progress out of the park with the old woman in the back. He doubted she knew his name. On the whole, he preferred it if none of them knew his name. He did not wish to appear in a Headline-Nooz report, looking for the bland, right, cliched words when a man shoved a mike in his face to ask what it felt like to play his part in the rescue of a poor old lady.

But she did know it, apparently.

The sergeant called him the following afternoon. The police, naturally, had taken his name and information for their report. Mrs. Nathan was asking him to speak to him, the sergeant told him. He had gone to the hospital to speak to her about why she had left the rehab facility alone and found it hard to make sense of some of the things she was saying. When he asked for a clarification, she told them to get the man who found her in the woods.

“She said, ‘he would understand.’” The sergeant’s voice sounded tentative.

Would he go see her?

Keel found himself agreeing without thinking about it. What else could he do? Someone in the hospital was asking to see him. He hoped it would be only the one time.

He decline an offer of transportation. This time he would drive himself, even though it would be the first time in a week or two that he had turned the key the ignition of his old, but serviceable automobile. When he sat himself behind the wheel he was happy to find some gas in the tank of the aging foreign made sedan. He did not dive the car much in winter; where did he wish to go in the winter? Keel marketed on foot.

It was only when he found himself in the hospital, looking for the information desk, that the question of what the police were asking Mrs. Nathan to talk about began to oppress him. No crime had been committed, had it? Did they think someone else helped her to walk away from the rehab facility? Was it a crime to help someone to leave such a place without, so to speak, going through channels?

Mrs. Nathan, the senior volunteer at the desk told him, was on the second floor.

He looked at the friendly face of the woman who gave him the room number, but there was no hidden message there.

What was he expecting to hear? Be careful; it may be a trap.

Upstairs he found another woman, this one younger, polite, carefully dressed in a suit the color of garden soil that had not been watered, sitting on a straight chair in the hospital room. The room held a second bed, but it was empty and made up with a simple sheet and blanket. The young woman had pushed her chair back against a wall and did not appear to be engaged in talking to the patient. Watching her then? Or had communication been attempted and failed. Keel assumed she was police.

The room was silent when Keel entered it.

The young woman stood, smiled to cover her inspection of him, and introduced herself.

She said she was from “the agency.” What agency, he wondered, but did not ask.

“We’ve been ‘expecting’ you,” she said. He nodded. “Mrs. Nathan has been expecting you,” she amended, slightly.

“Yes,” he said. “I was told.” He waited.

The woman stepped around the bed.

“I’ll leave you two to talk,” she said, and walked out of the room to wait in the corridor. Would it be impolite of him to shut the door? He shut it.

The woman in the bed followed him with her eyes as he approached and pushed the chair closer to the bed.

“I know who you are,” she said, before he managed to seat himself. “I’m not as batty as they think.”

He expected her to laugh, but she didn’t.

Looking old and fatigued, her eyelids drooping. His grandmother, the only old person he had ever really known, had never looked this tired. Her head and shoulders were propped up a little by pillows. Her thin gray hair framed her face symmetrically as if for a portrait (had they washed it for her?): Lady Such-and-such at rest. Grandchildren should surround the bedside; not an aging man waiting curiously for an explanation.

“Who am I?” he replied at length, as if she knew something he did not.

He meant it. Seeing her, he had no doubt she had something to tell him.

But why him, as opposed, say, to the young lady from ‘the agency’?

“You’re Keel,” she said. “That’s enough. You’re you.”

“Well.” He did not know what to say.

“You know,” her voice soft but insistent. “You see them too. Don’t you?”

He looked away, thinking.

“Who are they?” he asked.

He could not deny ‘seeing’ them. What would be the point? Dreams were a way of seeing. He has known this all his life.

“I don’t bother with names, if that’s what you mean.” Her voice was soft, as if she only had the one volume; all the voice that was left. “Not in this place.” She laughed very softly.

“What do they look like? To you?”

“Men, mostly. You would expect that, wouldn’t you?” She paused, but did not seek an answer. “Great, grimy men, some with beards. Not all of them.” She thought. “They wear dark clothes. They set fires. They love fires… Wearing hats, some of them, you know, like those sports hats for teams and the like… And white skin, mostly. Pale. Pale, white faces.”

“Where are they going?”

“You know that already.”

He did; though he did not wish to.

She looked at him with a new intensity when he did not reply. Her eyes wide awake. No weakness there.

“You don’t need to hide anything from me.” She made a face. Narrow features, chin almost pointy. Voice softer still, but more determined. “I won’t tell anyone about you. If you’re worried about that.”

She did not appear worried about what he would tell. He held back his question.

She answered it anyway. “It’s all over you. I see it everywhere. I don’t even need to see your face.”

“See my face?” he responded. Was she not looking at it?

He was beyond uncomfortable. He felt himself turning to ice. Not because he didn’t understand. But because he did. Somewhat.

“You mean some other ‘seeing,’” he stated rather than asked.

Then, seeing the light in her eyes once more. “You’re a seer?”

“That’s a word for it.” She laughed a kind of blunt, unhappy laugh; more of a snicker. “They called us witches.”

The witch in the woods, he thought. But if she’s a witch, then what am I? The seeker? Or the lost?

“What…” he began.

She didn’t need him to finish. “What are we supposed to do? Is that what you mean?”

The woman’s pale eyes regarded him, their expression both distant and wholly present in her plain, aging face. Waiting, perhaps to see if he wished to ask a different question.

But he shook his head, denying any further curiosity.

“There isn’t anything to do. It’s all been done.”

She said the words with no pleasure. No pleasure in her witchery, or seeing. Something like a sigh escaped her and her eyes shut for a moment.

“But you wanted to see me?” he pursued, quietly.

“I wanted to be sure. I thought you would…. You found me.” As if something more than wandering a path in the woods were involved. “I wanted to be sure you did.”

Yes. He saw that. But for what end?

“Can I ask you one thing more?” He had found a simpler question.

She closed her pale eyes again, as if this time from fatigue.

“Why did you run away?”

She appeared to consider. But perhaps she did not intend to reply.

“That ‘s what they all want to know, Mr. Keel,” she said at length, opening her eyes. “Join the crowd.” A joke, but she did not laugh.

She blinked, then closed her eyes.

He felt he should go, but delayed.

“I just needed to be alone, Mr. Keel. To tell you the truth.”

He got a funny feeling hearing her say his name.

Deciding she must be feeling that need again, he rose, without speaking, nodded to the figure on the bed, though her eyes were shuttered. Then stepped away from the bedside and walked quietly out of the room.

The poised and careful woman from the ‘agency’ was standing in the hall. He was not surprised. He paused, waiting for her to speak to him. He wanted to ask her what “agency.” The CBI, the country’s central bureau? Don’t be ridiculous. Probably some follow-up by the agency that inspects facilities such as the one Mrs. Nathan had somehow walked out of.

Or, in actuality, the city police.

But she merely smiled politely and said, “Thank you for coming, Mr. Keel.”

Had she been listening somehow? Was there a device? It seemed strange that she did not attempt to question him, or explain her own presence. What ‘agency’ was that?

Of course, he thought, everything could be surveilled. There could even be a camera in the room. On the ceiling? Over the bed? He hadn’t looked. He didn’t know how.

13. The Will of the People

Keel walked out that night. He liked the darkness because of the sensation of privacy it lent to all his surroundings. No one saw you on the sidewalks after dark. Someone might see you, of course, from somewhere — a darkened room; a spyhole on the night — but you wouldn’t realize it, so it was just as good as being invisible. It pleased him, this illusion of invisibility: night-walker, spirit of darkness.

He looked for graffiti. Or campaign signs. Who was for Pig; who was against him.

Many Pig supporters were fond of a sign that showed a large man in profile, casting a shadow. Was that a boast, this long shadow? To Keel it seemed like a threat. He brooded on other questions. Was the woman at the hospital truly a member of the Common Bureau of Inquests, keeping watch over a woman comfortable with the name of ‘witch’? How long before leading candidate Karol Pegasso was replacing the head of this agency with one of his own witch hunters?

Who were those people packing the rally halls the TV networks showed him almost every night? From what he saw on the screen, they were all light-skinned. Most people in the country were — descendants of the fair-skinned people who came to this land centuries before. Some down from the North in some forgotten migration in the mists of time; some from the countries over the seas. Others, darker peoples, had come later, from various lands. Some, according to the stories, were a wandering people who scratched out a living as entertainers, singers, storytellers, fortune tellers, psychics, impersonators. But these groups had blended into the mix of the general population. All of the country’s districts had among its citizenry some proportion of the travelers’ descendants, just as they had some darker-skinned people.

Yet their faces never appeared at the televised Pig rallies.

Keel walked away from his own neighborhood, toward the city’s border with the outlying town of Moorsby. Since his visit to the hospital he had been fending off the awful suspicion that the woman whose mind had called to him from a woodsy hideout in Green Hills Park knew what he was dreaming. And knew the sense of it. The same choking, helpless sensation Keel felt when he woke from the dream. Perhaps her dreams were of the same horrific hue.

What evil — or possible good — did that shared knowledge portend?

Was there something to be valued in the sharing? The old woman, Mrs. Nathan, had hardly struck him as a hopeful figure. Yet she had desired to see him. Why? She did not ask anything of him. Expect anything; seek anything. No, she had simply wanted him to know that she knew too.

Message delivered.

What use would that knowledge do him? Or anyone? No one knew what would happen when Karol Pegasso took office. His campaign was more like a performance of mass hypnosis than a rational appeal for public support for a elective bid. No one could say what he stood for. If he had a policy plan to govern the country, he did not share it. His campaign appearances were unscheduled, though meticulously contrived. They took place in large halls with standing room audiences who applauded, or cheered, or stomped, or hooted, or booed, or sang on cue.

Their presence itself was an amazement since no public announcement of the gatherings was ever made. How did they know when or where to show up?

The media broadcasts of these performances were also last-minute, haphazard, ill-prepared rush jobs.

Someone would call a studio with a frantic message — Pig’s in the County Auditorium! Get yourself over there!

When the cameras arrived the business inside the hall was already at a roaring pitch, people standing and shouting! Waving their arms with a pulsing sort of synched motion! Chanting “Pig! Pig! Pig!”

People said ‘revival meeting,’ but that wasn’t quite the feeling, the atmosphere. People said ‘big’ football game. But sports fans — even in overseas foosball — hardly ever remained at such a pitch of energetic response. They ‘sang’ team songs standing in their enormous foosball stadia. How quaint, Keel thought, was that? The feeling conveyed by Pig rallies was more like cheering on an execution. He would prefer to be caught in a full-fledged foosball riot than exposed to any five minutes of Pig-love hysteria…

Keel has already seen enough of these to recognize the pattern.

When the cameras showed up came and the networks turned on their lights from the back of the hall, the network people were never permitted to get more than a few feet inside the hall. The candidate’s men, his ‘phalanx,’ positioned themselves in a protective semi-circle so the eye of the camera could never get more than a partial view of the candidate himself. We saw (Keel searched his visual memories) the side of his head, a bullet-headed oversized cranium that appeared to thrust its way into the upper atmosphere beyond those who worshipped from below. A battering-ram of a head pounding forward with each word, each blow, at the still-resisting frame of the country’s status quo. At reality itself.

The image of that human piston breaking through the space-time continuum, poking holes in the three or four or however many dimensions in which human beings lived their poor, brief earthly lives — though what about dreams? weren’t dreams another dimension? — so terrified Keel and disturbed his state of mind for hours afterwards that he vowed to never again remain glued in front of the screen for even the shortest ‘clip’ of one these performances when they turned up on the nightly news.

But then, always, he did.

Just as, the night before, he could not — for some reason — help it. He was powerless, mentally naked and exposed to its intrusion. And so he had seen.

It was not what the man said. Keel could not recall a single word of what the candidate said.

No one, it could occurred to him now, could ever report what it was that Pig actually said. And so no one did. Listeners in the hall, viewers at home, sometimes recalled a few hammered snatches of speech: “power, right, nation, today, tomorrow, journey, battle.” Sometimes his speeches — or ‘performances’ — were interrupted by waves of chanting emerging from the crowd and overwhelming even his piston-powered emissions. But even then observers could not seem to recall these chants in any meaningful fashion.

“We! … People!… No!… No more!… Now!…Tomorrow!”

Many people said they heard these words. But when microphones were thrust in their faces, they could not draw any further connected meaning, any sense, from what they did hear.

“Uh. Well…,” they said, “…the people. The people don’t want no more. They want different.”

And yet they all knew what he meant. At least Keel suspected they did. Something they could not put into words. Or didn’t wish to.

He was coming for ‘them.’

For people like Keel. People who stood in the Pig-chanters’ way. Who stood in the way of their desire to sweep everything away that held them back. Anything they didn’t like. And remake it all in some new image. Whose image?

Pig’s? Animal Firm’s?

The image of the head-person, the willful, shouting, pushing human being (presumably) that no one but they could see.

Keel knew himself, knew who he was. A man, a citizen, of the rational, cautious sort. The caution of reason. He did not wish the government of the Commonhope of UZ to adopt drastic new measures. He did not wish to see laws and policies that benefited himself and many others — millions of others — swept away in the name of instituting some new regime. Based on what?

Pegasso’s campaign never released any copies of his speeches, his remarks. His campaign spakesmen said they did not trust “outsiders” to report them accurately. Or to comment on them fairly. They did not trust ‘outsiders’ period. Who were these ‘outsiders’? People like himself, Keel knew.

And when the first Voting Days were held, in districts far from his own, Karol Pegasso, to the surprise of almost everyone, swept all the contests.

Celebrations were held, but no ‘outsiders’ were invited to them. The campaign said only that Pig was ‘pleased’ by the results. But he expected no less. Because, as his only public statement put it: “my candidacy expresses the will of the people.”

That was all he said after each victory. All he would ever say.

No one interviewed by the news-sheets remembered signing a petition to place his name on the ballot in any of the districts. When the Voting Days came, broad-shouldered, heavyset men turned up to watch the polls. They wore dark clothing, sometimes made of leather, and pulled their sports caps low to their eyes. A few women with them, women you might expect to see with men like these. Solid and barrel-shaped themselves, with muscles on their limbs, their expressions hard, their gestures more blatant and determined than those of the men.

They behaved like people who knew they would get their way with a paucity of speech, because of who they were. Who they appeared to be.

Keel saw them the day that he signed in to vote at the upcoming Voting Day.

No one spoke at the Signing-In. This was surprising. The atmosphere at Signing-In was not ordinarily one of constraint. The mood tended to be mildly jovial; a room of strangers connected by the broadest of common beliefs. The obligation to do an ordinary job, though singularly important job that all were clearly capable of doing. The widest circle of capability. Yes, these moments seemed to declare, we are all citizens of this country today, though strangers we may be on other days. This much we share in common.

But this time Keel felt he was fighting his way against a stiff, invisible breeze. Some would-be voters sensed an unstated opposition, this stiff wind in their face, grew uncomfortable and walked away. They rationalized their retreat. Theirs was only one vote; why go to such trouble?

Keel supposed that was how Voting Days felt as well in the districts where they had already taken place. Possibly that was how Pegasso won.

Still, it was a shock. Now it appeared inevitable, after the next few Voting Days, that Pegasso would be proclaimed the country’s next Chief Adjudicator, the highest office in the government. The position commonly known as Chief Xec.

And nobody really knew who he was.

Keel did not see as many stars from the Monro city line as he had in Green Hills Park the night before, though a few gleamed brightly. Were they also beacons — these midwinter stars? Signal fires? Drawing something onward? Some approaching force, for good or ill?

He was not anticipating good.

14. He Dreamed of Fires

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark. Oh, look who’s back in town!

He had another hypothesis to test as well. The Dormands’ dogs had been penned indoors the last time. He had skipped this walk the before; the day of the hospital.

Now, this line of thought occurred to him, if Sir and Lady Dormand have been watching for him, surveilling him, wouldn’t they know that he failed to pass by the day before?

And if so, would that be reason enough for them to return to their preferred practice of leaving the dogs outdoors all day?

Fighting against the mind’s habitual urge to drift off, Keel spurred himself to remain fully aware of his surroundings. To look in all directions at once. If surveillance were present, could he figure out from where? Spot a half-second’s reflection of sunlight off a lens? An unexplained murmur, or suppressed buzz.

A face at a second-story window?

But fully aware, mindfully present, he simply looked at the world, registering impressions, letting them go, as he perambulated, one of the most basic of human activities (though one that some fellow bipeds appeared to avoid like the plague), down the sidewalk on Pike Street.

He took in the breaks in the sidewalk pavement, the extrusion of tree roots. He looked at the shapes of the bare trees and the houses. A woman and child on the opposite sidewalk, bodies slightly angled toward one another, coming home, presumably, from the elementary school that lay in that direction.

