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         [  Viv's House  ]                        [  By Eric Chaet  ]


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    ____________________________________________________________________



VIV'S HOUSE

by Eric Chaet



BEAN POLE - Viv's name for the tall young man with dirty, long, brown hair
and black-framed glasses, whom she had noticed quarreling with the staff -
was doing a little sideways dance, just to attract her attention - in the
dining hall - checking out of the corners of his eyes, to see if she was
noticing, lifting his eye-brows comically, when their eyes met.

   That's sweet, she thought, and realized she was feeling pleasure. She
could not remember the last time she had felt anything.

   He was pretending to be secretive and cunning. But there he was, right in
front of her - and of anyone else who cared to look - dancing his silly
little sideways shuffle - his face a mask that gave away nothing - except
for those mischievous eyes giving it all away.

   Viv laughed. Her own laughter felt so good in the belly - which, she
realized, had been cut off - as tho lines were down after a storm....

   He approached and Viv willingly listened, while he told her that he did
not think he was crazy. In fact, he was sure he was sane, and just as sure
that everyone ELSE was crazy. A common view-point here. It was easy to see
why others might think Spike - "Bean Pole" no longer - belonged in Old
Stayquo, Viv's name for the Steuben-Kraft Mental Health Facility on the
pine-forested shore of Lake Lakota.

   Viv's husband, Joe, painter of realistic landscapes a century after
realism had gone out of fashion in art circles, and in a part of the country
where only sentimental pictures of ducks, deer, barns, and cows were in
demand - unwilling - or unable? - to struggle to do what those who could
have helped him get them displayed required - whose suicide had triggered
Viv's depression and voluntary entry into Steuben-Kraft - used to say of
people with regular jobs, homes, and respectability, that they had "found
their niche in Old Stayquo."

   Joe had exhausted Viv - and himself. Tho she had to agree with most of
what he said - over and over, unfortunately - until she had begun to number
the most frequent sayings. Viv knew why Joe kept saying them: it was because
they were true, and no one else was saying them, or would acknowledge their
truth when he said them. No one would say "Amen".

   In fact, everyone else made it a point to say and do things that made it
seem that what Joe said - and what was so - was not so. They acted calm and
confident. The basis of their getting along together was agreement that what
was so was not so. That was the gist of the seventh of Joe's speeches.



SPIKE TOLD VIV THAT HE HAD BEEN VISITED by beings from another world, from a
vessel far out in space. The Principals - or maybe it was the Principles? -
were called P, Q, and R. There were others too, that Spike had not heard
from, also called by letters of the alphabet. Our alphabet was left from
someone's previous encounter with them, long ago, Spike said gushing with
delighted certainty. When Spike would hear from them, their voices were very
small, he said, excited, using his hands to help her see and hear what he
was imagining, again, as he told her. Very small - and running toward him,
from very far away.

   It would have been such a charming parable, Viv thought - if Spike had
not insisted that it was fact.

   His visitors' means of communication were imperfect, and they were
communicating to him from very far away. Tho seen from such a distance that
they looked tiny, they were gigantic, relative to humans, they told him.
They said that the people of our world were destroying it.

   Who could argue with that?

   Spike said he was to lead a small group to a temporary sanctuary, then
build a kind of Noah's Ark space vessel.

   Viv thought Spike's story was crazy. But no crazier than the story almost
every man and most women - including those in charge here, of tending to the
crazy people - distributing meds, deciding who was cured and who required
further attention and incarceration - told themselves about themselves.

   Spike said he was to use each of the metallic elements - some very rare.
Juxtaposed, they would chemically generate an electrical charge that would
repel the planet's gravity and the Sun's - so that Spike and those with him
could travel thru the Solar System, and beyond it.

   Space was not empty, cold, and inhospitable - as people, in their
upside down and backwards way, had been brain-washed to 'think'. Space was
not dark - it was all light. The 'stars' were merely light seen thru
pin-pricks in a shell built around this planet we were on - or IN - which
was actually Mars, not Earth. The Martians, who had captured and ruled
humanity, had purposely filled us with false ideas.

