MungBeing Magazine: Urban Landscapes and Environmental Psychology

Forward

Welcome to MungBeing's Eleven and Happy Holidays*!

I tell ya, give a theme to a bunch of really smart people and you're bound to read some interesting stuff! I will state again, for the record, that this is the part of this whole experience that I love: getting to see all of this creative work really gets the gears of my mind a-turnin'.

With this issue, we are looking out across our Urban Landscape and thinking about Environmental Psychology and picturing all of the possiblilities, all of the blight, regrowth, renewal, infill, outskirts, and sprawl that occupy our dynamic and exciting horizon.

And we have quite the ample supply of varied viewpoints, too! What else would we expect? We will hear from James Howard Kunstler, influential author and card-carrying New Urbanist, to find out exactly what is going on in our car-centric, suburbanized environment - and within the New Urbanist movement itself!

I'm also excited to finally be able to present Simon Yuill's awesome "spring_alpha project". Simon's work was one of the contributing factors in the development of this issue and his piece is an important contribution to the world at large. I hope you enjoy his work as much as I do.

We are thrilled to have with us Tiki Artist and Graphic Designer Michael Uhlenkott who has kindly submitted two beautiful illustrations to our humble rag. Michael is a former member of Monitor, an LA-based band that meant a great deal to me in the early 80s, and I am very excited to be able to show you some of his recent works. And what beautiful works they are! We'll be seeing a lot more of his designs in the future, you can count on that.

And I'm happy to report that Muayad Muhsin is still alive and painting in Bagdhad.

You may notice a startling lack of Starchy within these pages. Fear not, Starchy has stepped away from the desk but he'll be back in one form or another. We missed his input with this issue, however, that's for sure.

It's going to be a beautiful new year and I'm really looking forward to this holiday season. I hope that you have a pleasant time as well and, in any case, I hope that you enjoy this little diversion.

I'll catch up with you on the back page.

Enjoy!

* MungBeing Magazine is a proud defender of the War on Christmas

Announcements -- Password

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Announcements -- Michael Bierut

Brilliant designer Michael Bierut has a wonderful rumination regarding his childhood house at Design Observer.

Announcements -- Francois Echidna and the terrible rash

Food Fortunata has published a new volume of writings and drawings called "Francois Echidna and the terrible rash" (Part 4 in the Anxiety and Confusion Chronicles). This issue features a stunning collection of artwork, words, and an included cd. Action-packed and full of life, an excerpt is here.

Contact Food directly if you are interested in ordering a copy.

Announcements -- Guide to Suburban Denver Subdivision Names

Ken Schroeppel has written a very funny observation about The naming of Denver Subdivisions. It's a trend we've all seen developing and Ken really sums it up nicely. Good job, Ken!

Announcements -- Special Seasonal Refresher

In case you didn't get a chance to read jody's article last year, On Santa Claus and Saturnalian Revival, 'tis the season once again.

Happy Holidays!

Announcements -- New Logo

Do you like the new logo?

Announcements -- Naomi Hall "Love Full of Punches"

Naomi Hall's new CD "Love Full of Punches" is available now and, oh, is it a beautiful thing! Naomi's soaringly ascendent voice accompanies spacious instrumentation and a wit that has been described as "quirky" but that I will call "rapier".
On this new CD you will find a wonderful song that was included in MungBeing #2 called Until I Drown. You will also find the "safe edit" of that very same song. Splendid!

Sprawlopolis

Driving on the Interstate at night from one identical cluster of fluorescent logos to another, one might imagine sprawlopolis as a blacktop Net of Indra, an endless web of luminous nodes in which each reflects the image of all the others ad infinitum. Immersed in a highway atlas map or Thomas guide, one might see in sprawlopolis a parallel to DARPA's scheme for the Internet, a vast system with no single center, where each path from point to point is hedged by an endless array of alternate routes. This parallel is registered in William Gibson's early novels in which he describes North American civilization as simply "the sprawl" and portrays it as resilient enough, in its crabgrass sort of way, to continue to grow and thrive after a limited nuclear war. If a vampire has no heart, there's no place to drive the stake.