House front after house front, yard after yard. A remarkable series, in quantity at least, of images. Did his walk always take so long?

The Dormand house swam into sight.

He saw at once.

The dogs were there.

Now he had a problem, a decision he had postponed to this eventuality.

He wished to observe the house; but the house might be observing him. Continue on his path? Or swerve?

He slowed, hesitated, but then the dogs caught sight of him.

The large pale-yellowish one, and the small black hairy one. The big one took a few leaping steps toward the fence, paused momentarily as if to allow the nasty little one to catch up with him so they could confront the intruder together. Pack loyalty. The little one always yipping and squealing and howling, out of the great nasty happiness of its dogdom, and practically falling on its face in the anxiety to keep pace in the hypothetical chase playing inside its predatory-pack animal repertoire of instinct-necessary behaviors. His much larger, squash-tinted partner inhaled his own fury and expelled it in a red-throated bout of deep, rapid-fire barks now that the cause of his passion, the sidewalk-pedestrian Keel, was actually approaching the wire fence line.

The was the point where, Keel reflected with some rue, on previous occasions he had aimed a few metal-shaking kicks at the fence.

The dogs weren’t going to get at him, he could be certain, with the five-foot fence between them,. That same impediment would save them from the force of any blows he might aim in their direction. But still both sides had ample opportunity to vent their wrath.

Keel slowed, rather sped up his pace, trying to proceed as naturally-seeming as possible, somehow oblivious, or careless, of the racket of the dogs.

He glanced at the house, looking over the heads of the animals, ignoring them, their fury and their noise, searching for the eye of the camera, the flicker of motion in the window. First floor? Second floor? Porch roof. He simple fact: he did not know what he was looking for. The eye of good peering down from the heavens?

He did not know what he was doing, Keel thought. He was ridiculous.

The Dormands were merely typical selfish big-property owners. Not the spies of some new, terrible order.

He had nothing to do but walk past their house. Ignore their dogs.

And yet: Was it pure coincidence that two days before — the day following ‘the incident’

— the dogs had been penned up indoors?

So the hypothesis still stood. It could be tested.

Unless they had ‘gone out’ somewhere and left the dogs in the yard, they would know from the barking that he was there. Passing by.

How could they not know? And what would they do next time?

He gave the fence a solid kick, just to make sure.

That night he dreamed of the fires.

They were coming closer. Nooz-sheet reports of suspicious fires in cities to the west, where the Pegasso campaign was said to be gaining strength. Always, or almost always, the fires were confined to the poorer parts of town. Sometimes their origin was wholly mysterious.

Sometimes showing clear evidence of arson. No one was ever seen starting them. No one was ever charged. Mayors, and city officials, and local boards wrung their hands over them in public. Blamed them on increasing public lawlessness. Some officials uttered wistful hopes that a new national administration would help restore a higher standard of public order, more respect for the law.

Karol Pegasso, Keel thought, presented himself as a strong believer in law and order. Was this plague of mysterious fires no more than a coincidentally convenient target for Pig’s denunciations? And what had Pig, whose company had a finger in every walk of national life you could think of, but had never held a public service position of any sort, done to earn his reputation as a strong ‘law’n’order ‘ defender?

Pinned a medal on a cop? Donated some old equipment?

Perhaps it was his speaking style, bellowing, percussive, emphatic, repetitious, hard-driving, hard-headed, that made hapless local officials take him at his word? He was not a candidate of subtleties. The nooz began reporting that Pig said that crime was too high. This was the belief attributed to him by his vociferous supporters, though Keel wracked his brain to recall any clear statement by the candidate made at his rallies, or reported by the Nooz sources, that put forward that claim. No positions, policies, promises or programs designed to address this supposed increase in crime. No concrete positions on anything, as far Keel could make out.

He offered shouting and proclaiming, volleys of thunder in which the words “new” and “change” and “the people” appeared frequently, but were not connected to any pledge of redress or action that was worthy of the name.

“There must be change! There will be change! The people demand it!”

Did the city of Monro have a plan, Keel decided to inquire the next day, to deal with the nationally reported increase in arson?

He called the city’s fire department, asked to speak to the chief. The chief was in a budget meeting; no one could say for sure when he would be available. Keel found himself talking to a deputy chief.

“What about those fires to the west?” he asked.

“No one knows how those fires started,” the deputy chief, who gave his name Macoll,

replied.

“Some of those fires were reported to be arson.”

He did not wish to be adversarial, but when information was ‘reported’ he regarded it as something to be taken seriously unless the report was refuted.

“Crimes of arson tend to be the acts of people with mental problems,” Macoll said, in a conclusive tone. “You do all you can to prevent accidental fires. Use flame retardant materials. Fire alarms. Smoke alarms… But willful, criminal arson — that’s a crime that’s almost impossible to prevent.”

“Unless it’s a conspiracy,” Keel objected. “If it’s not the work of a deranged individual. If fires are being purposely set by someone or some group.”

Some memory tugged. A few years back, a gang of troublemakers were targeting certain churches. Especially those that advertised their openness to participation by so-called ‘flexibles.’

“Don’t you remember the church fires?” he asked.

“We haven’t had any church fires.”

“They happened all over the country. Just because we didn’t have any in Monro doesn’t mean that we’re immune to intentionally targeted fires. It’s happened before. It appears to be happening again.”

“What would you like us to do, Mr. — “ He searched for Keel’s name; couldn’t recall it. “Ride around all night looking for fires?”

He could think of worse ways for the department to spend its time.

Such as doing nothing. Talking to public officials sometimes nudged Keel into the role of skeptical taxpayer. How did the city fire department spend its time, he asked himself.

“I was hoping to hear that you had a plan, Mr. Macoll. A raised level of alertness. Something to raise public awareness.”

“Like that old-fashioned color system? You mean we’re gonna’ go from orange to red? Tell me, Mr. — “

“Keel.”

“ — Mr. Keel. Did that ever do any good?”

Yes, he remembered that system: the alerts. ‘Foreign elements,’ the citizens were told, were threatening to bring their violence to the country. Public transportation hubs were repeatedly searched. Nothing was ever found. A few ‘undesirables’ were rounded up and exiled to countries that didn’t want them. But during that period the idea of a ‘danger level’ had been impressed upon the public mind.

Back then some people, himself being one, had pushed back, prophesying that crying wolf too soon, too often, would result in complacency when a wolf actually did appear. Now the wolf was truly among them, Keel thought, though he came in the guise of a pig.

“No,” he had to admit, “it didn’t.”

The call ended in vague vocalizations on the notion of planning. Macoll said he would mention Keel’s concern to the chief.

But Keel’s ordinarily sluggish temper was roused now.

He could sit back no longer. He would take part, an ordinary private citizen’s part, in the events to come, for good or ill. He did not enjoy the prospect of giving up his solitude, his precious anonymity — the kind of invisible shield that surrounded him when he ventured into the world because of the unlikelihood of running into someone he knew — but something was gnawing at him.

Was it the woman in the woods? he asked himself. Who seemed to know him.

Who, in some inexplicable way, had called to him, summoned his mind. This confirmation by a self-described ‘witch,’ a person of some obvious perception — a psychic, perhaps, though he did not know if he believed in psychics — that others besides himself were sensing an impending cataclysm.

Maybe the graffiti-makers sensed it too. Something was driving them, gnawing at them, too.

Keel held the transmitter of that ancient device, the telephone, in his right hand and could not let go of it. Could not settle it back into its plastic cradle.

He had to do something.

He dialed the next number he could think of, recollecting his still-unreturned call to the animal control center. This time hearing his call go directly to the ‘message center’ and receiving the unhelpful admonition by a recorded voice that the ‘message box’ was full and could accept no further messages.

Disconnection.

He called the police line.

“Central Station.” The same dispatcher — again?

Keel marshaled his controlled, businesslike voice to ask for the number of the animal control department.

Yes, he told the dispatcher. That was the number he’d called.

The dispatcher was silent. Nothing more to offer.

Then he asked for the name of the animal control officer. Maybe it would help him reach this officer if he could ask by name.

“Ah… Magda.”

“Magda what?”

A sigh. Were the surnames of city officers privileged information?

A mutter of voices. No, the dispatcher simply needed his memory jarred.

“Officer Dormand.”

Dormand!

“No one answers there,” he added hurriedly, to keep the man on the line. “Any idea where Officer Dormand could be?”

Brief silence. “Outside, maybe. At the cages.”

15. “When Are They Coming?”

A family member — a daughter, maybe, of the dog-neglecting Dormands — employed by the city as its animal control officer?

Just a small venial coincidence that enabled neglectful dog owners to be secure from consequence by city authorities. If someone wished to make a complaint about the Dormand household’s dogs, who did they make it to? A close family relation?

Perhaps there was more than one Dormand family in the city of Monro. He would have to check into that.

It was a cold night. He had a knitted hat pulled down over his ears and was wearing his thicker gloves. If you kept your head covered and your hands warm, experience told him you would be all right. All right walking, that is, when the vigorous activity would keep the rest of the body warm.

He thought he was heading for the city line again, for its view of the night sky, but changed his mind on a whim, crossed a street and reversed his course back toward the square.

This maneuver put him on a different route from his usual afternoon walk, and so he approached the Dormands’ house ten minutes later at a steady, comfortable place — no fingers or toes yet complaining of the cold — on a different street, the one that passed the front door of their substantial manse. A few lights glowed inside as he drew close. A low spotlight illuminated the porch steps for after-dark visitors. He wondered where they kept the dogs when they were inside. The dogs would have their own room, he thought, with toys to chew and soft places to sit on that kept their own smell. The comfortable human couple would sit in their own soft places and watch their wide-screen; maybe allowing the dogs into the room for a few minutes late in the evening for a bit of play or petting.

Keel passed by the front of the house without slowing his pace or showing any sign of increased interest in his surroundings, scanning the quiet house with peripheral vision only. If the house trained some sort of surveillance on the street, the camera would find nothing of interest in his passage. Except, perhaps, that it was he, Keel, who was passing. But why would they surveil? And if they did, why would anyone bother to review the tape? Nothing was happening.

He was almost past the house before he noticed what was unusual.

The cars.

So many vehicles, parked everywhere. The houses were close together in this residential city neighborhood, so it was not unusual to see cars parked overnight on the street. But not so many. A taller van blocked his view of the house from across the street. An upstairs room showed lights burning between the drapes when he turned the corner to Pike Street, his usual approach. More cars parked at the curb there.

The epicenter of the action certainly appeared to be the Dormands’ place. A late night card game. Poker? Bridge?

The cars’ presence might meant nothing, but he didn’t think so. He felt twitchy and uncomfortable, warm rather than cold. He walked a few blocks down Pike, then turned around, impatient — he had intended to go farther away, let more time pass — and walked back down Pike Street and survey it from that direction. Where, perhaps, a camera watched the dogs’ fenced-in prison. He could not say what he was hoping to accomplish. Maybe the house, or the street, would show something he was not expecting.

He walked past without varying his pace. The house a large dark mass; no sound, only a glimmer of light from inside. Nothing moving on the street. Everything just as before.

When he turned the corner passed a few houses down, someone stepped from a parked car, as dark and silent as all the others, surprising him absolutely.

Who sat in a dark, cold car? Some kind of cop? Security?

The figure blocked his passage on the sidewalk.

“Get in,” a voice said.

A man’s voice. Youngish, he thought.

“What?”

“Get in the car,” the voice repeated, softly this time. An invitation. “We’ll go get a coffee.”

“Why?”

Keel heard the tension in his voice. He was not the sort of person who strangers accosted after dark. Nor was he comfortable responding if they did.

Yet was he the kind of person who spied on a neighbor?

“Because I want to talk to you, that’s why. And you probably want to talk to me.”

“We can talk here.”

“It’s cold,” the voice objected. “C’mon, man, don’t be ridiculous. We’ll just go to Randy’s.”

“On Broad Street?”

Keel was calculating quickly. Getting over the shock of an encounter. Aside from the surprise of other man’s sudden appearance, and his unlikely invitation, nothing triggered his bodily alarms. His psychic armor had dutifully strapped itself on in the first instant, but now the brain was regaining control.

Given nature’s alarm for fight or flight, he always chose flight. Much safer. But as the seconds passed, he realized he was not afraid.

“Yeah, on Broad Street. It’s the closest. “

“You know it?” he asked, a test question the other saw through.

“Of course. In the square. Two minutes’ drive.”

Keel counted to three. To see if anything would tell him he was doing something very stupid.

When nothing did, he muttered, “All right,” and walked around the car to the passenger’s side. The young man got back into the driver’s seat and unlocked the door for Keel.

“We should introduce ourselves,” he said, after starting the car and rolling it slowly past the Dormands’ house and around the corner. “My name is Kevin. And I suspect you’re out tonight for the same reason I was.”

“Kevin,” Keel repeated. Wondering, does that come with a second name? “I’m not sure I want to tell you my name,” he said, honestly.

“Oh, that’s all right. Just pick something we can call you by.”

We?

“Jake,” he said. It was his uncle’s name.

“Fine. Jake.” The drove in a block in silence.

“Tell me something then,” Kevin’s voice picked up. They were waiting at the Broad Street traffic light now. “What’s your interest in the Dormands?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. That was truth too.

“Well. You weren’t just hanging around there tonight for fun.”

“I wasn’t hanging around. Just passing.”

“Twice?”

Keel exhaled.

The light changed. Kevin drove two more blocks, then pulled into the parking lot for Randy’s, the sort of franchise fast-food and coffee place Keel ordinarily avoided. He followed the other man inside the glass door and looked around, as if he’d never been inside; possibly he hadn’t. But he had been inside other Randy’s coffee shops and recognized the inexpensive decor, the smell of the brew and the sugary haze that seemed to blur the outlines of the pastel counters and tables; and the air of evening somnolence. With their day-shifts, or jobless days, long over, most customers (like Kevin and himself) merely needed somewhere to go.

If the world were divided in two, where would this place ‘stand’? he asked himself.

He already knew that ‘Kevin’ (whatever his real name was) must be counted on ‘his’ side of the great divide. Those who were opposed to Pig and his new gang — the people who, as Pig insisted, claimed to want change, but did not know, or could not say, what sort of change they wanted. Keel suspected that what they really wanted was just to be on top. They wanted their turn in the driver’s seat. To feel that their ‘side’ was in control, calling the shots, handing out the jobs if any jobs actually came along, seeing that people ‘like us’ got the contracts, did the hiring.

The few people seated in Randy’s that night were the kind of evening customers who tended to keep their backs turned. They might very well be on Pig’s side. What had life, and the long period of official prosperity overseen by Kevin O’Rhule, done for them? Given them evening hours in a cheap place to sit over a cup of coffee and a sugar snack? They sat alone, except for an older couple — he assumed they were a couple, though the one he ID’d as female wore a man’s boots and coat — at a half booth, shielded from outside view, but exposed to the interior.

The man who called himself Kevin guided Keel to a table as far from the silent couple as possible, and went for the coffees. A moment later a much different pair, girls, teenagers Keel thought, pushed in through the glass door, laughing over an ongoing conversation, and chattering back and forth for a minute or so until the weight of the place settled over them, and they realized theirs were the only voices to be heard.

Lucky kids, he thought. They did not have sides yet. They did not need them. Not yet.

His cup of coffee, served in mug-shaped cardboard, was in front of him. Kevin was sitting across the table, inspecting him again.

No time for dreaming.

The younger man had a long, slim nose, a narrow lower face, and a rather tulip-shaped cranium feathered with lightish hair showing some nap in it. He looked a little older than his voice and manner suggested.

“So when are they coming?”

The man’s gray eyes blinked.

Then he shook his head slightly and uttered a quiet laugh.

“You’re asking me… that?”

Keel considered. “You must be watching for something.”

Kevin tilted his head. “I could say the same about you.”

They spoke very quietly, so their voices did not carry. The teenagers were scooping up their sugary drinks and taking them outdoors somewhere far from the place’s deadening grown-up depression. Neither man wished to be overheard, or to draw any attention.

Keel noticed the other’s furtive upward glance around the interior once he had chosen a table. Looking for cameras, he thought.

“You already have,” he replied when the girls were gone. “That’s why we’re here. You said I was ‘hanging around.’ But that’s what you were doing.”

“All right. Yeah. I want to see who comes to that house.”

“Who’s there tonight?”

“If I knew, I probably wouldn’t tell anybody — nobody I didn’t know.” He gave a quick, sardonic grin. “But I don’t know. I just know they’ve been there before.”

“And it’s not the Tuesday night poker game.”

The other face smiled. “Oh, innocent days…. I think the stakes are a little higher than that.”

“What are the ‘stakes’?”