   That it was Martians, Viv doubted. That people were filled with false
ideas, and ruled by those who did the filling, rang true.

   Spike, of course, had no doubt. Had he not been told it, by creatures who
had recognized him as humanity's leader? There were 26 Martians, he said,
one for each letter of the alphabet, one to match each of the Principals or
Principles, three of whom were Spike's allies. The Martians controlled the
great fortunes of our world. They were not the famous people you read or
heard about. They were so powerful, that they were able to keep people from
knowing their names. In the few cases that they WERE famous - members of
royal families - people did not realize that they were among the most
powerful beings on the planet. They appeared in self-deprecating roles. If
they were queens, they were queens in democracies. They had cover stories.

   Viv could see sense in all this - also that Spike had no respect for the
truth - that he was unscrupulous in creating an alternative reality for
himself. But she doubted he could get her into WORSE trouble - and SOME use
of mind - just about ANY kind of use of mind - was so refreshing, after -
absent Joe - such complete lack of original thinking - and a consensus of
white-coated hopelessness.

   Viv's own notion - that there were some few thoroughly ruthless people -
and a larger group of lucky people willing not to challenge, eagerly serving
those ruthless people and one another - protected by the law and by superior
force - and the rest telling one another and themselves the lie that what
they were doing, struggling for what was left, was what they CHOSE to do -
left her without energy. And she could not disbelieve it, or find a notion
that she could believe, that would energize her.



SPIKE WANTED TO BE OUT of Old Stayquo, but was not allowed. He owned some
land not far away - bought with money from his dry-cleaning business in
Chicago, which he sold when his wife divorced him - how much of THAT was
true? Viv wondered - with an old house on it, an old car, furniture, many
tools, books, canned goods - assuming THIS part of what he said was true -
which assumption Viv decided - sensing an opportunity - to risk.

Maybe she had become sufficiently used to the drug she was given daily, so
that it no longer overwhelmed her...  And maybe - maybe, maybe, maybe! - she
did not even have confidence that she understood how WHAT SHE WAS worked
- maybe there was enough in her experience in its entirety - which now had
managed to get around Joe's death, as an amoeba encompasses a particle,
nutritious or otherwise - enough in her experience and how she had so far
processed it, that had forward momentum, that was more encouraging than
discouraging - like a baby, learning to walk, getting up after a fall...
Maybe!

   Since she had voluntarily entered Old Stayquo, she could leave when she
wanted, notwithstanding a doctor's recommendation - which she learned about
when she inquired of a white-jacketed aide shortly after arriving and
finding that no one was going to help her become more capable of coping -
that she be held indefinitely.

   But Spike had had words with police, and had responded to roughness with
roughness - he had used his hands and pathetic muscles, resisting - he
could not leave without someone deciding that he was rehabilitated.

   Viv began to use the tiny hospital library - barely more than a closet,
with shelves of books around a small table with one folding chair. For hours
at a time - while neither fellow patients nor staff paid any attention to
her - she studied the psychological literature upon which the staff were
basing their 'understanding' of the patients.

   Then she worked with Spike on his story, until he was able to talk in
such a way that he would seem harmless, to the staff. He had a real talent
for saying what he did not believe was so - for acting, for the time, as tho
he believed it. Viv mentioned this to him. He smiled - lifting his chin to a
noble angle - pleased with himself. Viv coached him to say nothing that
conflicted with the views of the staff, and to use the buzzwords of their
theories, in such a way that they would 'realize' that he had transformed
under their 'care' for the better.

   After a month of their working together, Spike was released, with a
useful disability subsidy - more than $300 a month - from the State of
Minnesota. At the same time, Viv left Old Stayquo.



THE LITTLE FAR SPIKE OWNED was half-way between the Twin Cities and Frozen
Fish - where Viv had been raised, and where she had been visiting when Joe
had slit his wrists at a relative's cabin in the woods near the Canadian
line.