However we envision sprawlopolis, I do think that we can look at the emerging pattern of our horizontal civilization with something besides the usual dismay and disgust, and not just because the floodlighted networks of cul-de-sacs, highways, and parking lots can look pretty from the air at night. What are my reasons for hope? Well, I can't think of that many, but here is one: sprawlopolis is the continuing creation of people, and people are capable of transforming their environments in astoundingly beautiful ways when they are awake about it. At a time when people were more confident about the project of human civilization, teachers and parents would tell heroic stories about the power of human ingenuity to tame the natural world and shape it to our ends. I think it's possible that one day such stories could be told about the heroes who were smart enough to dream up a better sprawlopolis and brave enough to make it happen.

Of course, it can take a long time even to define one's terms. Back in the early seventies, my cousin's first husband, who was a dead-ringer for Jesus Christ and grew a secret weed-patch in my grandma's backyard, used the term "megalopolis" to describe the urban corridor that stretches along the northeast coast of the United States. In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey uses the same term, listing the creation of a vast megalopolis as one of the prerequisites to establishing a totalitarian state in this country. My guess is that sprawlopolis emerged as a competing term in the eighties. Like "homosexual," sprawlopolis is a heterolinguistic word. It mates Middle English to ancient Greek and means a city that spreads horizontally without any discernable center. Megalopolis is all Greek, and means nothing more than "great big city." Unlike "suburbia," with which it is routinely confused, sprawlopolis denotes a borderless network of economic and social organization that can exist far outside the orbit of any established urban center. Sprawlopolis is certainly a useful term that describes a real phenomenon, but it may not have much more luck in the rough and tumble of the meme pool than its bachelor uncle, megalopolis.

How big is sprawlopolis? Good question. I could say that a teenager who works at transnational fast-food restaurant in Xian or Buenos Aires is definitely part of the growing tangle, but would I say the same thing about a guy who sells pirated DVDs of San Fernando Valley porn on the sidewalks of Lagos or the woman who stitches brand-name blue jeans together at a "Made in the USA" sweatshop on the island of Saipan? The exponential growth of franchises, the viral spread of electronic media, and the proliferation of low-wage jobs are all aspects of life in sprawlopolis, and they are all aspects of life in the global economy, but that doesn't mean that the process of globalization and the growth of sprawlopolis are the same thing. I'll leave it to someone else to draw the hard and fast borders between things, and just settle for a sharing a few observations about my own perception of sprawlopolis and its size.

Growing up in Southern California, I saw the world as a patchwork of municipalities that differed in name only. If I rode in the backseat of my mother's car from the Pomona Valley to, say, my pediatrician's office just north of LAX, I would see endless acres of beige and pastel ranch houses bordered by pink cinder block walls beneath a glaring pink sky. Not that it was always ugly. When the sun was setting, the shades of red and orange could be as bracing and sublime as a slow motion film of some disaster involving lots and lots of burning fuel, and if you looked due west from Kellogg Hill at Covina and the cities stretching onward to L.A., you could even be surprised at the amount of tree cover created by so many mature Eucalyptus, Liquid Amber, Sycamore, and Pine trees planted in people's yards and along a few of the larger residential boulevards. Of all the art and media that I was exposed to as a child, I'd have to say that the Hannah Barbera cartoons, with their visions of cool cars and drive-in restaurants projected endlessly into the past and future, and their own repeating landscapes of outrageous shapes cast in soft candy colors, did the most to help me see some beauty in sprawlopolis.

At that time, I was convinced that 99% of the country looked like what I saw out the window on those hazy afternoon drives to the doctor's office. I remember reading a paperback book by Isaac Asimov about our "crowded spaceship earth" and the nightmare scenarios that would spread to the upper decks to affect the lives of the first class passengers. I had a friend in fifth grade who talked in paragraphs and wore his hair about five inches longer than any other boy at our North Claremont, retired Air-Force Principal, keep-the-ACLU-the-hell-away-from-our-Christmas-pageant, red-meat Republican school. During mid-morning recess, he told me during long diatribes in the far corner of the soccer field how people would be killing each other in the streets in just a few years over dwindling supplies of food and water. He also asked me for advice on a painless way to kill himself. I told him that I'd heard that some people stick their heads in ovens (at home my brother had a National Lampoon that contained a pornographic re-enactment of Sylvia Plath's suicide, along with other famous deaths), but I thought even then that his suicide talk was neither serious nor a "cry for help," but merely a way of messing with the head of a younger kid.

A couple of years later, when I was in Junior High School, our family took a trip to Virginia to visit my maternal grandparents. The most astounding aspect of this experience for me was the flight across the country, for which I was lucky enough to have a window seat. Like most cliches, the saying that "Travel broadens the mind," is almost always true, but this time it was true for me in a literal sense. My conception of how big and open the North American land mass was increased by a factor of something like 10,000. I suppose that if I'd walked across the country to visit my grandparents, the effect would have been even greater.