His colleague in after-hours sneakery looked unhappy.

“We’re still talking in riddles,” Keel pointed out. He took a breath. “I was there because I thought the people who lived in that house were acting like they had something to hide. At first I thought it was just about their dogs — “

“A couple of charmers, aren’t they?”

Maybe they were watchdogs after all, Keel thought. “But then I thought it might be something more important.”

“Like?”

“The political signs. The flag. It struck me as rather aggressive.”

“You think they’re part of something? The Pig campaign?”

They looked at each other. The word was out now.

“I think,” Keel said carefully, “the people who live in that house might be likely followers to somebody who was looking to — let’s say, ‘take over.’ Take charge, run things… They would be with the power.”

The two men held the shared look.

The younger one was not smiling. He was not relaxed or nonchalant or ironical, or any of the poses he had so far assumed. He was afraid, Keel thought, seriously afraid, and trying hard not to reveal any sign of his true state of mind. Keel’s own regard was, he supposed, much as he always looked. Glumly acceptant of the way things were. Despite his hare-brained, amateur efforts to ‘monitor’ the danger, gather intelligence, make a difference. Make a difference in what? Prevent this so-called ‘take-over’?

He wished he was imagining it. He wished he could stop hearing, or overhearing, the voices in his dreams. Dreams were just dreams — except when they weren’t. When they were something else. Messages; warnings. He could think of fancier, more imposing terms — shamanism, psychic transference, high-intensity inner light (sometimes known as HIIL) — but while nomenclature was important when you studied something, it was less so when you tried to deal with it. Dreams, particularly the dark ones, engendered activity. Making calls to city services. To the police dispatcher with the tired voice. Following the news of the graffiti messages. (Were they still turning up on the church message board?)

Spying on his neighbors.

Because what if the dreams were telling him something?

“Do you know them?” Kevin asked. “These model citizens? The people with the raging dogs?”

“No.”

A sigh. Kevin shook his head. “It would be more convenient if you were just another neighbor. You could knock at the door. Ring the bell. Whatever people do. Act like neighbors. Get yourself invited in and look around.”

For what? He wanted to say, ‘I don’t think they leave the explosives out in the open.’

“No,” he replied, “I can’t do that. They may know me, but they don’t like me.”

“Why?” A sharpness in the man’s gray eyes.

“I don’t like their dogs.”

He held back the full disclosure, out of an unreasonable, impractical emotion of shame. Was he the sort of person who couldn’t be trusted not to cast the first stone? Apparently.

Did he wish to be trusted? Apparently, again, because he sat through a long silence before the other ‘watcher’ spoke.

“Well,” Kevin said, with a kind of finality, “then we’ll have to ask her. Find out what she… sees.”

It was odd, but Keel did not have to be told who ‘she’ was. He already knew.

Outside Randy’s, Kevin offered to drive him back to the street where he had found him. Or anywhere. Not all the way ‘home,’ of course, but reasonably close.

The rules of this exercise they were both part of, whatever you wished to call it, were becoming clear. Kevin should not know where he lived. It would be better if he didn’t know his real name. Keel certainly did not know the other man’s real name. He also didn’t know what ‘Kevin’ was part of. He was obviously part of something. He had knowingly revealed that much, if nothing else, when he spoke of asking ‘her.’

We’ll have to ask her. Who are ‘we’?

People of the dream? People who hear voices?

“Never mind,” Keel said. “I’ll walk.”

16. A Vote for Consensus

He was a man who walked

He was a man who walked. Though he hasn’t walked so much at night in the past. People didn’t do that around here. Frankly, people didn’t do much outside their homes in his part of the city, as far as he could tell. Did they think it was unwise to set foot outdoors after dark? Keel did not believe it was dangerous. If he did encounter someone, wouldn’t it be more than likely to be a graffiti-marker — that is, someone on ‘his’ side — rather than those who gathered inside the Dormands’ fine manse to do whatever they did. Plan? Plot? Divide the spoils? Appoint themselves to important offices, the way plotters did in the old-fashioned days when gangs of angry people took down governments and made themselves rulers. What dictators, tyrants, ‘strong men’ did. Took names, made lists of enemies. Keel chuckled darkly. If dark suspicions were correct, he was undoubtedly on the Dormands’ list…

Of course he was, he thought, walking down Broad Street to the square, then back through it as he did on his afternoon walks, past the church where the message board had broadcast the dangerously subversive imperative, and then going two blocks out of his way to avoid passing the Dormands’ house yet again, the street where ‘Kevin’ had waited in the car and intercepted him. He doubted Kevin would go back there again now. But then how could he tell when the cars parked close to that house — clumsily, Keel now thought, with his new conspiratorial perspective — started leaving? Would he try to identify ‘them’? Did he have some kind of camera? Did he already have their license plate numbers recorded on some handy little screen?

In the morning, over coffee and a slow-burning stomach, he fought the urge to call the city’s nooz-sheets. Hadn’t they followed up on the church graffiti story?

He hadn’t seen a follow-up; it would be strange if they just let it go without hounding the police a little for some kind of update. Or at least a theory. Nooz-sheets were always printing the dismissive theories of police officials to explain why they couldn’t solve a crime, make progress on a case, prevent a similar crime from happening again.

The screens were full as usual with news about Pig. He was the favorite to win the next Voting Day, since he had won most all the previous ones. The polls — restricted by law because of their proven tendency to discourage voting (why bother? we’ll still lose) to no more than voter replies — turned up four definites for Pig. That was more than enough to win by plurality. None of the other candidates received more than one vote. Three voters confided that they were frankly undecided.

TV news carried the daily rallies. The now customary shot from the back of the hall while supporters stood and chanted while the candidate, raving from some distant podium, surrounded by ‘aides,’ egged them on. His raging red face, partially obscured, seen only in profile.

16. Designed to Produce Consensus

He was a man who walked. Though he hasn’t walked so much at night in the past. People didn’t do that around here. Frankly, people didn’t do much outside their homes in his part of the city, as far as he could tell. Did they think it was unwise to set foot outdoors after dark? Keel did not believe it was dangerous. If he did encounter someone, wouldn’t it be more than likely to be a graffiti-marker — that is, someone on ‘his’ side — rather than those who gathered inside the Dormands’ fine manse to do whatever they did. Plan? Plot? Divide the spoils? Appoint themselves to important offices, the way plotters did in the old-fashioned days when gangs of angry people took down governments and made themselves rulers. What dictators, tyrants, ‘strong men’ did. Took names, made lists of enemies. Keel chuckled darkly. If dark suspicions were correct, he was undoubtedly on the Dormands’ list…

Of course he was, he thought, walking down Broad Street to the square, then back through it as he did on his afternoon walks, past the church where the message board had broadcast the dangerously subversive imperative, and then going two blocks out of his way to avoid passing the Dormands’ house yet again, the street where ‘Kevin’ had waited in the car and intercepted him. He doubted Kevin would go back there again now. But then how could he tell when the cars parked close to that house — clumsily, Keel now thought, with his new conspiratorial perspective — started leaving? Would he try to identify ‘them’? Did he have some kind of camera? Did he already have their license plate numbers recorded on some handy little screen?

In the morning, over coffee and a slow-burning stomach, he fought the urge to call the city’s nooz-sheets. Hadn’t they followed up on the church graffiti story?

He hadn’t seen a follow-up; it would be strange if they just let it go without hounding the police a little for some kind of update. Or at least a theory. Nooz-sheets were always printing the dismissive theories of police officials to explain why they couldn’t solve a crime, make progress on a case, prevent a similar crime from happening again.

The screens were full as usual with news about Pig. He was the favorite to win the next Voting Day, since he had won most all the previous ones. The polls — restricted by law because of their proven tendency to discourage voting (why bother? we’ll still lose) to no more than voter replies — turned up four definites for Pig. That was more than enough to win by plurality. None of the other candidates received more than one vote. Three voters confided that they were frankly undecided.

TV news carried the daily rallies. The now customary shot from the back of the hall while supporters stood and chanted while the candidate, raving from some distant podium, surrounded by ‘aides,’ egged them on. His raging red face, partially obscured, seen only in profile.

Voting Day would be knocking at the door of Keel’s own Platow District soon now, a mere matter of days. That was how ‘the Voting’ went. Spiraling and twisting through the map of the country.

Candidates qualified for the vote months before with lists of signatures gathered by the parties that backed them. Each qualified candidate submitted a wish-list schedule of district voting days. A machine pawed through them, conflating them by lottery, to get the first few months of Voting Days scheduled. Then, the genius of the system, the candidates who did best in the first votes had their schedules preferred for the next month; and winners from that month scheduled the next. So it rolled, until the Sacred Commission stepped in for the Final Phases….

The system, its devisers pointed out, was intentionally front-loading, allowing the strongest performers a golden opportunity to sustain their momentum. It was like horse racing, or the Chase Europa. The better you did in one phase, the better your starting position for the next one. This structure created a calming impression of inevitability, planners argued, of growing consensus, unless of course the leader stumbled… Well, if it happened it was your downfall, not the system’s. If you stumbled, the other competitors scrambled around you, ran all the harder, the magnitude of their triumph increased by their newly won preference in choosing the next Voting districts; and left you in the dust. Such a result would also be accepted by the populace as earned. Any candidates who ran far behind the leader (or leaders) were expected to drop out, it was the patriotic thing to do, and allow their supporters to back a candidate more likely to prosper.

This overall effect of the country’s voting system was to build consensus, its planners reasoned. The last Voting Days of the ‘journey,’ as the system was often described, were meant to be a triumphant progress through the country whose reins of governance the leading contender would soon legitimately, and inevitably, grab hold of. The Leading Candidate was now almost certainly too far ahead to be caught. Crowds gathered to strew flowers at his (or her, theoretically) feet. The final Voting Days turned into victory parades, unifying the populace, building a general acceptance of the result, or at worst resignation.

The plan was consciously designed to avoid the last minute, overnight shock of a single nationwide voting day when half the country awoke outraged over what the other half had done the day before.

The country’s ‘Designers’ (as these hallowed personages were termed) wanted elections to appear to be a reasoned consensus, following a thoughtful process. They wanted new leaders to take office with the aura of a demonstrated consent of the governed.

In the nation’s earlier days, so-called ‘election days’ had frequently turned into highly charged and divisive public quarrels. Cries of ‘election fraud,’ rigged voting, and voter suppression added to a divisive, deadlocked ‘nightmare scenario,’ as it was termed by the nooz media.

Ironically, Keel thought, in view of what his own nightmares were telling him now.

The Monro Animal Shelter reminded him of a chicken coop on a farm he had visited a lifetime ago, attracted by a sign for “firewood for sale.” He had wanted a little firewood, half a trunkload maybe, for the fireplace in the cabin where he had taken himself for ‘a change.’ Remember that, he said to himself, he used to go places. The memory focused, then slipped away, as he looked for someplace to park. These days he was happy that his little car, made by a small company that probably didn’t exist any more, still started.

The animal shelter was located on the edge of town, where the zoning was looser. Any neighbors who lived nearby probably wished they didn’t.

The property was noisy, and the noise wasn’t caused by his arrival. Which nobody on two legs appeared to notice. The building had a ramshackle look, and the rows of what he assumed were cages for the dogs gave the place that chicken coop aspect: long rows of wood-and-wire boxes with metal roofs, wooden exterior walls, and chicken-wire gates. The dogs barked — some, though not all of them — but without particular urgency. They barked, he thought, because they were bored. They barked because they wanted someone to pay attention to them. But they barked without much urgency, because experience has already suggested to them that nobody much did. They had probably already been fed once that day, and no one had yet come back to clean out their cages. Keen kept his distance from this canine penitentiary, more from the intimation of a smell than its actuality, since a wintry breeze was blowing at his back.

The door to the structure, with a paper “Monro Animal Control” sign taped to its window, was closed, but not locked, so he walked in when no one answered his knock.

The room he entered was old, unappealing, built for something other than its current use, with a couple of desks and a few mismatched chairs. A woman sat on a chair with wheels behind a desk in a corner talking on a telephone. An actual old-fashioned wall-hanging telephone made of some unattractive beige plastic.

It was the assistant, he assumed, the one who did not bother to try to find out where the animal control officer was. The boss, he figured, would be secreted in some inner, cozier office, if she was there at all.

He stood and waited while the woman on the telephone pretended he wasn’t there.

She would nod at him any moment, he thought, and tell him to sit down.

She didn’t.

Keen planted himself like a tree between the door and the woman’s desk and remained calm. The way to win the contest of wills, he thought, was to do nothing, show nothing, until the fact of one’s unemotional persistence worked its way through the defenses of his opponent, who had turned her body slightly so as not to look at him and lowered her voice.

Personal call. What a surprise.

He could sense the sigh working its way through the woman’s body. She muttered some farewell, put down the receiver, and stood up as if the gesture changed the scene somehow, magically transported them both to another room, perhaps.

The nonexistent anteroom, where the visitors waited.

“Can I help you?” she said, her tone suggesting the unlikelihood of that possibility, and not quite looking at him.

He was unprepossessing, Keel knew, but he did not require admiration to speak his piece.

“I called a couple of times,” he said, without emotion. “I’d like to speak to the animal control officer.”

“What about?” She gave him a quick inspection. Was he looking for a dog? She had plenty of those to offer.

“About the dogs belonging to a household on the corner of Pike and Kent. Their name is Dormand.” That should do it, he thought.

“I see.”

He waited.

“Well. I’m the animal control officer.”

She looked at him then, but did not ask him to sit down, though the mismatched chairs were available. He wondered if he should mention the unreturned phone calls again; but no, there was already enough between them without adding another irritation.

“I believe,” he said, without revealing his surprise (not the assistant?), “that you are related to the Dormand family. They have two dogs,” he added, as if she could somehow be in want of this information.

She tilted her head. “Yes they do.”

The words were a statement, but her expression a question.

“I am here to request, as a citizen of Monro, and a resident of the neighborhood, that you do something about them. To prevent them from interfering with people’s right to walk on the sidewalk.”

She did not reply. He took her silence as a request for more information.

“The way the dogs bark at passersby and lunge at the fence can be quite disturbing.” He paused. “To children… and the unwary.”

“They’re disturbing the peace,” he added.

His own peace in particular. This did not sound to his own ears like a sufficient indictment. He tried to think of something more to add to the bill.

“I already have,” she said, before he could paint a darker picture.

Animal Control Officer Dormand was a tall woman on the slender side, dressed in slacks and a loose pullover that hid her figure. She continued to stand, keeping them both standing — in the hope, he thought, to rid herself of his presence as quickly as possible — although, he noticed, she seemed unable to stand without leaning slightly to one side or another. A slight scoliosis, he thought. And her features, he thought, looked drawn.

His presence, clearly, was not improving her day. He was a complainer. Another complainer.

Perhaps an animal control officer’s lot was not a happy one?

“Do you mean to say,” he queried, compelled to by her lack of elaboration, “the animals won’t be unrestrained any more when they’re out in the yard and free to bark and lunge at the fence when someone walks by?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“Look,” she said, shaking her head, and then collapsing into her chair, with an air of surrender. “I know why you’re really here. It’s the cars, isn’t it?”

Keel was stunned. Yes, he thought, he was more than a little interested in the cars as well. But how did she possibly know?

“Well…” He decided on candor, or its appearance. “In part. But the dogs do bother me.”

“And all those cars. Parked up and down the street every night. Do they bother you too?”

Her tone was sharper. She’d gone over to the offensive, now that cards were on the table.

“Well” — improvising, things were moving faster than he expected — “this is your family we are talking about, isn’t it? Who else should I go to?”

He offered what he thought was his naive expression. Just some little old man, with his petty annoyance. Some silly gripe about a neighbor taking his favorite parking space.

“I have talked to them. I can tell you that much.”

“I see.” He feigned contentment. “Then you’ve heard from others? There have been some other complaints?”

“Look, Mister — ” She frowned. She hadn’t asked his name.

He tried to exploit the opening. “What do they do there every night? Is it gambling?”

“No. But if it was, what am I supposed to do about it? Look, Mister…”

She paused this time, waiting for him to provide the name.

“Keel.”

No point in withholding. He had already provided his name, and number, to her assistant. In fact, he was spreading it all over town.

Besides, he detected a change in her manner, in the direction of candor. What could a dog officer do about parking? He didn’t have to fence with her. If she wanted something from him in return for listening to his complaint, sympathy maybe, that was easy enough to provide.

He gestured with his head to one of the mismatched chairs. “May we sit?”

“Of course.” A brisk nod. She sat behind her desk.

“People are talking…” He left the subject vague. “And the dogs do worry me. It seems almost as if they were guarding something — some secret. People who have an unfriendly dogs sometimes are doing things they don’t want other people to know about it… I mean this is our neighborhood.”