   Viv never knew whether the details that came out of Spike were true, or
just utterly apt bits of the dark, wonderful parable that he was always
elaborating. Now Spike, Viv, and Elaine went to Spike's land, Spike -
chain-smoking cigarettes - driving them in a ridiculously long old car,
telling about his father, who, Spike said, kept books for Mafia-owned
restaurants - fronts - in Chicago, and who always put down Spike's ideas -
Spike had wanted to be a concert pianist - and insisted that he get a
conventional man's job and life and wife, 'succeed'.

   Little Elaine - tho it seemed to Viv that she had grown an inch or two,
and her blond hair was darkening - all eyes, looking thru the car windows at
the country thru which they were passing, and ears for what Spike was saying
- was Viv's and Joe's child. Viv felt terrible about deserting Elaine -
after Joe's suicide, when Elaine most needed support. (Their life together
had not been easy anyway - just getting enough food.) But Viv had left
Elaine with HER mother, Fran - feeling incapable of even taking care of
herself - and Viv's younger brothers, whom Viv had seen Elaine shy from,
when Viv had come for Elaine in Frozen Fish. Elaine had always continuously
chirped delighted observations, Viv thought - noticing that, now, Elaine was
careful, uncomplaining, but serious, wary - keeping her own counsel.



SPIKE UNROLLED HUNDREDS OF YARDS of copper wire, cut it into two inch long
pieces, bent the pieces into spirals, and glued them to walls, to utensils,
and under each cup and dish - none of which were part of a set. He was
converting a small trailer (lined with copper) - attached to his old car -
into the space vehicle. Car batteries powered strings of little red, green,
blue, and yellow Christmas-tree lights, inside. On the ceiling was a large
map of the constellations - with spirals of copper wire glued to it here and
there, apparently randomly.

   And Spike attached copper spirals to every shirt and pair of pants he
owned, to the soles of his shoes, and Viv's and Elaine's, and underneath the
drawers of dressers, and to the tops of cabinets...

   Copper would disrupt electronic surveillance by the government or by the
Catholic Church. The steeple of every church was a receiving and
broadcasting station, he said. And surveillance by extra-terrestrials other
than his aliens - by the 26 Martians and those, so many aggressively normal
people, in their employ.

   While Viv was sewing, and repairing shelves and cabinets and tables and
chairs, and washing surfaces long abandoned to mice and the remnants of
occasional human gatherings - and attempting to calm Elaine and to
re-establish a relationship of trust and hope - Spike was scouting for
talent, extraordinary young people, mainly students at the community college
where Viv had now begun to take classes - a "busy little student," as Spike
put it, sneering.

   "You're not going to learn anything that will do any good", he would say.
"You have the qualities I need, to be one of the 12 whose energies,
juxtaposed, will make our escape from the planet possible. You're Viv, V,
the Valve."

   Most people Spike approached quickly backed away. But some found him
educational or amusing, if dangerous, and visited the farm once or twice -
using it as a getaway from the mundane routines of family, school, town,
jobs - and completely unsatisfactory expectations - in the years in which
the war in Indochina went on and on despite continual losses by U.S. and
South Vietnamese troops, and bigger and bigger student protests in the U.S.,
then the shooting of student protesters at Kent State by state army
reservists, and the immediate, and unending, totally sober silence that
followed.

   Some were so desperate that, like Viv, they spent time learning Spike's
ideas, half-investing themselves in his plans - but leaving themselves an
out - so that Spike came to think of them as spies and enemies.

   But, at first, when he seemed to have landed a live one, he would say,
"You're an Ion, not an Ian."

   "What does that mean?" asked quiet James Pollard, a serious student -
dark, spectacled son of the president of the Frozen Fish National Bank,
always roaming around town on his bicycle, briefly visiting each of the
brightest young people, then, uncommitted, restlessly pedaling on - today a
highly respected, if eccentric, surgeon and chain smoker, at Dade County
Presbyterian in Miami.