After that first trip across the country, I adopted the view that I later saw expressed so well by Marc P. Reisner in Cadillac Desert, namely, that anyone who doesn't get a window seat is just wasting money. I have stared for dozens of hours now at sere creases and river tendrils of the western states, the Euclidean glyphs of the Great Plains, and the low green undulations of the east. If going on a hike is one way of looking at nature, and going to the zoo is another, this is a third way that most resembles the astronaut's: the looker is in the wild, miles from any sort of human settlement or infrastructure, but he is surrounded by ponderous loads of life-supporting equipment. The white noise of the jet engines and the AC valves overhead is as familiar to him as the ubiquitous whoosh of the Interstate down below, and it serves to remind him that he is part of a rapidly growing species that wields the power to alter everything it touches in ways that are sometimes beautiful, sometimes banal, and sometimes horrifying.

When I was flying into Ontario Airport from a trip to Georgia a few weeks ago, I listened to the conversation of two big, friendly, burly guys who were sitting in the seats right behind me. It turned out that both of these men were in the mining business; one worked with open-pit soft coal mining in the U.S., while the other sold mining equipment around the world, most recently in Australia and Asia. Our plane's landing gear came down with its reassuring hydraulic thunk as we passed over the gridlocked intersection of the 10 and 15 (it was 5pm on a Friday), and I continued to eavesdrop on their conversations as I watched the reddish yellow galaxy of lights become a more distinct collection of familiar landmarks. "Yeah, there's plenty of gold in the ocean, you know, and nobody's figured out what to do about it."

Anomalies

"Anomalies" by Muayad Muhsin, oil on canvas, 2006

spring_alpha project

illustrations by Chad McCail

spring_alpha is a multi-player game set in an industrialized housing estate whose inhabitants are attempting to create their own autonomous society in contrast to that of the regime in which they live. The game serves as a "sketch pad" for testing out alternative forms of social practice at both the 'narrative' level, in terms of the game story, and at a 'code' level, as players are able to re-write the code that runs the simulated world. The original narrative is based on a series of drawings by Chad McCail, "Spring" and "Evolution is Not Over Yet", which also shape the game's visual style. The original stories and images become a framework that is fleshed-out by people's own ideas and experiences. The basic aim of the game is to change the rules by which the society in that world runs. This is done through re-writing the code that simulates that world, creating new types of behaviour and social interaction. How effective this becomes depends on the players' ability to spread these new ideas into the society.

In its name, the project combines the title of one of Chad's drawings with the term 'alpha', referring in part to sci-fi dystopias such as "Alphaville" but also deriving from software development. An 'alpha' version is an early proof-of-concept program in which ideas are first formed. 'spring_alpha' is a game in permanent alpha state, always open to revision and re-versioning. Re-writing spring_alpha is not only an option available to coders however. Much of the focus of the project lies in using game development itself as a vehicle for social enquiry and speculation: the issues involved in re-designing the game draw parallels with those involved in re-thinking social structures. Rather than writing such explorations directly as code, this aspect of the project utilises a programming practice known as 'design patterns'.

A design pattern is not a piece of code as such but rather an outline of how a particular coding task may be handled. Each pattern addresses a specific task or problem in a generalised form. A coder may then adopt this pattern, implementing it within a project in their own choice of programming language and tailoring it the project's needs. Design patterns, therefore, present a way of articulating programming practices and problem-solving approaches in a sharable form that is analogous to the sharing of actual code through FLOSS licensed libraries and source distributionslink. Whilst they are not unique to FLOSS development, they nevertheless emphasize a similar knowledge-sharing principle.

In the same way in which source code is collected and made available through online repositories, such as Savannah and Sourceforge, design patterns have been collated and shared through repositories such as the Portland Pattern Repository. Portland introduced a new mechanism for collecting and editing patterns called the 'Wiki'. Created in 1995 by Ward Cunnigham, the Wiki adopts a simplified form of the code management systems used by repositories such as Savannah to coordinate the re-writing of code by numerous distributed programmers who download and update the projects. The most widely used code management tools include Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Bitkeeper, and Subversion (SVN). Key to these tools is the use of version control, enabling the history of changes to a source code file to be recorded, and providing the ability to step back to earlier versions and review those changes. The Wiki provides this through a simple-to-use web interface, enabling a website to be generated by multiple authors as a discursive space in which they can review and modify each other's contributions. It is a looser system than CVS, supporting less structured, more informal types of text than program code. The Wiki can be understood as a design pattern in its own right, and has proven to be a powerful one, spawning many variations and applications, including numerous knowledgesharing forums. The most widely used of these is Wikipedia, an 'open', collaborative online encyclopaedia which has now outgrown all comparable institutionally authored encyclopaedias.