He would like to know who else has expressed concern; would she tell him?

“And then so many cars. Parking up and down the street. On both sides.”

“I know,” she said. “These gatherings clog up the street. The neighbors complain if they can’t find a nearby place to park.”

Gatherings? What sort?

“And they stay there a long time.” He was guessing.

“Yes. But what am I supposed to do?” she said again. “I’m not the parking officer.”

He nodded. Be sympathetic, he reminded himself. “It’s just that everybody knows you’re related.”

“I’ve spoken to Cal.”

A son? Her brother? Would she tell him.

“He said he’d talk to them…”

He looked his question.

“They told him there were lots of things to prepare… To get ready…”

“For what?”

Wouldn’t ‘Kevin,’ he said to himself, like to know the answer to that.

But her expression sharpened, and she looked away. Looking like someone sorry for having spoken.

Keel sensed he was not going to get anything more out of the encounter. She had told him something to shut him up; not to encourage his curiosity. Her brown hair fell over her face when she turned her head. Her nails, he noticed, were short.

“Well, thanks,” he said, “for listening.”

The encounter had not begun well, he told himself, but then she had accepted his presence, acknowledged his right to ask questions. His public ‘right to know’ about matters that affected the quality of life in their city.

She nodded in reply to his expression of gratitude, still avoiding his glance.

“And for dealing with those dogs.”

It was only he left that he realized she hadn’t told him what she had said when she talked to the Dormands about their nasty dogs.

He would have to find out.

17. Life in a Cage

Stepping down the rail-less stoop from the shack that served as an animal control office, he turned left instead of right and found himself sniffing the acrid, feral odor of too many dogs.

Still he walked toward them.

There were two rows of cages. The barking increased at his approach. He listened for a tone of expectancy. Excitement that someone was approaching, paying attention. Someone outside their cage, their prison, would look at them, speak with the unintelligible speech that nevertheless they registered and read, perhaps, in their canine souls. They knew, perhaps by smell, that the stranger’s approach was not the same as the routine approach of the assistant, or the volunteers, or whoever it was that cleaned the manure out of their cage and sprayed from a can or bottle to neutralize the heavy acidic odor of the urine. Then locked their cage door, again, perhaps even without a word.

No. The volunteers at least would talk to them, try to soothe them.

“There, girl, they would say. There, there. Look at you. Look how dirty you’ve got yourself! You’ve got to lick yourself, girl. Keep yourself clean.”

“Don’t roll in it, boy! For god’s sakes don’t roll in it.”

The dogs were shouting their barks now. Little ones were going ‘yip!-yip!-yip!’ like something underfoot and still determined to protect the mobile boundaries of its tiny, fierce, possessive, self-assertive existence. Determined to let you know and remind you continually that they were there, underfoot. As if otherwise you would forget about them, and step on them with your heavy, stupid, thoughtless feet and crush their fierce little bones; their bright, anxious, eager souls. In fact, people might.

The bigger dogs were less expectant. They slouched up against the front of their cages, as if taking some space from the world that was denying them everything they truly needed, especially space to spread out and lie on the ground; find someplace soft and lie down on their flank, stretching their legs out fully with whole yards of space surrounding them, free in the physical cosmos for which they were born. Instead of cooped up in this pretend space, this little prison island of boring food and the impossible smells of so many other imprisoned beasts whose propinquity confused their judgment and their nascent ability to think. Should they expect to fight? Or walk away with supreme confidence, nose in the air? Leaving the bad smells of too many bodies cooped closely together disdainfully behind.

The older, wiser dogs for the most part cared little for Keel’s approach. Another stranger who might poke his eyes at their cage door, overwhelm the soured space with man-smell, and blunder on after an uncomfortable moment, to offer the same useless presence to a neighbor, the next scent over. The sick one, maybe. The skinny one. The one who ate dirt, or tried to.

Coops and cages, Keen thought.

How did these captive creatures bear it?

Overwhelmed, he turned away.

The barking increased now that the canine eyes watching his progress could sense his abandonment of them, monitor his departure. Were they triumphantly barking him off the property? Or begging him to return and rescue them?

Life, in the Era of Pig — the unwelcome thought came on its own, from somewhere; from a dream? — would be like that.

Each man or woman, each human existence in its cage. Waiting for release.

What has he learned from this member of the Dormand clan? he asked as drove back to his own dogless domain.

That there are ‘others.’ That neighbors have complained their streets are clogged with vehicles taking up all the parking. They have to drive to blocks away, in the dark, and find somebody else’s house to park in front of. Thinking, all the while, that somebody will stick their head out, wondering “who’s that?” Is that Aunt Billie wandering around at night in her old-fashioned Cuddle-lac? Somebody dropping by to see the Smutzes across the street?

‘Who’s that, Jo?’

‘It’s nobody, sweetheart. Nobody we know.’

Nobody wanted to be that somebody else’s ‘nobody.’ They didn’t want to walk around in the dark feeling a need to apologize. ‘Sorry! Somebody’s having a party down the block! No place to park!’

Displaced is how they were feeling.

Get used to it, Keel thought. You will not belong — when Pig’s revolution comes to town. His gang.

They will park wherever they want. They will live wherever they want.

They will roll their trucks and the motorcycles up on the lawn wherever they want.

They will park them in Town Square, on the green in front of City Hall, and stamp their ciggies out on the grass. Their paper plates, beer cans, and junk food bags will pile up, overflow the couple of trash cans kept there by Public Works. So much for the piss-ant ‘public.’ Then they will walk down Main Street, stick their noses into a shop and kidnap a few kids to make them pick up their trash and haul it way.

‘Where should you dump it? We don’t care where you dump it. Go find their place. Dump it there.’

Yes, Keel thought, dump it on our country.

(What was this? Was he dreaming again?)

You have no respect for our country. You want your own country, where you can do what you want, turn the world into a pigsty, the kind of place you feel comfortable in. Where you can target-shoot all day. Kill all the wildlife you can find. Shoot the pigeons off the statues in front of City Hall. Hold rallies in the park all night, with all the beer and booze and grating, boring, thumping music you can pour out of your sound-boxes, and call up your ‘vain-angel’ preachers to preach to the converted.

Thou should not kill!… unless, of course, you really hate somebody. In that case, go right ahead, they probably deserve it.

Keel daydreamed when he walked, he always had. But now his daydreams seemed to summon up those other dreams — the ‘seeing’ dreams that came at night.

Everybody dreamed, but Keel suspected the way he dreamed — some of the time —

was different, different in kind, from what happened in ordinary anxiety or wish-fulfillment dreams, when in the midst of hours of shut-eye those REMs started revving up.

He was revving up as well, but to a different engine. Sleeping Keel, dreaming Keel, was transported to somewhere more absolute, and shown things — visions, perhaps; messages? — of what was happening, had happened, or was still to come. He was taken away: transported. But by what?

Ordinarily, he would say ‘his own mind.’ But what was happening now did not feel ordinary. Something more than ordinary. What ‘more’? Whose mind?

The dogs were there.

They were always there. (Except the time they weren’t.)

The white one, the large mean-faced one, leapt up against the fence, confronted him loudly. Its face was full of wild angry desire. What did it want? Something more, he felt, something more than ordinary canine wants and needs.

It wants its freedom, he thought. To do what? To run with its brothers in the wild night — and tear up everything it finds. Why else be animal? Why else be wild? Why else was it possessed of such power, such fury?

Enough of these people with their people smell, their people, their fences, their rule! It wanted the wild chaotic nights, the country of formless confusion where shapeless power ruled.

The animal wants its fellows, Keel thought. It wants to belong; to run with the pack, to nuzzle its nose under the butt of its fellow. It wants to be one of the Pigglies.

18. ‘Places for the Soldiers’

That night he found Kevin again. The younger man’s dark sedan was only a little larger, he realized, than his own car. That made it easier to park, but it also made the vehicle stand out from almost all the larger vehicles clogging the narrow streets around the Dormands’ house. He had parked it a block farther away than the last time, so far from the house that Keel wondered how he could persuade himself that he was monitoring anything.

Kevin was watching him, he knew. Keel didn’t have to see him to know it; he knew it from inside. He walked past the car, proceed to the end of the block, then lingered there, as far from any street or house light as he could be.

His presence, Keel felt, would draw the younger man out of his car.

Two minutes later Kevin got out of the car, betraying no concern, and walked a brisk, cold-weather pace up to Keel. He wore a light brown waterproof coat and looked tired.

“Here again, Jake?” Kevin said. “Hanging around street corners now.”

Keel felt an odd excitement, nerves probably, as if he’d prepared the wrong talk for the class he was supposed to teach and was now compelled to wing it. Would he be up for the task? “I have something to tell you,” Keel spoke.

“Really.”

Kevin hunched his shoulders slightly forward to look the older man straight in his face. Or maybe the stoop came from the burden those shoulders were carrying. The weight of the world?

“They’re preparing something,” Keel said bluntly. “That’s why there’s so many meetings here, so many cars.”

The younger man did not respond, as if waiting for something more.

“The woman, the dog officer, told me.”

“You talked to their daughter-in-law?” The watcher for some an unstated ‘us’ did not sound happy.

Daughter-in-law? Keel hadn’t considered that possibility. He thought her connection was blood.

“She’s the dog officer. I was a citizen with a complaint.”

Kevin sighed. His face looked damp as if it were raining in his world, though it wasn’t in Keel’s.

“You and those dogs,” he said.

“It gave me a reason to talk to her.”

“And she talked to you about the meetings?” He sounded skeptical.

“That’s what I’m telling you. She said the Dormands couldn’t tell her when the meetings would stop and the cars go away because they had ‘to get ready.’”

Kevin groaned softly.

“Of course they have to get ready.” He paused, then spoke again. “Pig’s coming here. So, yeah, they’re preparing a big, warm welcome.”

“He’s coming here?” He felt confused. “You mean he’s coming to the district for the Voting Day.”

“Here. Monro.”

A shock. “How do you know that? It hasn’t been announced.”

Kevin’s raincoat clad shoulders lifted slightly. “We know.”

He felt an urge to walk up to the Dormands’ big house, knock on the front door, and tell them he wanted to apologize for throwing the rock. Maybe they would invite him in; everything forgiven.

“They need bases. Places for their ‘soldiers’ to stay.”

Soldiers?

Apologize and offer to pay for the damages. He forgot there weren’t any actual damages.

“Maybe in that house.”

Dazed, Keel took a step toward Kevin’s car. As if seeking a place to hide.

Kevin seemed to sense this desire. “I don’t want you inside my car again,” he said, bluntly. “I don’t want any sign of you at all around here.”

Did he fear being stopped, searched? Questioned?

“I don’t smoke,” Keel objected. “Pieces of me don’t flake off.”

“Still. You never know.”

“What are you afraid of?”

Kevin groaned, the sound muffled this time, barely audible. “I’m thinking of you, man.”

Maybe he was.

“How can I find you then?” Keel said without thinking. He felt a sudden desire — a stab of fear; longing, maybe — not to be alone.

“We’ll be in touch,” Kevin said quietly. As if the stars could hear.

This made no sense. “You don’t know how to reach me.”

“Oh, yes.” A nod. “Yes, we do.”

Kevin was not the watcher’s real name, he knew. It was his nom de guerre, chosen (he suspected) because it was the name of the former Chief Xec, Kevin O’Rhule, who had retired, gracefully, earlier that year, looking so much older than when he had taken office so long ago, walking tiredly off stage with a backward glance at a world, and a place in it, he would miss.

Those who believed in his world, reasoned, modest, seeking always for balance, fairness, were sorry to see him go. An outpouring of public affection greeted his departure. His goodbye tour was mobbed by large, grateful, peaceful, mannerly crowds at every stop of the line, as he crossed the continent on his way to retirement, beside another ocean. In their hearts they wished to summon him back, presume on his generosity, persuade him to stay. But he couldn’t; it was against the rules. A country was governed by rules. A society lived by them. Keel, like millions of others, tens of millions, respected O’Rhule’s decision. He had the make-up of a wise leader; modest, self-questioning, forbearing.

Now, however, in view of what has followed, he wished the honorable outgoing Xec possessed a dash of the ax murderer in his make-up.

The Pigglies represented the unleashing of the demons, who chafed under the balanced rule of a careful man, a thoughtful leader. They did not desire restraint. They wanted action, however ill judged; passion, however ugly; emotion, anger, victims — and a bigger piece of the pie. They wanted a pig-caller, who roused them in voice that woke their appetites and summoned them to slop at the feast. Or partake in the slaughter.

In their heart, Keen feared, what they wanted was slaughter.

Politics, under Kevin O’Rhule, was thin gruel. A slim and self-regulated man, he modeled what he preached. He avoided gluttony, sugar, alcohol, tobacco, drugs. He drank diet soft drinks. He left the Executive Chef’s special confections on the table. He kept his hands off the servants. He kept his voice under control.

Was it this model leadership, so consistently choosing reason over unreason that filled to overflowing the subterranean tanks of rage powering the new, irrational movement?

“The people want change!” Pegasso boomed. “They must have it!”

You can’t always not-have what you want, Keel pondered. You must have it sometimes, however; or else appetite preys upon you.

Was that why so many of his fellow citizens grew stout as they aged?

They gluttoned in private. In the privacy of their own homes, at their own tables. They surrendered to appetite; excess over moderation. Desire over restraint. They puffed themselves to death. Or they drank to delusion.

They lived peaceful, ordinary, outwardly friendly, apparently satisfied existences: good citizens, paid their taxes, went to work as long as they had to, decade after decade, while cultivating some private vice, or vices. Little stashes of dirty pics. Splurges at the race track; or, these days, at the casinos. Or, more simply, on their machines. No limits there. Others bet legally, but obsessively, on the markets: trading trading trading. Adults worried about the virtual violence depicted on the screens their children played on. Their children grew up without becoming murderers, but they watched a steady diet of contact sports, action-adventure videos, film violence, war movies. Screenporn.

The devil had to dance somewhere.

Now it danced with Mister Pig.

And yet it was not the Pigglies who initiated the surveillance that Keel so anxious, it was the Kevvens who planted the lenses.

If he had sensed, rather than purely hallucinated a watching presence at the Dormands’ house and up and down those two or three blocks where the cars parked at night, it was because such a presence actually existed. But it was not as he feared and believed possible, given what he felt about the Dormands, a surveillance by the other side. It was the eye of the cameras hidden in the shrubbery or in the branches of bare trees, secreted by ‘his’ side, those whom he privately christened the ‘Kevvens,’ because each member of their fellowship had taken the code name of the former leader: the good guys. Eyes intended to capture the identity, at least the license plate numbers, of the individuals who parked their cars on these blocks to conspire inside the Dormands’ manse.

Maybe these people, the city’s key Pegasso supporters if Kevin’s information was correct, should have been more circumspect. They behaved as if they had nothing to hide.

But why should they be discreet? Voting Day was coming shortly to the state of Platow. If there was a conspiracy — to do what, exactly? — it was hiding under the flag of a perfectly legal ‘campaign.’ Why should not the followers of Pig be ‘preparing’ to get out the vote? If anyone needed to know, they were (plausibly, legally) organizing a canvas of the neighborhood, the lower Broad Street ward.

They were getting out the vote.

But that was not his dreams — or his paranoia — told him. The people parking those cars outside the Dormand house were not the local party hacks divvying up voter lists and organizing bell-ringing teams. These were the Pig’s gang. Advance men, tacticians, planners. But what were they planning? What else — a voice stabbed the answer somewhere in the back of his consciousness — but the arrival of boss, the mighty Pig himself? Here. But why, of all the cities in the district of Platow, was the campaign preparing to plant its banner in Monro?

Keel walked to the square in the late afternoon, avoiding Pike Street and the Dormands, the light lingering a few minutes longer each week these late winter days, determined to inspect once again the message board outside the Universal Church.

He had come to a new understanding of the blunt, dangerous message: “Kill Mr. Pig.”

‘Mr. Pig’ was not simply a reference to candidate Karol Pegasso. The message meant ‘Stop the Pig movement!’ But ‘movement’ was not a strong enough word. Not precise enough. It was an illness, a disease, an outbreak of hysteria. A national malaise — but no, something stronger than that. A fever. Spread openly before across entire society, a significant portion of which was under its spell. Like some tribe of ancient people, first peoples, dancing before their ritual totems and sacred paraphernalia, the campaign’s followers stared at their screens, at the images on their screens, as if spellbound by some power. As their ancestors had danced around some sacred effigy compounded of blood and longing, they found release now in the mediated image of the raving, darkly liberating Pig: spellbound, brain-washed.

Keel waited anxiously to see if the graffiti agitator had struck again through the medium of church’s message board. But what he saw as he walked past the church and glanced swiftly at the board puzzled him more than any of the possible meanings of the previous message:

“Your Help is in Your Own Hands.”

