Letters

As we dutifully reviewed this noisy history, Ambrose took my elbow and informed me that Prinz had just that day informed him that the “patients” at the Remobilisation Farm, apparently under the direction of Bea Golden (one of their number, you know, from time to time, when under the nom de guerre Bibi she dries out between failed marriages), were involved in some sort of ongoing recapitulation of your End of the Road novel, which either inspired or was inspired by the original farm for remobilising the immobile, down in Maryland. Thus there is a black doctor in chief known simply as the Doctor, and a half-patient, half-administrator who goes by the name of Jacob Horner and is even thought by some to be the original of your soulless anti-hero. A patient known as “St Joseph” plays or lives the role of poor Joseph Morgan; “Bibi” herself has assumed the part of Re

I do not reenact, here in this letter, my reactions to this news there on the twilit, Buffalo-facing rampart of Fort Erie. I do not even call to my aid my trusty suspension points, that have got me out of many an epistolary paragraph heretofore. I merely report to you this initial detonation. Still holding my arm, Ambrose regarded me. We turned to a nearby whir: Prinz with his “hand-held,” photographing my reaction, Ambrose’s indignation.

Separate cars to the Farm. Did Prinz “set us up,” Ambrose wonders, for that shot? Perhaps even fabricate the “Monsieur Casteene bit” for that purpose? He offers to return me to the motel; but of course I must investigate for myself. On the farther, downriver (up-map) side of the town of Fort Erie, past the old fortification and the Peace Bridge, I recognise the Victorian white frame, half nursing home, half hippie sanctuary, the freaks and geriatrics rocking in their separate fashions on the porch. No suspension points. I hold my friend’s arm, as I hold now onto my syntax and, less certainly, my reason. The Baratarians have preceded us; we are “shot,” en passant, coming up the walk, mounting to the porch — not so unremittingly as to make clear that we are the stars of the scene, but the angry set of Ambrose’s mouth is not missed, nor are my too bared legs, Ambrose wonders What the Hell; makes to let Prinz know he’s going too far. But here to greet us comes “Bibi,” drawn and severe-looking (and more attractive, alas) without makeup, and wearing a simple shift, her “Re

“Joe Morgan,” played by… Joe Morgan! To be sure, “much changed,” as our correspondent A.C. IV would say — the careful, conservatively dressed ex-college president now a benignly grizzled guru, beaded, bearded, bedenimed, barberless — but unquestionably Joe Morgan! He smiles at us in quiet unsurprise, greets us both by name from his rocker, and believes we “both know Monsieur Casteene, the Doctor.”

Boom. Whir of camera. “I am the Doctor only when we rehearse,” intones with the faintest accent (bit of a zed on ze definite article; emphasis evened out over ze sýl-á-blés) no dash no suspension points some cordial amalgamation, much changed, of the Maryland Laureate and my André. Then, in flawless Canadian French: “Le Médecin malgré moi, eh? But just now we are not acting.”

He takes our hands; makes the slightest bow. André’s bald spot; A. B. Cook’s salt-and-pepper hair. Moustache rather like André’s, but no beard. André’s dentures, possibly, but no eyeglasses. Contact lenses, I believe, can be tinted? Ambrose squeezes my arm. No action, no reaction; what a slow movie it’s going to be! I begin to mumble something like Thanks for the nice letters and My but isn’t Guy Fawkes Day early this year when Boom comes the third explosion, so deep and quiet I don’t even hear it. A plain-faced sharp-jawed firm-voiced (trim-figured) middle-thirtied woman stands nearby: Horner’s? Casteene’s (she could be the sister of that blank-phizzed unreceptionist chez Cook at Chautaugua)? Morgan’s perhaps, if her incongruous Indian headband means anything (otherwise she looks about as Indian as the woman on the Land O Lakes butter box)? No: plainly her own woman, this “Pocahontas”—so “Casteene” introduces her, with the smiling flourish of a magician introducing his assistant — though from the particularly disagreeable smirk with which she appraises me, and from Ambrose’s sudden lividity, his appalled, exasperated “Jesus Christ,” I begin to infer that she once was

Bang bang bang. Observe that I do not whimper; I merely report the news from across the Peace Bridge. It is now three days later, Saturday morning, 14 June, today. My inseminator scratches away at his tale of Perseus and Andromeda’s failed marriage, the problem of addressing the “Second Cycle” of one’s life. My Toronto newspaper reports Nixon’s claim to broad new “bugging privileges” against political radicals; also that the sinking of the U.S. destroyer Evans by collision with an Australian aircraft carrier was not the Australian skipper’s fault, and that Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra is still seaworthy despite an unexpected waterlogging to starboard. What are you up to over there this mild muggy morning, I wonder, and where are you up to it? It is “Jacob Horner,” no doubt, from whom I have this almaniacal reflex: he has apprised me that the steamy St Barnabas evening aforereported — Kamehameha holiday in Hawaii, birthday of John Constable, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Richard Strauss, and Mrs Humphry Ward — when I re-met Messieurs Morgan and Casteene, and my would-be impregnator re-met his ex-wife Marsha Blank, was the 198th a

The debris from those three explosions is still falling; Damage Control has yet to complete the assessment of our condition, but all the evidence is that we are sinking fast. On Thursday 12th, John L. Lewis died and the Niagara Falls shutoff was completed; convinced though he is that Reg Prinz knew in advance “Pocahontas’s” identity and “set him up” for that dismaying surprise (duly filmed, of course), Ambrose “kept his cool”: one would never have guessed, from his energetic flirtations with “Bibi” as the Baratarians filmed the unfailing Falls (at whose base one well-rinsed human skeleton has been discovered), that he had spent the night pounding the mattress in his rage at “them”—Mr Prinz, Ms Blank — and at his incomprehension of their motives and co