   "Look at all the words that end in i-o-n or i-a-n", Spike said. "Those
endings MEAN something. There are no accidents. Ians are controlled. Ions
INITIATE."



SPIKE GREW MORE AND MORE DESPERATE, as others would not drop what they were
doing with their lives, to join him and Viv and Elaine on the farm - tho
they would drive in, share a meal, walk in the woods, smoke a joint. Spike
knew what they were doing, tho they tried to hide it from him. He hated all
drugs, especially the lithium he had been dosed with at Old Stayquo - he
had joyfully adopted Viv's nickname for the place - which had shut down the
voices, and numbed him.

   Spike had planted rows of saplings and built a tower from old windmill
parts - he wanted to power the place using static electricity from the
atmosphere, as Tesla had suggested, but the power barons had thwarted him,
there being no profit in it for them, he told Viv - who listened with dread
to his recitation - an epic with episodes apparently without limit - of the
defeat of the initiatives of promethean reason.

   He erected a well-coppered sign at the gate, which said 'THE I'LL OF MAN'
and painted a series of wonderful drawings of spiral galaxies, which he
insisted were NOT art, in three big hard-bound sketch-books, and on the
walls of the basement of the main building, where he spent a great deal of
time performing chemical experiments, using commonly available cleansers,
dyes, inks, foods.

   Teens from neighboring farms drove by honking their horns and yelling,
"Hey, Spaceman!" in the middle of the night.

   Viv had schoolwork to do, and Elaine - who oscillated between bright,
joyful serenity and sobbing panics - to care for. Viv struggled to extract
herself from Spike's ravings - he drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and
talked most nights. Viv wanted time to simplify and organize her own
thoughts and emotions that occasionally broke thru with a force that would
have thrown her into panics like Elaine's, but which she could not - because
of Elaine - allow herself.

   She was beginning to dream, FORWARD, of a little house she could control
- she had have to own it, she supposed - she knew nothing of the mechanics
of loans and mortgages, yet - for herself and Elaine - and maybe,
eventually, for other serious people who wanted a brief refuge, to think
thru THEIR own serious purposes, without anyone insisting they compete, or
act up-beat, or subordinate themselves to crazy dead norms, or to something
with manic energy equally crazy.

   She wanted to get some sleep before morning - when she had to coordinate
her activities with others, to attend classes, earn credits, earn money.
She had taken a part-time job selling men's clothing from behind a glass
counter at The Crystal Store, on Main Street, in Frozen Fish.

   None of which meant anything to Spike.

   There was a lot to be accomplished and not much time; besides, it was
such a RELIEF, articulating his story.

   "P, Q, and R show them to me," he said of the pictures of the spiral
galaxies. "I'm just the camera. They're the galaxies we'll pass. See how
each has three legs curling out like nines from the center of the spiral?
This is the beginning of our road map. It's coming in - in bits and pieces.
The communication process is so imperfect."

   Spike bought a shot gun, and in the middle of one night when the neighbor
kids were driving around in the driveway hooting "spaceman!" and honking, he
fired - over their heads, he told Viv, after they had sped away.



VIV TOOK ELAINE TO FROZEN FISH, and rented an apartment above an old house
near the community college. She was determined now to study to become a
nurse, to earn her living - and some control over her life - helping people
in the world the way it was.

   Viv's mother, Fran, still raising the youngest of her ten children, was
willing to care for Elaine, too, while Viv was in classes, or working at The
Crystal. Viv had only recently been in rebellion against Fran - always in
the home cleaning and cooking and picking up after the children - but now
saw that her mother's kindness was not accidental, not mere docility - but a
manifestation of decision and will.

   At the Crystal, Viv's boss, Al Zatori, had put Viv in charge of selling
men's clothing. He invited her to come with the others who were in charge of
departments, on a buying trip. Al at the wheel, Viv the only woman, the
other buyers in back - all young men, either awkward or bold, flirting with
her - they went in Al's van, to Chicago.