The design patterns concept did not originate from the programming community, however, but was adopted from the work of the architect Christopher Alexander who described it in terms of 'pattern languages'. Alexander's pattern languages were developed as an approach to designing buildings and urban space in a way that enabled potential inhabitants of a design, who were without architectural training, to communicate their own desires for the creation and use of the space as well as understand an architect's proposals. Such patterns were a way of de-mythologising and democratising architectural design so that a built environment would not simply be the whim of a singular architect, but rather a response to the collective needs and desires of the communities it housed. In place of the 'Master Builder', Alexander proposed a socially located practice:

"... towns and buildings will not be able to come alive, unless they are made by all the people in society, and unless these people share a common pattern language, within which to make these buildings, and unless this common pattern language is alive itself."link

A parallel may be drawn between this and the Free Software movement's emphasis upon software development as a social issue, and the need for code to be 'free' and open in order to facilitate this.link Alexander himself has stated that he has been positively impressed by the adoption of the design patterns concept into programming and that programmers have, in general, appeared to understand and utilise it better than architects.link Whilst it operates well as a method for communicating between programmers however, there is still a way to go in de-mythologizing programming knowhow akin to that which Alexander sought in architecture. Design patterns, as they are currently used within computing, also fail to implement the kind of socially located practice Alexander promoted.

"A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction" is a repository, in book form, of architectural design patterns collected by Alexander and a team of collaborators over many years. It is intended as a reference book and user's manual from which people (whether architects or not) can implement designs appropriate to their situation. Many of the patterns are based on observations of vernacular building and the ways in which people have made use of spaces according to their own needs rather than the purposes they were possibly planned for. The patterns address issues of building and urban space on a variety of levels, from broad elements such as mixtures of housing and workplaces down to small formal details such as window positions and room layouts. Significantly, Alexander does not present these as exclusively formal patterns dealing solely with structure and shape, but rather, he emphasizes the need for each pattern to combine "the field of physical and social relationships" upon which a successful environment depends. The patterns therefore include examples such as: "Self-governing workshops and offices" in which the workers have autonomous control; "Teen-Age society", which replaces high-schools with distributed learning networks governed by the students; "Dancing in the street", which speaks for itself; and a pattern for creating spaces for people to sleep in public. This last pattern proposes that "it is a mark of success in a park, public lobby or a porch, when people can come there and fall asleep". It is in stark contrast to the kind of regulative perceptions governing most modern cities that see such behaviour as 'anti-social' or counterproductive, highlighting just how far uses of space that are not work or consumption orientated are discouraged there. With the possible exception of the Wiki pattern, such awareness of the combined physical and social, as promoted by Alexander, is absent from the use of design patterns in computing. Here they are almost exclusively applied to formal and technical issues, how software mechanisms operate internally rather than how software functions as a human 'inhabited' environment.

Alexander's patterns are used to articulate a model of how a built environment might be both in terms of structural form and social processes supported by that. As such they can be compared to two quite distinct 'traditions' of pattern use: one located in architecture as an expression of top-down state governance, and the other created from a grass roots level to challenge existing social patterns.

Originally published in the 1960's, "Space in the Home" was a guide book for architects and urban planners addressing the appropriate allocation of space in designing public housing. It had the aim of reforming current design by setting standards of minimum spatial requirements for the typical inhabitants. Based on the findings of the Parker Morris report, published as "Homes for Today and Tomorrow" in 1961, the plans in "Space in the Home" were based upon a model of the typical behaviour of a modern nuclear family. The book includes not only spatial layouts but temporal plans plotting a family's typical activities during the day, in which mother stays at home and father goes to work. The architecture it promotes is, in a sense, 'programmed' according to a particular lifestyle based on traditional gender roles and the demands of Western industrial culture. "Space in the Home" is a 'closed' pattern book, however, imposing itself on the communities it addresses rather than enabling them to voice themselves within, or against it.