What did that mean? Do the members of the Universal Church speak in a code closed to others?

He did not believe it. He believed the message, veiled though it might be, was intended for a wider audience. And he believed it was meant for him.

19. Mrs. Nathan

He has seen Mrs. Nathan only twice. In the hospital she looked small in the bed, but hospital beds did that to you. If you were healthy and strapping, full of vital spirits, you wouldn’t be there. If you were lying, head barely raised, not much of you actually propped up against the two pillows and the metal bars, you were probably some poor creature experiencing difficulty over getting more than a few drops of water down the gullet. Was that how she had looked ? A poor creature?

Except for the eyes, maybe. He had barely been able to look at her eyes. Were they gray or black? They were magnets, he thought. Everything in their purview was attracted to them. His evasion of those eyes was the defense of a an ordinary fellow who did not wish to become imprisoned by those eyes. Could he be sure they would release them?

Keel shook his head. He had felt comfortable in her presence, more comfortable than he expected, but he had asked her only a single question, hadn’t he? What should he do? What should anyone do?

He could not recall her answer precisely, but his sense was that it was no answer. She had answered him with a dismissal. I’ve told you all I mean to. I’ve told you that I know what you’re seeing, in dreams or wherever, because I’m seeing it to.

But she did not tell him what to do. Had he not asked the question properly?

Nathan was a common name. Even if he assumed she lived somewhere in the city proper, and that was a reasonable assumption — certainly she knew Green Hills Park intimately — he would find numerous Nathans in the book, but perhaps no “Mrs. Eleni Nathan.”

He doubted that she gave out her name widely. ‘They used to call us witches.’

He doubted she was searchable on the think-machines. He would find other Mrs. Nathans, but not the one who had run away from the Rehab facility and buried herself in a bunker in the woods — to ‘be alone,’ she had indicated. Someone who took pains of that sort to be alone would probably not invite casual attention from the general public. Would tend to hide herself away; perhaps had always done so.

He tried calling Monro Physical Rehabilitation.

No; no patient by that name. His query was answered with such fervid certainty that it appeared to him the facility’s staff and volunteers were being instructed to erase all memory of her stay. He called the police and asked for the sergeant he had led to her bunker in Green Hills Park. The sergeant was not in; he left a voice message at his extension.

What if he was going about this the wrong way? Keel asked himself.

What if he didn’t use the phone or any communication device to send his message? What if he just sent it with his mind?

The answer came late in the day, when he was about to gather himself for the daily trek down Pike Street to the square. He had his left arm thrust into his dark green winter jacket. But he stopped with that one arm in a sleeve, and listened.

Then after closing his front door firmly behind him, he turned right instead of left and got into his old, little-used foreign-made sedan.

Third time this week. He would have to start thinking of himself as a busy man.

He checked the gas gauge; still mostly full.

The call, the sensation at the back of his head, right below the knot at the top of the vertebrae, had come from the west. It tingled, occasionally rising to the recollection of a bee sting, the bass note you got after the initial pain had worn off. As if some distant presence was putting a fingertip on a nerve, squeezing a string of tiny neurons, causing some new signal or interrupting the flow of known impressions.

The signal guided him, told him which way to go.

He started west, of course, taking the state road out of the city limits, and through the suburban towns, past the shopping centers that hugged the outskirts of Monro, and when the turn-off to Star*Route 22 appeared, the sensation told him to take it and follow it north along a swooping uphill climb, where signs warned yahoo motorists to slow down for the upcoming turns.

This was the country, Keen thought.

The place where he lived, the places most people lived their whole lives, packed people close together. But much of the country, the Commonhope of UZ, remained like this. Unsuitable for development, in real estate terms. Semi-cleared hillsides with a lonely farmhouse halfway up the slope. Pastures. Fence lines. The route gentled down again and he drove along a flatter strip, valley land, where stubble fields from last year’s corn crops covered both roadsides, visible throughout a largely snow-less winter.

Other hillsides were wholly treed. When he came to the intersections of paved, two-way roads, the places where the storefronts and the churches gathered, he realized that you could not call such places towns, they were “corners,” truly. The ‘four-corners’ where the spirits store was located, and had always been.

The ‘corners’ with no gas station; have to drive another ten miles north.

People who lived out here, away from the big cities, and the smaller cities like Monro, and the towns that surrounded them, relied on the denser population centers for anything more than the most basic needs. The corner stores kept bread and milk, coffee, alcohol (some of them), ciggos, sugar-sources, frozen-dins, gambling cards. They relied on the bigger people-centers for the rest: produce beyond what they could grow themselves. Cash input from travelers passing through, stopping for gas for snacks or someplace to sit down and grab a bite. Customer for the local craft goods shops. They were forced to go elsewhere for stores that sold insurance or hardware, or cut hair, or offered ‘financial services,’ or something different for breakfast from what their own kitchens or the local diner served up.

All the tiny ‘corners’ gathering-spots did offer breakfast, Keel noticed with an outsider’s curiosity about the ‘new’ or ‘different,’ but their menus were pretty much all the same.

Keel ate breakfast alone at his kitchen table staring at a nooz-sheet. He could not imagine what attraction the breakfast spots exerted that would take him out of his own house, his familiar routine, to rub elbows with strangers.

Well, maybe these folks weren’t truly strangers to one another. Maybe people were friendlier out here. Maybe that was the attraction.

Whenever he came to the next intersection, or traffic light, or warning sign for some new numbered route, his own interior signal kept him going on Star*Route 22. He passed the last of the places likely to have animal shelters; they have barns now.

Did the people living out here, he asked himself, feel the lure of the Pigglies? Were they likely to vote for Mr. Pig?

Or did they share his own unease? Keel did not know these people.

He drove past a dense settlement of identical structures with a big sign announcing “Mobile Metropolis.” He was gazing at the long array of low, ranked, rectangular dwellings that seemed to him not ‘mobile,’ but stranded — when the ‘call’ sent him down a two-lane road with nothing but bare fields on one side and a fair-sized river winding companionably on the other.

What did all that water think about what was going on in the country?

Were its atoms in an uproar? Were its particles divided between positive and negative charges? Or did they sigh and say, ‘The animals come, the animals go, but there will always be water flowing down this time-smoothed bottom, this comfortable trough in the Great Mother’s rutted face’?

Speeding and slowing.

Leaping in storms, lapping at the banks in spring, waning slow and thirsty in summer.

Keen hoped the water was right. It took the long view.

He wished that view was available for him as well, but human beings were short-lived and understandably focused on the now, the Biblical three-score and ten — too skimpy a number by a long shot (as, increasingly these days, he began to realize). Human beings were less likely to be complacent about the arrival of the next ice age, or the rise of the oceans. How would water feel if its bed dried up? Would it shrug and think, ‘There’s still plenty of me left elsewhere’?

When the neural-urge came again, guiding him to turn at the next bridge crossing so that (if his internal compass was correct) he was heading east, Keel began to grow concerned, because now he was driving back in the direction from which he had come, though it would be many slow miles on roads like these before he reached Monro.

But the prompting, the signal, swiftly directed him off to a dirt lane, which soon transformed, as his modest vehicle began to nose its way up, into a winding narrow track that guided him uphill within view of a house-sized building of conical, uncommon design, closely hemmed by tall pines. He caught glimpses of a bare, peaked roof, as if the builders had neglected to finish it off with shingles, or roofing of any material, or assumed that the incline was steep enough that no water would work its way through the roofing wood, which from a distance looked to be a composite like plywood.

The structure was short on windows as well, as if throwing up a wooden skin to serve as a kind of curtain wall to keep the elements out was as far as the builder felt he needed to go. And that all the usual refinements, such as windows, roof coverings, and exterior wall facades were frills he could do without in his hurry to move on to some greater purpose.

What could that purpose be?

Keel was happy (and rather surprised) when he left his car, approached the trees, and discovered the existence of a door, deeply shadowed by two effusive pines that between them managed to block any view of the door from the drive, along with much of the building’s blockish exterior. The ‘house’ was actually a bunker, Keel decided, now that he was close enough to size it up, topped off with that oddly steep dome-like roof. It was as if the building’s shape were molded to the need to keep some towering object — another pointy tree? a rocket-shaped vessel? was anything truly impossible here? — concealed within.

Had the place initially been designed as a missile silo? Such things had existed, he knew, during the old wars.

The door had no window in it, either, but he was certain that whoever was inside was watching his approach from somewhere.

They were probably all Kevvens, he was thinking, when the door opened inward with no visible human assistance. Someone passed across his view of the interior, and an instant later another someone else emerged from behind the thick wooden door and looked at him appraisingly.

Men of a certain age, he judged, but able; still strong, active, long-legged creatures.

Unlike himself, Keel thought. He was too short, and always a little too soft; no one called him an ‘active’ man. He was more like a ‘sitting’ man.

A third ‘Kevven’ appeared. A little older, a little grayer; closer in age to Keel, but in better shape. His features had laugh lines, but the eyes were heavy lidded. Perhaps, Keel thought, from the weight they were carrying. He nodded an ‘all right’ nod to the colleague, or perhaps ‘comrade’ holding the door, and then greeted Keel with the ironical expression of the shared sufferer. Prisoners of destiny.

“Got here all right, I see.”

“You people are well hidden up this way,” Keel replied.

The gray-haired man shrugged. “They won’t find us easily… But they will, eventually.”

Keel wondered what would happen before that ‘eventually.’

“Are they looking?”

“All I mean is no one’s safe. Nowhere’s safe.”

Was this fellow having dreams as well? Maybe that accounted for the darkness around his eyes. We’re all seeing a lot of darkness these days, Keel thought. When was the last time he took a good look in the mirror?

There seemed to be no reason to beat around the bush.

“What do we do then?”

“You mean here? Not much to do. This place will go up like a chimney. It’s built around a chimney. And,” he twisted his head in a quick scan of the interior, “as you can see, not a lot of ways in or out.”

“The place is a pillbox.”

Keel realized this truth only as he spoke it. “It’s built like a fort.”

“Windows reflect light,” the man said in a tone of weary acknowledgment. “And after dark? Lights in a window? You might as well put a sign on the roof saying, ‘Target lives here.’”

Curious, Keel wanted a tour (where did people sleep? how many were they?), but all that was up to the other man. He wondered what name they used for themselves here. Were they all Kevvens to one another?

“Well,” his Kevven said, “I’ll bring you to her.”

Keel followed.

The house was circular, like an oversized yurt, built around that central chimney chute — how many separate fires did it exhaust? — with thin room-dividers separating spaces. The dividers were short walls, like fins or curtailed spokes, radiating from the center, with passage spaces at both their interior and exterior. One could move quickly enough inside the place. A ladder led up to the loft-style second story. Beams would be exposed up there, he supposed. And hidden windows.

One of the rooms they passed through served as a kitchen. A hot plate, microwave, sink, refrigerator. A square table behind which a woman sat, though not the ‘her’ he had come to see. Someone much younger who sat looking down at a handful of papers and turned her face away as they passed.

Keel caught a glimpse of silver ear-stud within a scallop of short dark hair. An acolyte, he thought, on first impression. Apprentice spy: all eyes and ears.

On the other side of the kitchen, the divider closed off both passages. A real wall, with a slider.

When his gray-haired guide slid it open, Keel saw a bed and the lower half of a human form profiled beneath a quilt.
The two men entered. His guide Kevven slid the entryway shut behind them.

“Mrs. Nathan,” Keel said to the form reclining in the darkness.

It would be polite, he thought, conventional at least, to say something more such as “You’re looking better,” but in fact he did not see any difference in the woman he saw now from the recovering “Mrs. Nathan” he had visited in the hospital.

Nor, for that matter, from the woman he had led the police to in the cement bunker in Green Hills Park.

He wondered now if she had been looking for some place to hide her signal from those she didn’t wish to find her. Now that he knew how strong it was.

Lying on her back in a darkened room, with head and shoulders pillowed, her face looked silent to Keel, the features clouded. Her expression worn, inward.

Just as she had looked in the Monro hospital when the young, professionally dressed woman of unknown affiliation had sat by her bed, minding her, as if the authorities feared she would mysteriously slip away once more.

Until — once again, as on the previous occasion — her eyes opened and blazed, and the rest of her features came alive as well.

“You must think,” she said to Keel, “that I am a terribly lazy person…”

Not knowing how to reply, he was silent.

“Here I am again… Always in bed.”

“Maybe,” he offered, “you will be getting up soon.”

“Yes, maybe. But that won’t necessarily be a good thing.”

She chuckled drily, in a low, precise voice.

She lifted a hand to the gray-haired man, who turned and departed, leaving them alone.

“His name is Marvin,” she remarked.

“Not Kevven?”

She laughed softly. “That can get confusing up here.”

The room felt claustrophobic. Keel could not imagine what it would be like to lie here in bed, in the semi-dark. No windows anywhere below the structure’s upper level.

He broke the silence. “May I tell you why I’ve come? Why I wanted to see you.”

She eyed him.

“You want to know what to do.”

Of course. She knew things; she had already told him that. She was a seer. He had no need to tell her what she already knew.

She had guided him here. Her touch a precisely perceptible sensation in some part of the brain from which his own thoughts and words did not originate; and which told him which way to go and when to turn. How else would he have found the place?

“Yes. You’re right. And you don’t have to tell me, ‘everyone wants to know that.’”

“Oh,” spoken with the same faint, humorous superiority, “some people already do know. They do.”

She didn’t have to name them.

“What will ‘they’ do?” he asked. “Will they break the law? Ignore it?”

“I don’t think ‘laws’ will matter much any more. Some people will just sort of take what they want. His people will.”

The lack of emotion with which she spoke this dark prophecy unsettled him. It was too

much like his own vision. And it scared the hell out of him.

What did it mean to live calmly with such knowledge?

“What will the other people do then?” he demanded. “People like you?”

What he really meant, he realized, was ‘people like me.’

“Try to run away, I guess. Hide. Maybe look for other countries.” She gazed at him, but made her gaze soft. “I don’t see everything, of course.”

“Where will they go?”

“Places like this?” Each phrase sounded like a question. “Remote places… Places nobody else wants.”

“Then they’d better bring a lot of food with them,” Keel responded, thinking of his drive through the hills and valleys of rural Platow. “And coffee.”

She laughed a kind of cackle. “Yes, that’s the first thing they’ll miss. I know that already.”

“I’ll bring some next time.”

She laughed again. “The old witch misses her morning coffee.”

Note to self: Go to different markets to stock up on cans of coffee. Don’t start a panic by clearing out one market.

But he was glad to hear the possessor of the voice that summoned him laugh at herself.

“Seriously,” he said. “What do you think they will do?”

She eyed him, hands folded on her stomach, as if it sitting on a throne; or lying in her grave. “What do you think they’ll do?”

“They will find someone to pick on,” he replied, “to be the problem. Flexibles — everyone picks on them. Dissidents. People who complain. They’ll come up with a word for them. The ‘rejectors.’ Anyone who rejects the rule of the new order. People who are trying to block this wonderful ‘change’ we hear about… The ‘jams,’ maybe. Or the ‘jammers.’”

He was thinking out loud, when he heard himself and thought he might have stumbled on something. Was that what the Kevvens up here were doing already — jamming? Employing a wooden box, a pillar, to turn back what came through the air. While no physical barrier blocks a different kind of power — your own ‘seeing,’ and sending — because that power is not wholly physical.

“Are you jamming their brain-washing?”

She tilted her head. “Oh no. Quite the opposite. I want everyone to hear their signals. I want everyone to have those dreams.”

He was silent.

She looked at him carefully. “You know what I mean. The kind of dreams you’ve been having. I want as many people in the country as possible to know what’s coming.”

“The dreams….,” he said. “Are terrible.”

Keel wondered what she saw when she looked at him now. Confessing his fear.

“I know.”

“You want people — people like me… to be frightened?”

“I want them to be afraid.” She spoke decisively.

“I’m afraid.”

“I know. I can feel it.”

She spoke with a note of finality that disappointed him. Was this what she was doing? Warning people? Was that all?

Her expression seemed to say that she knew what he was thinking. But why wouldn’t she?

He tried to find words to say this, to beg her to tell him what he desired to hear. How to stop ‘them’… He was a dreamer, yes. But she, disguised as the fragile old Mrs. Nathan, was a seer. A prophet. A spiritual force. Did she not have further powers to bring to bear?

He was staring at a blank wall, unpainted plywood, a few feet above the woman’s deceptively gray head, avoiding her eyes.

“Maybe,” Mrs. Nathan said, interrupting Keel’s inward flight, “you can find someone else… To help.”

20. Two Days Away

He found the gray-haired man, named to him as Marvin, staring at a screen in a chamber that looked like a study.