   Red-haired, middle-aged, chubby, and relaxed - Al - who was dating Viv's
co-worker, Annie - sang songs from the musical "Oklahoma!" as he drove them
thru the dark, which was punctuated by the lights of other cars and of
windows of houses in the small towns thru which they passed, then into the
dawn: snow flurries blew across fields with hay bales, silos, and small
herds of black and white Holstein cows keeping close together.

   Just north of downtown Chicago, Al put them up in an elegant little
hotel not far from Lake Michigan.

   After a walking tour of the Near North district, and a fancy meal - on Al
- Viv admired the elegant furnishings in her room - and the lobby, people in
sharply-creased suits, the sparkling city at night, lit-up windows of tall
buildings, vibrant signs demanding attention for all kinds of competing
merchandise and entertainment, and the sky-line. Viv and Al admired it all
from where the Lake slapped a cement pier, and hundreds of small, anchored
sail-boats bobbed - sails down, masts bare.

   At the fine restaurant where they met for several meals, Al paid for
everything.  He insisted that Viv not be shy about getting exactly what she
wanted from the waiter, who was inclined to be cavalier with her.

   She had begun to blush, when Al broke in with a loud "Whoa!" - directing
the waiter to slow down, behave politely, and wait - and Viv to gather
herself, and remember that she was the customer and in charge, and that Al
would not let her get away with anything but doing it right.

   In the morning, they crossed the Chicago River - tall buildings on
either side. Viv saw a dozen bridges - half to her left, half to her right
- opening from the middle, allowing deep-honking boats to go thru. An
elevated train roared past, and around the corner of a big brick building.

   They went into the enormous Merchandise Mart, where eager men and women
in elegant showrooms showed her the clothing they hoped she would choose to
take back to Frozen Fish. It was up to her! Choices!

   But they made most of their purchases, finally, in the shabbiest of the
showrooms - even if it had windows thru which the river flashed in sunlight
- with a weasely fellow Al seemed to know from way back, who was selling
clothes that were made in Asia, with labels less well known than the far
more expensive things, mostly British, they'd seen til then - but which were
made just as well, of the same sort and quality of material - Viv handled it
with pleasure - and from patterns that might have been the same.



VIV HEARD THAT SPIKE WAS BACK in Old Stayquo, then that he was out. He
showed up at The Crystal, to tell her that he had rented an apartment in
town, that he had agreed to take medication which he had no intention of
taking, that he had been given a bigger allowance from the State of
Minnesota.

   "You can't visit me here!" Viv said. "I'll lose my job. Don't you have
any sense of what's appropriate?"

   "Appropriate..." he scoffed.

   "I have a daughter to provide for. I have to earn a living."

   "They've got you."

   "No one's got me. I have to make a living. That's the way it is. You're
doing us harm. Leave us alone. Leave me alone!"

   Spike left. But he kept calling on the phone. He would wake Viv out of a
precious dream - in which Viv was building a house, nailing planks to the
frame, under a starry sky, while Elaine slept on the floor of a 'room' whose
walls were still bare frame - to rant about the Catholic Church and the
Martians and how she needed copper wire between her and the rays coming out
of the gold cross atop Saint Rita's steeple...

   Viv kept hanging up on him.



ELAINE - SWEET, SINGING, and PLAYING ELAINE - had begun to hang around,
smoking cigarettes, with a bunch of girls whose self-destructive
rebelliousness disturbed Viv. At school, Elaine complained, kids called her
Hoser.

   "Hoosier?" Viv asked.

   "Hoser! Aren't you listening?"

   Viv gathered that boys Elaine was trying to please led her on, then
discarded her, when she would not go 'all the way'. Elaine had begun to
crawl thru the window, and disappear, sometimes all night. Viv did not think
that Elaine was going to school.

    Viv remembered her mother, Fran, when Viv had snuck out of the house to
hang around with her 'friends' - boys and girls her own age, looking for
action - when Viv was a young teen (but Elaine was not even a teen yet!)
telling her: "Some day you'll have a daughter, and you'll know what what
you're doing feels like to me. You'll see."