It is this kind of closed and imposed social patterning that spring_alpha deliberately starts from. The housing in spring_alpha is directly derived from the designs of "Space in the Home". This is combined with a simulation system that parallels the 'spatial programming' of "Space in the Home". The simulation system in spring_alpha follows the 'smart terrains' model used in games such as The Sims.link In a smart terrain character behaviour is coded into the objects of the environment rather than the characters themselves. The behaviour to open a door, for example, will be coded into the door, and when a character comes into contact with that door it acquires and performs the behaviour. Social behaviours may also be encoded this way. In a pub, for example, the roles of barstaff and customer maybe coded into the different sides of the bar. In The Sims, players develop their character's behaviour by purchasing goods for them, with new behaviours being coded directly into the commodities. Whilst The Sims may claim to satirize consumer society, it nevertheless also reinforces a paradigm of consumption as the primary means of social and personal agency - you are what you buy. In spring_alpha, these closed systems are overtly opened and exposed as ones in need of re-writing. The player is not a consumer within the simulated society but rather one of many authors of it.

Whilst the Parker Morris patterns consolidate a set of normative social behaviours, and physically build them into the landscape, an entirely different tradition of patterns have developed to articulate ways of rewriting such behaviours and challenging the institutional mechanisms that support them. These have grown through less formal or systematic approaches than those of "Space in the Home" or Alexander, often being distributed through small-scale self-publication formats such as posters, zines and, more recently, websites.

The "Glasgow User Manual" is a project currently in progress in Glasgow. The 'manual' is more of an ongoing process rather than a static publication, evolving through a series of workshops and events covering different ways of re-claiming autonomous citizenship within the city outside of consumerist and bureaucratic models. Ideas developed through these are being collated on a website, http://www.citystrolls.com, where they can be cross-referenced with broader issues and debates and made more widely available. It is informed by an older project, "The Citizens Handbook" put together by Charles Dobson and the Vancouver Citizen's Committee, online at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/citizens-handbook/, and in print as "The Troublemaker's Teaparty, A Manual for Effective Citizen Action". This focuses primarily on forms of community action whereas the Citystrolls project also aims to explore alternative ways in which the city itself can be engaged with.

The 'ex-workers collective' Crimethinc have been gathering and publishing similar material through zines such as "Rolling Thunder" which "neither reduces the organic impulses of revolt to inert theory nor prioritizes conventional activism over the subversive elements present in every other walk of life but instead focuses on sharing the stories of those who step out of line and sharing the skills developed in the process." Crimethinc also make available a series of 'toolkits' such as the "Gender Subversion Kit" produced as posters and leaflets for easy distribution and use in play and workshop situations. These are comparable to Chad's "Evolution is Not Over Yet" drawings which make similar propositions and provocations for alternative patterns of social action: "Obedience does not relieve pain", "School is not compulsory", "Money is burned". They recall an earlier series by Clifford Harper of posters presenting 'instruction manual' style images on converting terraced housing into an eco-collective and setting up a community media lab.

Various forms of 'howto' guides have been a staple part of activist culture for a long time, particularly those informed by anarchist and autonomist principles. The SchNEWS website provides a collection of online howtos covering topics ranging from running a local newspaper to making bio-diesel and road protest techniques. Such knowledge is not always expressed in explicit guidebook form however. "The Heart and Soul of It" is a book put together by women of the Worsbrough community documenting their experiences of the Miners Strike in the mid-1980's.link Through a series of personal narratives it describes not only the running of the picket lines but also how the community sustained itself through community kitchens and swap shops. This is a kind of knowledge that often falls outside of academic and theorist studies. The howtos and the Worsbrough narratives articulate a different form of 'pattern' collection. Some are propositional, like Chad's drawings, promoting an alternative for how things could be, others, like the Worsbrough accounts, deal with the situation 'as is', acknowledging the possibility of conflict and adversity. What they share is an emphasis upon recording 'knowledge through action' and making that distributive. Here the pattern is a vehicle for propagating activity rather than imposing form.