Not so many books, Keel thought. Lots of folders on a short table. A cut-glass dish that looked like it was meant to hold salted cue-nuts filled with a handful of thought-sticks instead.

The man looked briefly away from the screen and asked, “Are you staying?”

Keel didn’t answer. He had his own questions. “Can I call you Marvin? She said there were too many Kevvens up here.”

The other man laughed, involuntarily, and looked away from the screen again. “Trench will do for me,” he replied. “I call it a ‘gnome’ de guerre. We try not to use real names around here.”

Keel ignored the joke. “But you know mine.”

“I’ve heard it,” he said. “But you can pick another.”

They looked at each other. Jake? Keel could not think of anything more dashing.

“The reason I asked,” Trench said, “is if you are staying, I want to tell Fama.”

“The woman in the kitchen?”

“Yeah, I know.” He shook his head guiltily. “It looks stereo, but Fama insists. She says she can’t eat anything the rest of us cook.”

Keel was not looking forward to the drive back, but the prospect of spending a night inside the plywood bunker did not appeal to him either. He temporized.

“Can you tell me anything about what people are doing up here?” He pointed to the screen. “What are you looking for there?”

Trench appeared to hesitate.

“Is there anything you can tell me about?”

“All I’m looking for,” Trench said flatly, “is a decent weather report.”

Keel, who relied on the local news show for weather (should he expect rain when he takes his walk?), was discomfited. Did the Pigglie infiltration of the networks extend to re-interpreting the weather the way they reinterpreted other facts — Financial, medical, scientific — to suit their purposes? Would a time come when the nooz denied it was raining if the leader didn’t wish it to? If it was inconvenient for the government to provide Major Storm Disaster Aid, would the nooz-shows deny that a ‘Major Storm’ had taken place?

‘You must have walked into the shower with your clothes on,’ the Leader would reprimand the petitioners. ‘What a stupid thing to do! Things have to change around here! Those who cannot join the wave of the future will find themselves cast upon the rocks!’

Cheers for the Leader! Go, Pig, go!

Keel walked to the other side of the chamber and collapsed into a chair far enough away to be ignored by Trench; dejected beyond sociability by the prospect of taking part in cheers for the leader. Adjusting to a world of Pigglies would not come easy. Would he cower in his little house all the day, sneaking out after dark with a wool cap pulled down over his eyes to grab a few hasty supplies from a market where they didn’t know his name? Changing his route, going to different markets. Eating less; drinking less. What would he do when they cut off his credit? Why would the college keep paying his pension? Who would take over that institution? When they made up lists and decided who to pay and who not to pay, they would not find his name on the memberships of any of the Pig-loving societies? So why waste funds on him?…

His thoughts found no bottom. They kept descending: Where would the refugees go? The fugitives? Would they look for places in the hills like this bunker, whatever it was called, and build huts of their own without windows? Ha, he thought, a literal ‘dark age.’

Let no one see your light in the window, less it attract the attention of the Pig’s Own Predators? The rollicking, rowdy, fun-lovin’ POP Society!

Would that be their byword?

Where was this stuff coming from? Keel’s day-dreams were all turning dark. Horrid, fantastic, stomach-churning fantasies. But were they fantasies, or were they already happening?

“Tell me something,” he called to Trench. “Where are they now?”

“They?”

“The Pigglies. The ‘campaign.’”

“Pig’s campaign? They’re rolling along. They’re campaigning in a bunch of towns

about two days west of here. They’re taking their time, though. No rush. Voting Days are winding down in Platow. Just a few cities left. The Voting has pretty much been decided, at least that’s what they’re saying on the networks. It’s pretty much just a victory march now. Just the way the Revised Voting Protocol — the good ol’ RVP — was supposed to work.”

The man seemed to be talking to himself, Keel brooded.

Was he not afraid?

“Two days,” Keel said, at length. Not cheerful nooz. “What will you do when they get here?”

“I don’t think things will change much over night. At least not all that much.”

“So there’ll still be some time… What will you do with that time?”

“What we can.”

Trent turned in his seat to face Keel now, as if to say, ‘I am not hiding from the truth.’ His eyes looked slightly bloodshot. Did he dream also?

“And what is that?” Keel asked. “What you can?” He heard the edge in his voice.

“Build up, I guess. That’s the way we usually put it.”

“Build up what? An opposition?” Keen did not believe the appearance of a last-minute opposition was likely. It was self-delusion.

“Where,” he insisted, “is that opposition now?”

The reddish inflammation infiltrated the rest of Trench’s pale flesh, as the men shared a silent stare.

“Well,” he replied at length, “you’re here.”

Keel did not like picturing himself a source of hope. Hope and he were strangers. He was not sure that he knew what the word meant. Did it imply a form of belief? Belief in the power of men and woman of good will to bring about change? Keel did not know if he could look at ‘change’ as a hopeful prospect any more. Mr. Pig has appropriated it.

And, of course, he thought, while driving home, there was his local Kevven surveilling a quiet street in Monro. Was that his ‘opposition’?

He would find the man in the car again.

But the late-night congregation of cars around the Dormands’ had thinned out noticeably. Were they meeting somewhere else now? Had the arrangements already been made? Keel walked hopelessly through the streets surrounding the big house on the corner of Pike and Kent Road, hoping to discover some unusual pattern in the parked cars or other signs of habitation on one of the other blocks of the neighborhood, careful of course not to pass directly in front of the Dormands’ house or come close enough to be caught on surveillance, just in case there was surveillance there, which he did not even know.

Kevven, he recalled, had parked out of range. That should be reason enough for him to be careful.

On his second pass, he took a wider circumvention of the target house, trailing along several inconspicuous blocks of Herringbone Avenue, then turning left on Colby, streets he seldom bothered with in the past. Houses nestled tightly into their plots here, no room for a car park, all vehicles parked in the street. Nobody would choose any building here for a meeting unless the participants were arriving on foot. No point going down this way any farther, he told himself, and turned around abruptly.

But when he began walking back toward the Pike Street, still a half dozen blocks away, he became aware of a vehicle moving slowly behind him down the street. You drove slowly on Herringbone to avoid clipping the parked cars on either side of the road, but this vehicle was barely moving as fast as he walked. The driver was either looking for a house number — or following him.

Keel paused at the corner. The vehicle paused as well. He heard a window roll mechanically down.

He waited, hearing nothing.

Distant tires rolling up ahead on Broad Street. The sky quiet. He could not stand about in the dark on the street corner, pretending he was not calling attention to himself.

“You might as well get in,” a voice called softly. Barely audible.

He thought the car might be Kevven’s. But the voice sounded female.

The door on the passenger side of the vehicle squeezed open slightly. A tight fit.

He would have to step into the street, take hold of the door, and slide himself into the front seat beside the driver before his senses could form any impression of who ‘she’ was. It did not appear that anyone else was in the car and so if anything about this act could be considered ‘safe’ it was that the driver was alone.

Keel gave himself up to this chance. Stepped into the street, got into the car. He closed the door, found it heavier; a bigger vehicle than he was used to. He could see the driver now, from profile, but she did not look at him directly.

“Do we know each other?”

“I’ve seen you,” she said. Her voice soft, controlled. “I know who you are.”

How? He thought, but came to no conclusion. “Were you looking for me?”

The driver moved the car forward and turned down Colby Street, driving only slightly faster than before. Needs to keep moving, he thought, but wants to talk in the car.

“I didn’t want to go to your house,” she said after the car had traveled a block.

“Surveillance?”

“Who knows?… We’re all pretty much driving in the dark here.”

“Mrs. Nathan doesn’t know everything.” He took a chance, mentioning her name.

“Mrs. Nathan,” she repeated, softly.

The word a touchstone; a code. How else would they know they were on the same side? The side he was now thinking of as ‘the conspirators’?

“Why were you looking for me?”

“Got a message.”

He waited. “Tell me,” he said, at length.

“OK.” The car put another block between the target house and their own position; maybe that was the goal.

“No more meetings at the house,” she said at length. “So there’s no point wandering around there at night trying to see what’s going on.”

“Drawing attention?”

She glanced, minutely, his way. Still in profile. “I hope not.”

“Are they meeting somewhere else?”

“Doesn’t much matter… now.”

Because something was happening soon? Or some other reason?

“The meetings don’t matter any more. He’s coming. The whole circus is coming, that’s what matters.”

“Do we know when?”

“Pegasso’s people don’t exactly release their schedule.”

“But… there are other ways of knowing.”

“Yeah.” She did not elaborate. “We know when.”

She was still driving, leaving the neighborhood now — so not exactly giving him a lift home — and heading toward the city line, the place where he would go to look at the stars, an activity that now struck him as hopelessly romantic. What help were the stars?

“So the message is what?” he asked. “Keep away from the Dormands? Don’t do anything to draw attention?”

“Yes, that’s it. Basically.”

He felt — disappointed. Then ashamed. What did he think he could do? A man his age? With no connections?

“And wait,” she added.

“For what?”

The driver pulled to the side of the road and stopped the car. She made him wait for an answer.

They were paused at the outskirts of Monro, gazing at the old lots where the state fairground used to be. The city had pulled down the buildings. A big hanger-like barn for the animal shows. Long rows of booths. People showing off giant squashes, perfect fat tomatoes; huge multi-colored peppers grown entirely in water. Old-fashioned stuff, lingering from the days when people still kept animals, grew vegetables. Caged creatures sold for pets, the size of cats or a little larger, but created from reptilian DNA. ‘Little Dinos,’ he remembered, but could not remember why. The craze for them was long over. They never could get the biting gene completely out of them.

“The right time,” she replied.

The two of them looked straight ahead at the empty lots. Weed trees and vines growing up against patches of wire fence.

“What will happen when he comes?”

“It’s the end of the campaign, probably. End of the Voting Days. After the Voting in Platow he’ll have enough triumphs to be proclaimed the winner.”

“But why come to Monro. Why not go someplace really big?”

He sensed her shrug.

“Here? Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. The media does whatever he wants. Tells the story to the whole country. His story — his way.”

What does matter, then? But he didn’t bother to ask it. It’s what she, his nameless driver, hasn’t told him. Wouldn’t — or couldn’t? Neither did Mrs. Nathan. Or Trench.

She turned so that he could see her face now. Even in the poor light, he recognized her. The hairline. The bright, hard perimeter of the upper part of her face.

Something caught the light, reflected from the car’s headlight, bounced back off a metal post: a thin renegade stream of electrons yielding the tiny ornament shining from the lobe of her ear.

He saw its shape now: a tiny, silvery triangle. Shining. He had noticed it on the woman who sat in the bare, pro-forma kitchen with her head turned away from him and Trench as they passed through on their way to Mrs. Nathan’s chamber.

She spoke again.

“We will contact you.”

Then she faced forward, causing the three-sided ornament to disappear from sight. At least he knew who she was now. Who had sent her.

“Do you have a name,” he asked. “A name you go by?”

“Nah. No names. I’ve already forgotten yours. But you can recognize a voice, right?”

He did not reply at once.

“You can remember mine, can’t you?”

“Maybe if we sit here and talk some more.”

She laughed. “No can do.”

21. ‘He’s Coming Here’

The next day he walked back to the square, but avoided the usual route on Pike Street that took him past the Dormands and their dogs.

In the square he made his customary surreptitious pass by the Universal Church and its black message board starred with white letters arranged in some manner intended to bring comfort and enlightenment, or maybe a soft-sell invite, to those who passed by. To lure the occasional new customer in for a Sunday dose of well-meaning comfort and quiet talk, attracted by the kindly wisdom of these words.

“Somehow,” the board observed — Keel’s mind scanning the words on a casual walk-by —

“light and love shine through the dark.”

Did the message board really say that? The words struck him as a response to his own pessimistic state of mind.

He would have stopped and gone back to read them again, but that was impossible given that the idea of possible surveillance was now always with him. Keel the actor for unseen eyes. He would find himself ridiculous if he wasn’t, also, afraid.

He shot quick glances ahead, across the street: if anyone else was likely to encounter the sign he could read their reactions. But, big surprise, no pedestrians. Up ahead, an aging couple of a stoutish build were leaving the General Market and heading toward a berth in the parking lot. They seemed to fall forward together, then right themselves just in time to transfer the momentum to the opposite leg. It hardly counted as walking. He did not see anyone likely to be passing the church.

Who knew what the sign said when anyone else perceived its letters? This, he knew from his undergraduate studies, was called “the problem of other minds.” We say we are seeing the same thing, but how does one mind really know what another mind is perceiving?

If he could find a public phone, he could call the news-sheet or the TV station to tip them, anonymously, to check the message board in Broad Street Square again. But he couldn’t, and of course it was a stupid idea. The nooz-guy would not read the sign the way he did. Maybe, just possibly, the message board was sending ‘instructions’ to (or even from) the Kevvens. Coded, of course. Words — ‘light’ and ‘love’ — could stand for something else. They could mean anything.

He shook his head. He was thinking nonsense.

Inside the General Market he ignored the overloaded aisles of “self-health” remedies, forgot what items he was running short of, and drifted over to the rack of late nooz-sheets and periodicals. The news-sheets all carried variations of the same block-type headlines.

PEGASSO DUE HERE TUESDAY

The story had evidently broken. The young woman (he did not know her name) said so the night before, and Mrs. Nathan had prepared him for it. But now the day of arrival had received both its baptism and confirmation in print.

As he knew from the networks’ Voting Days coverage, the Pegasso campaign was notorious for not sharing its appearance schedule, creating through its secrecy the ambience of an unexpected holiday atmosphere when the buses rolled in, the trucks, the motorcycles — the noise, the fuss. Bikes gunning their engines, trucks blaring their horn, guys throwing firecrackers out the windows of the vehicles, hooting at women on the street, helicopters and planes overhead pulling campaign signs. Lasers would sweep the sky after dark. Fireworks explode.

At least those were the rumors. The campaign — as shown by the late-arriving nooz cameras (kept at bay until the following day) — set up tents on public grounds, the most prominent place in town. Amplifiers would play music, the popular commercial sort, sometimes the songs came from ten years before, sometimes twenty, sometimes even older; all of them deemed popular with ‘the people.’ Large flat screens would show campaign ads, cycling the same half dozen for hours. All of them showing moments from rallies in which the voice of Karol Pegasso would be heard hammering home his theme of “change.” Images of people applauding, standing, clapping their hands wildly, or simply shaking with ecstasy. Images of the aspect of the candidate supporters were calling “Mr. Big,” his appendages lashing cruel blows through the innocent air.

But none of the images ever showing the man complete. And never, up-close, full face on. They showed him closer in profile, but not head on. They showed him at some remove, shouting and gesticulating. Or with aides or supporters, wildly cheering uncontrollable supporters, standing between the camera angle and the full person of Mr. Big, the man entire. The screens knew his parts, but not the whole. He had thick wavy hair, broad shoulders, muscular limbs, pale skin, eyes that appeared to be dark but were never probed since no camera was permitted to hold its aperture steadily on the man’s face. Something always interfered. The candidate turned abruptly to his left or his right. An aide rushed in his direction, waving a page that contained a new pledge of support, to step in front of the camera.

The probing eye withdrew to scan the crowd, the awe in their faces, the ecstasy of their movements, their transport. The flags waving in their excited hands.

Their portraits of a man no one knew. The face of a man they worshiped but saw only from a distance. No one was up close and personal with Pig.

Keel knew what would happen, now that word was out about the Pegasso campaign’s imminent arrival. The storm blast of rumor, anticipation, then electronically mediated presence when the gossip was suddenly confirmed and people began turning on their TVs and devices. Big screens readied for insertion into picture windows on Main Street to show excited live-mike talkers with the news of the location, the time, and then the “event” already underway. The ripple of self-congratulation flowing through pockets of gathered supporters, standing outdoors to stare at the screens, or in workplaces in the break rooms, in the schools, the city councils; large screens wheeled on smooth or squeaky-wheeled carts into the lobbies of General Markets so that excited shoppers could share in the excited round of fervent whispers.

‘I knew it! I told you he was coming! I got the word two days ago!’

If you were a true devotee of Mr. Big you always ‘got the word’ in person, from some other human being of your acquaintance. People knew how it worked; the media had already covered this much-remarked phenomenon. You didn’t read about it or hear about it on TV. The ‘word’ was unmediated. The truth spread by word of mouth.

Pig was the people’s news. So the people knew it before the media did. Before the elites did: government, universities, editors, intellectuals, boardrooms.

Pig was the people’s candidate. And what did the people want? They wanted “change.”

But this time the news had openly broken ahead of the event, two whole days ahead of the leading candidate’s arrival for Voting Day in Monro. Why? Keel wondered. What happened? Maybe the campaign was changing tactics. Now that the vote was as good as won, Pegasso’s people could afford to behave more conventionally, assume the robes of the establishment.