   "Time's on your side, Elaine", Viv told her now. "Don't make what could
be nice dirty. Don't do anything until you're sure you want to."

   "I can't do ANYTHING", Elaine said. "Get a life yourself. I'm sick of
trying. The teachers don't care. The boys are all junk. You're screwed up,
and don't care..."

   "Elaine - if you fail, will that hurt the boys, or you? Will it hurt the
teachers, or will it hurt you? I care - but you're right, I DO have a lot on
my mind."

   "Oh, a lot on your MI-I-I-IND!"

   "You think I don't know how bad it is? I do know. It's even worse than
you think it is. But that's why you have to struggle to DO something. What's
happening automatically is going to waste you. You have to go AGAINST what's
happening. You have to DO SOMETHING - on purpose."

   "You mean, stuff myself with ice-cream, and fall asleep in front of the
television?" said Elaine and stormed out.



A POLICEMAN CAME TO THE DOOR of the apartment. Viv's hair was in curlers;
she was half-asleep. 'Oh, Elaine!' Viv thought, her heart racing. 'What have
I done?'

   Viv had fallen asleep. The television was humming, the screen a gray and
staticky storm. 'What time is it?' ('What year is it?' asked a mocking
voice.) She'd been waiting for Elaine to come home. Elaine had not come h
ome.

   I'm fat, Viv thought - whose looks had so recently been so exciting to
so many boys, then young men - suddenly, imagining herself thru the eyes of
the policeman, who was waiting for her to understand that he was asking her
if she knew Spike - and I'M A FOOL. I'M NOT YOUNG. I'M NOWHERE - and NOBODY
CAN HELP ME GET ANYWHERE.

   "Yes", she said carefully. "I know him." (Did this have anything to do
with Elaine, or not?) "He keeps bothering me."

   "Well, he won't be bothering you any more, Ma'am. He drove in front of
a truck. He's dead."

   "You're kidding," Viv said, recognizing as she said it, a phrase from
her childhood. "ANOTHER DAMN DODGE!" she accused herself, indignantly.

   "We don't kid, Ma'am. We found your name and address on a piece of paper
in his pocket." He showed it to her: 'Viv, V, Valve, 1406 Elm, 946-8881' it
said among some spirals. "He didn't have a wallet. Are you a relative? Or do
you know who we should contact to identify the body?"



WE DON'T KID, MA'AM. WE DON'T KID, MA'AM. WE DON'T KID, MA'AM.

   Viv remembered these words, as you occasionally remember the words to a
pop song, when...

   When it seemed that Elaine was determined to throw herself away, yelling
at Viv, mutilating herself - she cut her wrists with a razor blade, only not
fatally, as Joe had done - allowing worthless boys to use her, in fury at
the dead-ends presented to her to adjust to, so blandly and universally.

   When Viv did not think she could go on - upbeat for customers - hurrying
to and from evening classes - shopping, cleaning, trying to keep track of
Elaine, eating the cheapest foods, studying half the night.

   When Frank came into Viv's life - she helped him, when he came into The
Crystal, saying he needed "a goddamn jacket and tie for a job interview" -
and it felt like Viv would live happily ever after - until she began to
understand HIS torment.

   Should not life be like a straight line, or smooth curve? Viv wondered -
a development? - the making of a fortune, the invention of an engine, the
creation of a statue or a nation - or a complete coming-apart, a revolution,
wiping-out what is wrong, a fresh start? How did it keep being a series of
complications, unsatisfactory, without resolution, and apparently without
SENSE?

   When Viv managed to get thru college. She was living with Frank, and
Frank was working as a designer at a box factory - his consulting business,
environmentally sustainable production, having failed - and was kind to her,
and concerned about Elaine. He tried, several times, to talk to Elaine about
her future - but Elaine took every opportunity to disrespect him, and was
missing, more than accounted for. Then Viv began to work as a nurse, and
discovered how competent she was, and how she was able to cheer up suffering
people with her caring inquiries, and by applying a few principles and
procedures - and that she could help the less well organized nurses also
help patients; Viv became a leader.