The connections between these traditions and FLOSS methods have been recognised in projects such as Socialforge. This is an online repository for developing and discussing various alternative political and social practices which has consciously modeled itself on the FLOSS code repository, naming itself after Sourceforge specifically. "A GNU World" is one project hosted on Socialforge, linked with the Oekunux mailing list. Oekunux and "A GNU World" are concerned with exploring how FLOSS principles may be extended beyond code into other forms of social organisation and practice. As such they come closest to the combining of "the field of physical and social relationships" of Alexander's original pattern concept.

spring_alpha is a hybrid game-engine and Wiki. Whereas, in The Sims, game behaviours are sealed components, in spring_alpha, the code can be accessed directly during gameplay and re-written. Each object keeps a history of its changes. New code does not automatically take effect but depends on game characters adopting and activating it, therefore, gameplay itself is a dual process of re-coding and character actions. The game code is under constant surveillance by the gameworld's state security system, not unlike anti-cheat systems used in commercial games, such as "PunkBuster", but here used as an explicit part of gameplay. The project as a whole, however, is bigger than the game itself. At this larger level the game serves as a focus and test-bed for forms of social pattern development through a series of workshops.

The project is being created and released through a series of modules, each of which focuses on specific aspects of the project overall. So far these have been development modules, through which the construction of the core gaming system itself has been formed along with the basic framework needed to realise the project. A series of actual gameplay modules are now starting to appear which implement more the ideas and content of the project in a playable form. Each gameplay module takes a specific element of the original story, such as the creation of re-claimed urban food gardens, a pirate radio station, or the riot in which the story culminates. The modules are developed in conjunction with different groups, such as a local community in Dundee where the project is currently based, and draw upon issues and histories specific to them. Different materials are developed from this, ranging from characters representing particular individual's viewpoints, to actual gamecode and design patterns. The design patterns enable people to articulate ideas that can be potentially coded up by others, but even if a pattern is never coded up directly it still has significance as part of the project. Being in permanent alpha state, un-coded aspects of the project retain their potential to be implemented elsewhere, possibly outside of the game itself.link Each module is made available as a downloadable game and handbook. The handbook is a mixture of the player's manual and cheat-guide genre that has grown alongside commercial gaming and the howto guides described above.

In an era before the spread of home computing, anarchist educator and environmentalist Colin Ward developed a notion of learning through the city he called 'streetwork'.link Through this, the city is to be understood as both a resource from which to acquire knowledge, based around local issues and events, and a malleable medium that the child or citizen could shape, or 'write' back into. As well as gathering and interpreting material from the urban environment, streetwork utilises games and simulations to explore how conflicts of attitudes and values shape that environment. Such games need to be open and re-writable, necessarily partial and improvisational, permanently alpha. Games in which we play with the rules rather than by the rules. In spring_alpha conflicts and discourses of patterns can be brought into play and explored in terms of a 'knowledge through action' rather than academic rhetoric. Codework complements streetwork as dual interrogative practices. As such it provides a reflective and speculative 'object to think with' alongside the complex and contested pattern repositories of the real urban environment: "On the one hand, this city is the only one you will ever have, and you must make the best of it. On the other hand, if you want to make the best of if, you've got to be able to criticise it and change it and circumvent it ...." Paul Goodman, The Grand Piano, 1942

originally published in "Media Mutandis" a NODE.London Reader, March 2006

link

Metamorphosis

"Metamorphosis" by Kim Richardson, mixed media collage, 2005

Los Angeles City Hall

Since 1989, Michael Uhlenkott has run the Graphic Services Section of the Los Angeles Dept of City Planning.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Picture this scenario: You arrive at a small party, are introduced to someone who says a nice "hello." You begin conversing and two minutes into the conversation they toss out another "hello." Two minutes of more talk and yet another punctuation of "hello." Again two minutes later. And again.

Whether you call it wearisome, worrisome, or just plain stupid, I've been encountering just this sort of thing, albeit in a different form. I live in a very small town. It's quaint and relatively intact in terms of its older buildings. It's the sort of place that, when people drive through it they think, "This is quaint and relatively intact. Let's stop and see if there's a good restaurant, hotel, book store, and any antique shops." (The answers being yes, no, no, and one, respectively.) A state highway winds its way into the village, making a sharp left turn at the light in the center of town. All along this route, on about every fourth light post, there is a canvas banner proclaiming, "Welcome to Greenwich." That's where the overlay of the jabbering semi-lunatic comes in. An offering of "Welcome" is appropriate when entering the town, not on a continuous basis as you pass through.

The number of these banners was doubled a couple years ago when more light posts went up. However these use a smaller font and an image of a park bench by a tree. Given the height they're at and the simplification of the pictorial forms, these now welcome as you're leaving town, but with a noticeable dose of obfuscation. It's as if that lunatic has been handcuffed to you but has become barely audible, repeatedly whispering "hello," causing you to ask each time, "What? What?"