Or, the thought quietly occurred (brushing the back of his head with the lightness of a feathered wing,) had word actually ‘leaked?’

Suddenly, Keel knew. The local news-sheets had the story because someone had told them. Who could that someone possibly be?

Mrs. Nathan?

The caller ID on his phone when he got back to his house showed a Monro number that looked familiar though he could not imagine why. He felt he had dialed it himself.

When the phone rang with the same ID showing in the window, he picked up the receiver and said, “Keel.”

“Mr. Keel?” A woman’s voice; that was the first surprise.

And not the woman who had driven him to the old fairgrounds and told him to be prepared.

“Yes.” As he has just admitted.

“It’s Marga Dormand. The animal control officer.”

“Yes?”

He could not hide his surprise. What was this? An approach from the house of Dormand?

“Hello, Miz Dormand,” he added quickly. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m calling about the dog you were interested in.”

A second, even bigger surprise. They were coming faster now.

He stopped himself from demanding, “what dog?” and told himself to listen. What had the woman with the triangular ear-stud told him? ‘You can recognize voices, can’t you?’

He recognized Magda Dormand’s voice, but there was something new in its tone. This was not a public servant dealing with a complaint. And since he had not expressed interest in any dog — he pitied them, yes, but that was all — then this imaginary ‘interest’ was clearly a ruse. A pretext. Did she fear someone was listening in?

“Yes,” he replied, “cute little fellow.” Was that the sort of thing one said?

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, in the forced brightness of her ‘different’ voice. “I have to be at Broad Street later today. How about I drop him off for you after that? Save you the trip.”

“I won’t be home,” he replied quickly. If she was worried about being surveilled, shouldn’t he too?

He said the first thing that occurred to him.

“I volunteer at the library. You know the branch on Broad Street? Why don’t you meet me there in the parking lot? What’s a good time for you? Around five o’clock? I’ll be free then.”

A hesitation. “Yes. All right. That will work. See you later, then, Mr. Keel. Five o’clock.”

“Good…” What else should he say? “And thank you.”

He had learned these rules from observing the Kevvens. Don’t give out information unnecessarily. Magda Dormand already knew his name; there was no need for her to know his address. Assume that somebody may be watching; listening.

If the woman had to make up a story about a dog in order to have a private conversation with him… well, maybe she was being overly cautious. Maybe she had worries of her own to hide. But her paranoia — her hairy dog story — awakened his own.

Yet she had told him something important before, that the people meeting at the Dormands’ house were planning something. Maybe he could get her to tell him what.

22. The House of His Enemies

The branch library on Broad Street occupied an old stone building that had once been a fraternal society house. The front door, old wood, painted a dark chocolate brown, looked like somebody had been kicking it. He saw from the posted hours in the window that the place was open for four hours that afternoon, which was fortunate if anyone — the person, perhaps, who the dog officer apparently feared was tapping her phone — was checking up on the call.

Just a call about a dog. A dog officer doing her job. And a man who volunteers. In some bizarre way, it was all (mostly) true.

He arrived a half-hour early, spent twenty minutes inside the building read nooz-journals that told him the candidates challenging Pig were all hopelessly behind. Why had no more worthy candidate emerged? Keel still did not know who to vote for. At ten of five he emerged from the library to sit in his car and wait for her. If there were a camera somewhere, it would see him doing exactly what he said he would be.

Magda Dormand arrived when she said she would as well.

She parked on the other end of the lot, got out and then walked behind the car to open a hatch.

It took him a moment to understand what she was doing; then he saw. She leading a little dog on a short leash over to him.

Well. That was their cover. And you couldn’t just take a dog into a library, could you? The dog officer was simply enacting a charade that would raise no red flags for a surveillance eye, but he felt himself locking up inside.

Keel had considered the possibility of a camera. But what if there were real eyes — not camera lenses — on them right now?

From where? He restrained a desire to scan the horizon. He felt stupid. He’d been standing here in the open, making it easy for someone to spot him. Even from far away.

He told himself to calm down.

Too late to do anything about it. Besides, here she was.

Animal Control Officer Dormand wore a light blue coat, her dark blonde hair falling below the collar. A slim, tallish woman approaching with a strained casualness masking her features, and a tight rein on a little brown dog with floppy, spaniel-like ears.

“You have something to tell me, I think, “ he said, speaking first.

“They’re coming,” she said, flatly, in a controlled, low-volume voice, lest the skies have ears. Her thin lips forced what was meant to look like a smile.

“I thought you should know.”

“I know they’re coming,” he said. “Everybody knows that. It was in the news sheets.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

She smiled her pretend smile. Her features tightened and she whispered a single word: “Smile.”

“Why?” Unsmiling.

For the hidden cameras? Or the living eyes?

Magda’s long features dropped into a scowl, then she turned the corners of her lips up. “Like this.”

Keel forced his mouth into an answering grimace.

“That’s better, sort of. Think about what dogs like to eat,” she hinted. “That’s what we’re supposed to be talking about.”

“What are we really talking about?”

“Pike Street,” she hissed, almost a whisper. “I don’t mean they’re coming to Monro, I mean to the house.”

“Your house?”

“The Dormands’ house. What?” Angry now. “You think I live there? I live with Jaff.”

“Who’s Jaff?”

“My husband! Jaff Dormand! “

Oh. He knew that she was ‘family.’ But not how.

“And Jaff Dormand is?”

“Their son!” She looked away, as if from a judgment. “And don’t call me again.”

“You called me.”

“This time, yeah. The first time you called office, for Christ’s sake. Couldn’t you find any other way?”

“I called the dog officer,” he replied, defensively. Had he truly done something wrong?

“Well, don’t do it again. After this we don’t know each other.”

“We don’t know each other now. I wasn’t calling you. I was calling the dog officer to complain about dogs. Who did you want me to call? The dentist?”

“The dentist? Who’s talking about dentists?”

“They’re the people,” some devil made him say, “who get called to identify the bodies.”

She whitened. “You know, Mister — Keel,” she said, “you have a weird sense of humor.”

“Tell me more,” he pressed, sensing her eagerness to leave. “What day will Pig’s people be at the house? What time?”

“How would I know that?”

“How do you know anything? Is your husband one of them?”

“I’m not saying anything about my husband. He’s made his own bed.”

And who sleeps in it? He bit back the words, a part of him asking, ‘where did that come from?’

“But if you know they’re coming to the Dormands’ — Who’s coming? Exactly?”

As soon as he spoke, he knew the answer: Pig, of course. And some of the inner circle. Maybe a few of the guys who stand around him protectively at rallies. Shielding his mystery.

Keel caught his breath. He was new at this stuff. He was a grown man, an aging man, but he was new at everything. And nervous.

The leading candidate Pegasso, and some combination of ‘them,’ would be coming to the house of his enemies, the Dormands. Who was it, he could not help trying to remember, that preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies?

Not Magda Dormand. She looked as stressed as he felt.

“OK,” he said.

She stuck out her hand. Assertively. A wordless goodbye, then. He extended his own to shake hers, but discovered it was holding the dog leash.

What? He started to pull his hand away, but how would that look to the hypothetical camera? She took advantage of his hesitation to transfer the leash into his hand and withdraw her own. A quick smile of triumph.

“What’s this?”

“Enjoy your dog.”

“My dog?”

“You’re taking care of her because the pound’s too crowded. You’re a volunteer, remember?”

“A library volunteer!”

“You started this.” The smile again, with a hint of pity this time.

She turned and walked decisively away, stopping once to call, “Her name is Balco!”

Keel held the leash in shock, the dog’s large brown eyes transferring their attention from the human who had leashed her to the man who now held the lead. The creature did not seem to care which of the two larger animals she was bound to. She was probably happy, he thought, looking back at those chocolate spaniel eyes, to be out of the cage.

“I’m bringing it back!”

The dog control officer appeared not to hear. He watched her get into her vehicle and drive off.

He had read that dogs liked sleeping in containers of some sort, and since the spaniel — he would not call her Balco; what kind of name was that? — was small, he went down to the basement and found a cardboard box to bring upstairs and place in the so-called ‘spare’ room next to his own bedroom. He hoped the dog would stay in it and not walk around the house at night, waking him and chewing things.

Then there was the matter of food. When he began the motions of feeding himself that evening (not particularly hungry, but he ate by routine), he became cognizant of the creature watching him.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

The unnamed dog tilted her head. She had big, down-hanging ears. She was a dog with earflaps; especially in view of the petite dimensions of the rest of her. She had a black island continent of fur crossing the ridge of her spine and hanging peninsulas down both her flanks, surrounded by a sea of light brown. Was she full grown? Her temperament struck him as mature, remarkably calm considering her last known address was a cage.

How would he make out in a cage? Keel asked himself. Was there one in his future? If so, who would get him out of it, take him home, give him a bed, something to eat?

He could not think of anyone. The little dog with big ears continued to regard him.

He rose from the table and found the leash Magda had handed him. The dog lifted her head and waited calmly while he clipped the lead to her stiff collar.

“Smile,” he announced. “We’re going shopping.”

After buying a few cans of dog food, Keel decided to extend their walk. Increasingly fearful of the prospect of surveillance, he chose a route that would take the pair of them far in the opposite direction from the Dormands’ house and the square.

It was then that the name for the dog (even temporary dogs needed a name) occurred to him: ‘Survi.’

Man and beast had reached the city line, his putative stopping point, when the even-tempered little dog did something that told him he needed to lay in a stock of plastic bags.

Subsumed with guilt, Keel looked quickly about for some piece of trash with which to gather up the dog’s droppings, and some feasible container in which to dispose it — of which of course none existed (he would have to go to a city park to find the latter) — when a car drove slowly past him and came to a stop on the opposite side of the street.

Kevven’s tarnished-silver car.

Now? he thought.

On instinct, he yanked the dog away from the unrecovered poop and walked fifty feet down the sidewalk before slowing. He waited, facing away from the compact, to let Kevven decide what the next move would be. When he heard the car door open and the sounds of emergence, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that it was not Kevven who was approaching.

Short, severe hair-cut.

An arc of scalp cut to the roots, while the other side of the head was neatly draped with thick, straight, black hair.

Female. She had kept this side of her head concealed from him the last time. Showed him the side with the triangular ear stud instead.

He kept his eyes on the dog; anyone driving by would see a man waiting patiently for a dog to make a decision. Survi lifted her own head, as if to ask what more was he expecting out of her.

What pretext, he wondered, could be imagined for the young woman’s approach.

Needing directions? Or were they acquaintances chance met. Hi, Uncle Jack!

The girl with the triangular earring drew up a couple of feet off and nodded, unsmiling. If he’d had a daughter she might be this age.

“You remember my name?” she asked.

From his visit to the bunker, presumably. He shook his head.

“Good. One thing less to forget.”

He did not reply.

“You remember that bit about ‘someone’?” she asked.

Casual, her voice, her stance. If anyone passed by, they would see two people standing over a dog, talking.

“Someone to help,” he said. “Are you that someone?”

“Nope. You already have her.”

“The dog?”

She laughed.

“You know who I mean.”

“But here you are, poking around in Kevven’s car.”

She waited, as if to clear a space. “Just listen.”

He listened.

“We know when Pig’s going to be there.”

“At the Dormands?”

Her features remained expressionless, but something tightened, as if to say, ‘Where else?’

“Tuesday. Midday. Got it?”

“Got what?”

“That’s when you show up. To the Dormands’ house,” she insisted, to his amazement. “When Pig is there. He may be there already. That would be best.”

Worst, he thought.

And,” her features tightening still more. “You have to speak to him.”

Keel waited for her to break out laughing. But she was not the kind of person who laughed easily.

“That’s crazy.”

“It’s not.” Another sound escaped her; frustration. “I did not come all the way here to play games, Mister Keel.”

“Just Keel,” he said, automatically. “What should I say?”

“We don’t care what you say. Really. Say you’re very impressed by his campaign. He’d like to hear that, because you’re so not his type.”

“Not his type?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just make an impression. Make sure he looks at you. That’s all we need him to do.”

Stunned. Wordless.

“Do you understand?”
“Why?”

“We need to mark him.”

“Mark him?”

“Make a connection. Something to guide the waves. A channel.”

“A channel?” What was she talking about?

“That’s right, Mr. Keel — Keel,” she corrected, as if placating a child. “That’s all you need to do. Get him to look at you. That’s enough.”

“Why?” he asked again.

“That’s all I can say. Now.” She shook her head, a tight gesture showing a slice of bare scalp, then retrieving it.

“But not all you know.”

She did not reply, but watched him, waiting for his acknowledgment that he would do what had been asked of him.

He took a breath, lifting his shoulders. Exhaled.

She nodded, and left.

23. It Was Already Sunday

His daughter’s age, he thought. If he had a daughter. If he had ever married.

He thought, as he occasionally did, of the attractive, dark-haired student at the college, his first one, where he worked on a three-year contract as a young man, understanding that he would probably be asked to leave at its expiration. A woman, a girl really. Who stood very close to him when she came to see him in his office to talk about the paper she was planning to write for his class.

It was about subliminal advertising, she told him.

He knew what subliminal meant. At least he thought it did: The brain saw something that the memory could not recall them. So the viewer was not ‘aware’ of having seen it.

“What sort of images do these advertisements use?” he asked.

“Images?” She looked at him with surprise. Had she not made the point clear? “Sexual,” she replied, calmly.

“For ordinary products? Cars, beer, shoes?”

“Yes. You bet. Everything.”

“And so the images they show are…?”

“Body parts.”

He was suddenly more deeply aware of the girl’s presence, sitting down and moving her chair closer to him than student-conference conversation typically called for. He could smell the shampoo in her hair. Maybe, he thought, they should go for a walk.

He sat behind a little desk in a cramped room. The student-chair was placed on the side of the little desk, and both parties turned their heads so they could look at one another while they discussed ‘the paper.’ Or ‘the idea.’ Neither one of them took their eyes off the other.

They stayed in their places, and he let her talk. He noticed her shirt was not buttoned all the way up, and once having noticed this could not really pay attention to anything else. His body turned into a machine. He tried to ignore it.

“So,” she said, pausing. “What do you think?”

He did not say what he was thinking.

The line was preserved between them. He never learned if she was trying to attract his attention in the way he suspected — his body, at least, suspected — she was.

The ‘encounter,’ so to speak, was unfinished. But he was the one who had chosen not to finish it.

He stopped holding office hours that semester. The semester was nearly over, and he suffered no repercussions for this evasion of ordinary duties.

A year or so later he left that college and found a place in the second one, the one where he stayed for a long time until they told him they no longer had a need for what he taught.

One day the college president called him into his office and informed him, in a quiet businesslike manner, that he would have to stop teaching because his classes were not drawing enough students. The college, the president said, was moving in another direction. More technical; more professional. More cutting edge. Keel did not know what was being cut by that edge, except for him.

They give him a ‘package,’ not the kind you need scissors to open, and he moved back to the city where his grandmother had continued to live out her life and where, occasionally, he continued to visit her. When she died, he learned that she had left him her house. To save money, he moved in.

Tuesday, the girl with the earring told him. He had until Tuesday to figure out what to do. And now it was Sunday.

He could get in his car, which appeared to be functioning properly, and had carried him without trouble to Mrs. Nathan’s ‘hideout,’ and drive it to the ends of the earth; or to the end of the continental land mass of the Commonhope of UZ, at least. And hope nobody would notice, or care, that he had disappeared. And seek to endure there, whichever end of the earth he ended up in, the reign of Pig, in the country of Pig, the country that the Commonhope became under the domination of a ruler elected by his mystifying power to induce a kind of mass hysteria in a significant portion of the country’s citizens.

Would the sun shine at night?

Would the earth reverse its direction and spin back in time, perhaps settling into some simpler age when the lord of the manor set the rules and was obeyed without question?

Would the tides cease to recede and flow in alteration, and either spill endlessly forward over the land, challenging the coastal mountains for the primacy of earth, or withdraw mutely off the continental shelves to loiter for eons in the deeper trenches of the sea?

The waters had once done just that; in fact they had accomplished both of these great geological tricks some time in the deep past. So urth science told him. Each of these cataclysmic advances or withdrawals, however, took thousands or even millions of years.

Could Pig bring them about in the first hundred days or so?

And would these alterations satisfy the people’s desire, that overwhelming hunger for change, that Pig relentlessly affirmed as the basis for his campaign?

Or did they long for something more truly revolutionary?

The gift of speech in the mouths of beasts?

Would Pig make the birds talk social theory? Or politics and business? Report the greed-market closing prices? Predict tomorrow’s winners and losers?

Share that deep, speechless knowledge of weather and climate that sent their various species hurtling in one direction or another in massive numbers, with inexplicably brilliant flight plans, in faultless anticipation of the seasons?