   When Frank cut the cord of Elaine's stereo - Elaine had reduced Viv to
tears with insults, when Viv and Frank showed up at the house unexpectedly -
and told Elaine - in front of her astounded, insolent girl friends, who had
filled the house the cigarette smoke, and who had not meant to be discovered
- their game was always to be where parents were not - that she was no
better than the people she and her friends were so clever at putting down,
and would certainly amount to LESS than Viv had already made of herself -
and to SHAPE UP - and Viv nearly threw him out - so intense was her instinct
to defend Elaine - but did not.

   When a good job (or so it seemed to Viv) that Frank had applied for -
assistant to the president of a competing box factory - finally came thru -
and their finances were picking up, so that Viv bought an old, house,
idiosyncratically-built by the previous owner - tho, for some reason, Frank
was against it, maintaining, stoutly, that the income was temporary, that he
intended, soon, to start doing something - equivalent to her schooling -
more likely to be a drain than a contribution.  When Elaine graduated from
high school, got married, got a job she liked, selling electronics at the
mall, and seemed to become a cheerful conventional young wife - her
negativity gone as suddenly as it had appeared - and began taking college
courses at night, then full-time, working at the electronics store only
part-time. When Frank quit his job - over Viv's fearful and tearful
objections - and started a business installing computers in people's homes
- saying that this, too, was only temporary.

   When Elaine's marriage turned rocky, then her husband left her, and
Elaine, now fat, in her mid-twenties, moved back in with Viv and Frank - she
had only a semester left to go of college... but now she thought that
everything she had done so far had come to nothing, and Frank re-assured
her, and Viv re-assured her.

   When Elaine lost forty pounds, became girlish and happy again, was dating
a polite young man, Sal, who had a house-moving business.

   When Viv's mother, Fran, was rushed to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester for
quadruple heart surgery - and Viv drove all night thru a blizzard to be with
her - and stayed a week, til Fran was out of danger.

    It wasn't the life Viv had hoped for or imagined - or as bad as what she
had feared. It was beyond her control.

   WE DON'T KID, MA'AM.

   Viv tore up floors and walls, and re-did them - Elaine's Sal was a big
help. There was wiring and plumbing and painting to do. As Viv watched, thru
the living room picture window, an eagle coasting above the beautful, but
PCB-polluted river that ran by, right in front of the house - she and Frank
had taken out a quarter of a million dollar mortgage ($86,000 the bank, and
everyone except Frank, called it - the principle, that is, without the
interest) for the privilege of living in and fixing up - she wondered if
this could be the house she had dreamed of, and if her life, and Frank's,
and Elaine's could somehow become... satisfactory.

   Frank turned fifty, sold his business, and started learning everything he
could about solar energy. "Great!" Viv said. He muttered that others would
make things a lot worse than he could improve them.

   "We'll miss you," Frank said, when Elaine moved out, to get her own
apartment.

   "Sal is a good person", Viv told Elaine.

   "So is Frank", Elaine told Sal.

   "We're a couple of saps", Frank told Viv. "You patch people up who are
going to do what they have been doing, and I'll help them do it more
efficiently. And the people who thrive at everyone else's expense make out
like bandits, and just when everybody is about to be bad enough off to see
it and learn to do what it takes to change it, about ten million more people
suddenly find a new technology to get rich off, out of a billion people
competing for the riches, and everything goes merrily along."

   Viv cried. Then they hugged and kissed, watching sun go down over river.
Viv dreamed about the house to which people with serious purposes would come
to re-group and re-dedicate themselves.

   Frank could not sleep, and could not concentrate on solar energy, or on
how to organize his new business. The damn taxes, accounting for everything,
to pay the damn taxes, he was thinking. The destroyers so well organized -
the others... the innocent deluded, the righteous isolated...

   He paced - trying to keep quiet, so Viv could sleep.

   How? he was wondering.

   How?


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 uXu #534              Underground eXperts United 2000              uXu #534
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