When did all these banners become necessary? I see similar ones in other towns, with just the names dropped in. The first welcome banners that showed up here (and are still hanging, now joined by their idiot cousin banners) have a backdrop image of a quaint village building. We have the real things right here! Why put up a clip art picture of a quaint townscape, when motorists can see the real things right out the windows of their car? linkBanner salesmen and the companies they represent must be having a field day. What one little town sees the next one wants, these being essentially efforts to scare some dollars into the coffers of the local businesses who struggle to survive in the face of questionably sound discounts at big box stores. A rather desperate ploy adopted by most every business on the main street was pitched to them by the local chamber of commerce that got them all to purchase (at a "discount") matching "open" flags. As if the reason people weren't stopping and buying was because they were confused as to whether or not the establishment was open, rather than the fact that there are too many country knickknack and consignment stores.

The proliferation of these banners suggests drunken town planning, with decisions having been made just before passing out. What makes them all the worse is that there have previously been some excellent decisions made. There are sturdy, professionally rendered historic-looking wooden signs at a few of the entryways into the village. These were erected after some banners were already up. But rather than take them down, more were added!

Free

"Free" by Liz Parkinson, black ink on paper, 1996

Signal House #1

"Signal House #1" by Ian Pyper, ink on paper, 1996

Last Name

Chapter One is here.

Aaron Telco was a decent guy when I knew him in school. He was three grades older than me, so he would have been perfectly justified in acting like a dick around my friends and me, but he always wore his age with grace, as if it were an accident. He was Edgar's cousin, and the two chatted occasionally, usually about stupid things their parents had done.

Aaron graduated ahead of his class and went straight into training to be an EMT. He was on first response the night Edgar killed Martha and her mother, but that happened in a different jurisdiction.

I ran into him at the hospital after I heard that Edgar, though still in a coma, was all right for visitors. The door to Edgar's room was closed, but the nurse had told me to go on in, so I knocked and pushed it open. Aaron was standing next to Edgar's bed, his hand resting on some piece of beeping machinery. He settled his eyes on my face for a good long moment while he dredged up my name, then said: "He's asleep."

"Has he woken up?" I asked.

Aaron shook his head. "He opened his eyes a couple of times, but there's nothing behind them."

"That's weird," I said.

Aaron nodded. "You guys keep in touch?" he asked.

"We're classmates," I said. "He's got a million friends."

"I thought he'd have graduated by now," said Aaron.

"We're still the young cusses," I said. Then: "Does it help him to hear a familiar voice?"

"Maybe," said Aaron. He slapped his hand nervously against the top of one of Edgar's monitors, as if trying to fix the reception on a TV set. "I've been here too long," he said. "You want some coffee?"

The cafeteria had a free pot. One sip and it clung to my teeth like some chemical solvent. Aaron steered me toward a table in the corner and waited for me to sit before taking a chair opposite mine. "I feel like I owe you an apology," he said.

"It's not that bad," I said, mock-toasting him with my Styrofoam cup.

"I was a dick to you back in school," he said.

"I probably deserved it," I said. "I always thought you were nice to me."

"I was, to you. But you had a lot of nicknames, back then. I guess you've outgrown most of them, now. I started a few." For the last two years, I had been wanting to confess to Emma that the first time I met her, I had called her a space cadet. I wondered if Aaron was feeling the same low pang of guilt. "It wasn't very nice of me," he added; then he grinned into his coffee and took a big, steaming gulp. "I got away with it, though. I guess you didn't even notice."

I shook my head.

"See, I have this theory," said Aaron. "Everyone on Earth has some stupid super power. Nothing great, like flying or heat vision, but dumb things, like being able to tell if you're on the ground floor, or guessing the right thing to order off a menu. Me, I was always able to tell when I'd get caught. I lied all through high school. I passed eleventh grade biology without hardly attending, because I told my teacher I did the reading at home, and he sucked at writing tests. I kept two girlfriends at the same time, and they never found out. I ended up dumping them both. I convinced the whole graduating class that you were gay for your friend. What's his name? The smart one."

"Harald," I said.

"Yeah, him," said Aaron. "I'm sorry. Some of the senior girls thought it was cute, at least."

"You always talked about your parents behind their backs," I said.