What did ‘the people’ mean (Keel now asked himself) when they called for ‘change’? Did they wish to walk on their hands, eat grass, cavort in trees like primates of a so-called ‘lower’ order? Mate all day in certain weathers, phases of the moon, or directly upon emergence from the chrysalis like certain lepidoptera pupae in a picture of nature driven by instinct so rigid, heartless and brainless it caused a nausea to rise in Keel’s gorge merely to contemplate it…?

Was that what anyone wanted?

Or did they wish to be planted in the ground to bloom each spring and shine like the flowers of the earth for their brief, appointed, heart-breakingly beautiful moment before being released to subside back into the earth and return to that dreamless nullity… in which it was conceivable to exist, but not to be, stripped of all choice, or urge, or power to rise or fall? And therefore removed equally from all fear of failure, or injury, or sickness, or surcease.

Die now, he brooded, and end all worries. Make a quietus with a spare cod-skinner.

Who, he asked, reasonably enough, would fardels bear?

Let us all put our fardels down, once and for all. And good riddance to them!

Vote for Pig!

In fact (Keel brooded), so many of his countrymen have already voted for Pig that the result was a done steal.

The Pegasso Campaign, Monday’s nooz-sheets proclaimed, was planning an extra-special celebration in Monro to party after what it expected to be the victorious conclusion of the Voting Days when the Platow District results were announced and the Supreme Electors of the Sacred Commission declared Karol Pegasso to be the country’s next leader.

“Pulling Out All the Stops!” the headlines pronounced.

“Big Party Announced for Capitol Green”

“Hold On To Your Hats!”

“Are You Ready for Some Noise?”

Or.

He could try to do something.

To stop it.

In his dream Pig wears a wig.

It was nothing extraordinary. It had a look of ordinary male hair. Medium length, somewhat coarse, plywood brown. A thick pile of it, magically suspended in the air. What was holding it up?

When the man turns, Keel sees something impossible. Something he has never seen on the body of a human being. Something out of a painting, some ancient mural, some pagan scene in a woodland glen where a mythical being is mildly frolicking, or perhaps merely resting, while displaying an aspect of muscular, rosy, molded torso to the painter’s eye…

What he sees is not merely the tips of the ears, as Keel first suspected. But something harder, boney. Something holding up that upland bog of phony hair. Something not to be seen; not by him or by anyone.

That’s why you can’t ever see him clearly on a screen, Keel murmured, waking.

Not all of him. No pictures up close. The ground rule already established before the dreaming Keel was admitted to the presence: no cameras. Those who carried the sort of hand-held devices that took photographs almost constantly, almost on their own initiative; constantly worming their way out of pocket or the bag in which they were stashed, regretfully, by their owners to snip-and-snap away at their surroundings… creep, creep, an inch at a time… until a sufficiency of light woke them and they began convulsively snapping their ocular jaws at whoever or whatever was within sight of the aperture… These devious little machines were absolutely banned from the environs of Pig.

And if one of those burly protecting presences caught sight of such a thingy-device creeping out of its hideaway on the person it ostensibly belonged to, that person was hustled unceremoniously out of the room.

No one may capture in entirety the mighty presence of Pig. No one may see him whole and unguarded. Exposed.

The dream left him feeling tense, and the tension did not release him all day.

He hunched his shoulders and took the dog, now called ‘Survy’ for his own personal use, for her morning walk, having fortified his pockets with a supply of plastic baggies and twisties, like some anxious preschool Mommy loaded with treats and inducements when she accompanied her little princess, or dashing buccaneer, to the public or private institution that would lock up her precious cargo for three or four whole hours a day among the little terrorists of the neighborhood.

He repeated the exercise in the late afternoon, sneaking briefly into the little market on Gandalf Street to take a peek at the bold type lead of the evening nooz-sheets. The storeowner, a foreigner named Pepys, Keel recalled, cast his usual baleful eye on man and dog, as if he suspected one or the other of them was about to do something noxious rather than make a purchase. Survy, sensitive to mood, stuck close to her master, eventually resting a flank against his upper ankle to remind him of her own needs.

Keel felt no relief in the headlines, full of vague, held-breath noozlessness. A Nation Awaits. Expectations Rise. Pig Rumored Close to City. Mayor Says All In Readiness.

The dog got her way. The storekeeper fumed over his omission of custom as Keel led the attentive animal back outdoors, like a closely kept secret.

He guided their way to the downslope edge of a town cemetery where, he noticed, other pet owners deposed their four-legged “member of the family,” aiming querying looks to divine the animal’s intentions. Everybody knew what the business was being taken care of and made a show of looking in the other direction. Keel assumed that animals were self-conscious about their eliminations just as humans were, but then again that couldn’t be quite true or we wouldn’t be asking them to do it in public. Still, he tried to look politely away, and then seamlessly slip back into the picture to master the plastic-handed pick-up.

Home, Keel found nothing to occupy his thoughts but his poorly formed plan to bluff his way into the Dormands’ (the house of mine enemies) high-octane gathering of Pigglies and then somehow steal a moment with the great Pegasso himself. And — do what? Tell him a joke? Keel was the joke.

He waited for the evening news. But as day ended and the sun went wintry down, cranky and unappreciated, the long-awaited arrival of the leading candidate and his notorious entourage screeched into town.

The noise was deafening.

Keel heard it with a shiver, from a long way off. A mile; maybe longer. Of course he had no way to estimate the distance, but the sound felt like a mountain falling.

24. Vikings of the Road

A thousand motorcycles, at least. The owners having ripped off their pipes in a paroxysm of joy.

“Let ’em rip, boys!”

So boys had ripped.

They must have stuffed their own ears with compact wool from the under-down of Arctic birds, Keel thought, then covered the stuffing with the fat industrial earplugs used by workers accustomed to handling dangerously loud machinery, if they meant to have any hearing left.

Closer to hand, his own tortured ears could almost hear the footsteps of Monro denizens emptying from their homes and workplaces, driven by the thunder of the approaching wave. A human, and human machine-made, tidal wave, Keel thought.

The noise drove him out of his own home.

On the doorstep he glanced up, panicky, at the sky. Planes overhead? Jets?

No one could flee the bombs if they could not hear the planes. But skies were clear.

The rumbles and roars came from the roadways. The earth trembled. Keel found himself hunched in an unconscious, reflexive crouch.

People remembered their sins. Some fell to the earth and prayed. Those and others, perhaps, did not know what it was, the tidal-wave rumble of pandemonium that engulfed the senses. Keel knew, or guessed rightly. Pig’s arrival: the cataclysm of history. The calving of a monstrous human glacier. The world would end not with a whimper, but a mighty bang.

He wondered when the screaming would begin.

In his mind’s eye he saw heavy trucks rolling over the curbs as drivers cut the corners too closely on narrow side streets that fed into the old, pre-automobile capitol zone, following in the wake of the heavy bikes that had already arrived at the grand entryway to a Capitol Building hallowed lest by history than its fortunate absence. From the epicenter of the Capitol, a jumble of stone-front structures, brickways, and ill-suited modern additions spread astride a long gently sloping greensward for a block and a half toward the secular state of business as usual.

Old Town Monro, past its peak a century ago, clung to both ends of Mansdowne Street. City Halles (old spelling) was still found in the center, close to the City Public Library and the oldest Universal Church. Plus the brick edifice that had once been a high school and was since refabricated into expensive condoms — not, not the right word, Keel chided himself, suddenly tired, overwhelmed. Condiments? Candy mints?

It was too loud to think with the roar of the engines of Pig’s approaching army. Well, they did call it a “campaign,” the term borrowed from the military. And Pig’s arrival looked to Keel to be an invasion.

The Pigglies who traveled with the leading candidate (so he’d read) called themselves

“Road-Kings.” Some special in-group faction of these christened themselves “V-8 Kings,” a motorhead term that sounded to Keel like Vee-Kings, raising echoes of an ancient, perhaps legendary wave of invaders called Vikings. So in Keel’s thoughts they became Vikings of the Road.

However named, or nameless (dreams told him), they arrived in force, overwhelmed their opponents, ferreted out opposition leaders, especially those critical of Pig, and hung them in effigy from lampposts. Sometimes, if the opposition did not cave and cower immediately, but stimulated the deeper foul and feral instincts of the attackers, they hung women too, letting their colorfully draped bodies swing in the air as warnings to the locals and stimulants to the sadism of their own followers. A subterranean current of angry rapacity they could tap as needed. If they turned it on, it would flow.

In his own dream-haunted, Mrs. Nathan-psychically roused consciousness he saw the engines left to roar even after the vanguard arrived and secured the Capitol Zone, pulling their machines up onto the grass and staking them on the broad lawns. Tents would be planted there soon and on other nearby green spaces, the few square blocks of city commons where an occasional monument served as a tent pole.

He saw more; day-dreamed more deeply. He could not turn away.

The newcomers surged over the landscape, set fires to warm themselves, broke out their canteens and flasks, smashed a few windows when they found doors locked against them, rousted out a mayor’s aide and a handful of councilors from City Hall to serve as guides and local reference sources (the mayor himself, a secret Pig ally, having been tipped off and allowed to flee to the city’s sub-lands), then began to tamp down some of the engine-roar so long as the local populace remained suitably cowed.

After which they began looking for stuff. Drink and provisions came first, of course. Then girls, a little later.

The nearby markets were quickly looted. Employees fled at the sight of the approaching Pigglies, their beards, their bellies, and their girth; and their flesh marked with arcane symbologies… He recalled momentarily the opposing symbols of guerilla graffiti artists; the comparatively harmless ‘Kevvens.’

Keel left Survy home. Sorry, girl, he apologized, but she was already hiding under his bed, paws over her long sensitive ears.

He headed toward the general direction of the noise, guessing where it had come from. Smoke drifting over the city center was visible when he approached Broad Street, and he heard distantly what sounded like a coach from hell bellowing on a megaphone alternating with something like music, but vile and pulsing.

Keel lived a mile and a quarter from Monro Center. It was not a walk he made routinely, but he wouldn’t hesitate to do it. Now he kept off the main roadways, hearing from these wider spaces the aching sound of car alarms, loudspeakers, and the screeching of brakes typically followed by the deeper bang of collision… but on this occasion simply by louder sirens. He did not walk toward these noises.

He followed the residential streets that looked as if the sirens had done their clearing work, for now nobody was venturing out of doors, even to stand on a porch and crane a neck at the sky.

Block after empty block. Angry noises in the distance, no one on the sidewalk or the streets. The occasional vehicle pawing slowly up to intersection to take a fearful peek before making a turn. Its driver rigid and anonymous behind the wheel. The corner shop closed, locked down for the night hours before nightfall. Dog owners bade their pets to stay inside and hold it. The cats were in closets, whining.

By the time he came within blocks of the Capitol Zone — the distance of a long shout in the street that no one would hear — the compounding of sirens and amplified PA noise rose to a volume beyond which ordinary conversation could not be attempted. Keel imagined pointing to his ears and shaking his head if anyone else manifested on the street, but no one did.

Faces appeared at the upper windows of the four and five story apartment blocks, looking dumbstruck, dazed. Beyond the last brick building, the view opened and he spied a few scurrying figures, walking hurriedly away from the center, their bodies hunched forward as if lowering the head to protect the ears. They did not look at Keel or anyone else, but hurried past. Homeward, he supposed — or hoped. Unless their homes had already proved unviable, commandeered by the intruders or rendered unbearable by the constant noise or foul exhausted air, and they were now hastening to some more distant sanctuary.

Fugitives from the party: hands shoved deep into pockets, features raw, red-eyed, perhaps from passing through smoky patches.

Keel thought about trying to stop someone, forcibly, to demand an account.

What’s going on? What are you afraid of?

But it would be like trying to lay hands on a tempest.

Then smoke reached his senses, flowed thickly in streams, borne by the wind.

He ducked into a narrow alley, a final sanctuary between cramped buildings, and studied the prospect of Capitol Plaza between volleys of smoke. He saw the bonfires, wood fires sprinkled with trash, burning on the Plaza lawn and others spread across the old town green like pustules from a raving fever. He saw the brightly colored tents, planted here and there where the green space allowed.

He saw what he took to be dummies, effigies, hanging from the lamp posts. Some clad in what looked like business suits. He heard the loud pulsing sounds of what he supposed was meant to be music. What did they call it — Crash Music? Train Wreck? Dead Mental?

A small knot of men, suited but not wearing overcoats, huddled on the stone portico outside the main entrance to the District Capitol building, the old stone heart of the Capitol Zone. Its carved columns gave little protection from the elements, the stiff late-winter wind, whiffs of smoke blown by a cross-breeze into their faces.

One of the men, gray-headed (possibly the mayor, Keel thought) began to cough.

The noise grew, as if amplified by open space. He did not know what he would do if

anyone approached him, but no one did.

He left the alley and walked slowly toward the smoky fires, a jumble of waste wood and garbage at their base, dismembered chairs dispersed among them. Toward the human figures dispersed across the lawns, some edging in or out of tents: the central one of these a big circular, party-looking big-show shelter; the others triangular, monochrome, with tent-pole spines and a revivalist aspect. People gathered, unhurried, looking at home here unlike the fugitives hurrying way. They wore big-shouldered jackets, sports caps, belts with chains; men and women dressed alike. Figures merged, broke away, threw their heads back and laughed, lifted cans or bottles to their mouths. Some strode purposefully away from the plaza lawn to the town green on the other side of a rectangular big-shot parking area, the green’s civic monuments now draped with the tent cloths and plastic layers of improvised shelter. Others strode from the green back toward the plaza, pausing to slap hands or greet others, shouting hallos to acquaintances.

The carnival air of these ambulatory figures contrasted so strongly from the cowed, fugitive aspect of those escaping the city center — and (he noticed) the huddle of anxious figures planted outside the city hall entrance — that Keel struggled to understand what he was seeing in this transfiguration of a once familiar setting; to assimilate these new impressions.

Festival? Or conquest? It took him a moment to convince himself that the people he was now critically regarding were the campaign followers of one Karol Pegasso…

The Pigglies. Creatures of his dreams, nightmares…

Their dreamlike aspect changed as a pair drew closer. Noticed him, exchanged a glance, turned his way.

Large men, two of them.

One heavily bearded, wearing leather colors, a red bandana, a low black working-man’s hat, a thick black belt cinched around an equally thick girth — so tightly that Keel, involuntarily staring, groaned at the thought of carrying so much corseted gut through space and time.

His companion was short-haired, coiffed, clean-shaven, square-jawed, with eyes like icebergs. He had seen photos of icebergs in nooz-sheets that appeared warmer.

Not just Pigglies — his chest tightened — but Pig’s guard dogs.

The two closed fast. He could smell alcohol in the breath wasted upon him by the open maw of the bearded man.

“You a reporter?”

Keel shook his head.

“Whatcha’ doin’ then?”

“City Hall,” he said, forcing out the first words that occurred to him.

“Yeah? Whatcha’ want at city hall?”

“A dog — “ Keel began, sharing a glimmer of that first idea. He was here to complain about a neighbor’s dog.

The short-haired one cut him off. “I think City Hall’s closed for the day, chief. Some big doins’. Maybe you noticed?”

Bearded one turned his head to address his companion. “I wonder what he did notice?”

“I couldn’t say,” short-hair replied. “Let’s ask him.”

“Whadda ya say, old man?” he addressed Keel. “Notice anything different?”

One of the effigies strung from the flagpole twisted slightly in the wind, and showed a face.

Keel caught the image in the corner of an eye. His stomach turned over.

Bug-eyed. Flesh blue, thin hair plastered on one side of a grimly bared head. Neck unnaturally crooked.

“Seen anything new?” the short-hair repeated.

Beard-man turned his head and caught what Keel was looking at.

“I think Granpa’s seen enough.”

The man’s hard-eyed glance aimed first at the short-hair, then at Keel.

“So what?” short-hair replied, his own expression revealing a close, personal knowledge of what Keel had seen. “Who cares what he saw?”

“I didn’t see anything.”

Keel turned on his heel and walked.

“Hey!” the bearded man called.

Keel did not respond. He told himself not to alter his gait. He was a harmless nobody who found that City Hall, surprisingly for a Monday afternoon, was not open for business. Now he was going home.

“Hey, old man!” the short-haired Pigglie called after him, in a colder, sober intonation. “You see any reporters, tell ’em to come on down. We’re ready for them.”

He kept walking.

“We have a story for them!… A hell of a story!”

For some minutes he walked without thinking. While the sirens and bike engines had largely died away, the pulsing hollow beats of amplified music made it impossible to tell whether other footsteps could be trailing his. Finally, when it appeared no one was following, he risked a glance behind.

He understood now why the others had walked away, and why they looked the way they did.