"Yeah. They never caught me, either," said Aaron. He froze as a code call went over the intercom. There was a cardiac arrest on floor three. Aaron downed the rest of his coffee and leaned back in his chair. He took a deep breath. "Two weeks ago I answered a call for a head-on collision," he said. "Guy who called it in said he saw one car swerving all over the road, thought about calling it in, and then felt guilty when he waited until after there was a crash. He sounded really broken up on the phone, apparently, and he was still on scene when we got there. I can't stand guys like that, all guilty over things that aren't their fault or even their business. He was right, though; he should have called it in. The guy that was swerving turned out to be dead drunk. He went limp on impact, landed tits up on the asphalt, unconscious but still alive. Other car had a dad and a little girl, couldn't have been more than fifteen. Had her learner's permit in her wallet, and ear buds in her ears. They went stiff; and, even though they were buckled in, they both died.
"So, we were there to pick up the drunk. It was me, the driver, and my training partner. It didn't take much to get the bastard stabilized, so we got him on a stretcher and into the ambulance. My partner sat up front with the driver; I stayed back with the drunk. I stared at him for a while as we tore through the city, lights on fire. He was an ugly man. Had a big old brow ridge like a gorilla, and a unibrow. Probably wasn't smart enough, evolved enough to handle driving a car in the first place.

"No, he was worse than that. He was a shit, a bit of useless flesh cut off from everything good about life. He killed that little girl and the kicker was he didn't even know it. For all he knew, he had died in that crash.

"It wasn't hard to kill him, morally or otherwise. Easy enough to tweak the hardware and the wetware. Nothing traceable; when we pulled up to the hospital, it looked as if he'd died of head trauma from landing on the pavement. I stood in the ER filling out paperwork for half an hour, and during that time the drunk's family came in because they'd heard about the accident but hadn't heard that their husband and father was dead. I stood right next to them, the clipboard shaking in my hands, and I fucking felt like the angel of death."

Aaron had crumpled his coffee cup in one hand. Bits of it flaked to the linoleum floor, white on gray. I stared at my hands and tried to get the tastes of coffee and hot blood out of my mouth.

"I don't think I have a super power," I said.

"I can teach you how to kill a man," said Aaron. "If you want."

After that, we both went back to Edgar's room. Aaron sat in a corner chair, his neck angled over his lap, while I sat next to the bed. I wanted to say something to Edgar, just to line up my life with the movies, but it didn't feel right with Aaron sitting there. Others of Edgar's friends had gotten wind that it was all right to drop by. A couple of librarian-types I didn't know came bringing some of Edgar's favorite CDs, and I offered up my uncomfortable seat. I said goodbye to Aaron; he grinned instead of replying.

When I got home, it took me a while to find the number for the police station. I didn't think it was worth calling emergency over, but I figured I could call in weeks-old crimes to the officer on duty. I had to dig out the previous year's copy of the yellow pages out of a stack of recycling I had never gotten to taking outside for my mother, since I couldn't find this year's.

I told the officer who answered the phone that I had heard a man confess to killing a drunk. The whole time I spoke my heart was pumping so hard in both directions, it felt as if two halves of my blood were at war; one half wanted me to finish the tattle, the other wanted me to let it go. I could feel my body rocking with the tidal forces of the battle, and when the officer asked me if I had a name for him, I said, "I didn't catch it. He had brown hair, wasn't taller than me, five-nine, and had blue eyes."

I told Emma about the whole thing the next time I saw her. "Poor you," she said. "Always late to the game. Everyone else gets there first."

"I don't want to kill anyone," I said.

Emma nodded thoughtfully, and I fully expected her to launch into a story about how she had lived on the streets and killed dozens of gang members in her life before she moved up here. Then I remembered what she told me about the young boy that she had killed, just as she said: "Sometimes death can transform something ugly into something powerful, or something puny into something beautiful. It's never what you expect." Then she sighed. "I don't learn as much from you, these days," she said. "You used to tell me everything you could think of. It's not your fault. There's just not enough to learn. I feel as if I'm telling you everything."

First thing that came to mind in the wide space of that almost-invitation was god. I asked her if she still believed in him. She smiled, shook her head. "But I don't believe in the weatherman, either. I need something falsifiable, like human courage," she said.

Most everything I know of Emma I learned from other people. I first heard about her from Harald, and it was his description of her that I saw when she came around the corner on her way to class. Edgar told me about her history, about how she had had to run away from California because she didn't belong there, and because some people were after her. She was like an alien to me, and I used my friends to dissect her.
It wasn't until we started going out that I really learned a few things about her for myself. I learned that she was scared of children because they asked too many questions. I said that she wouldn't mind questions if she didn't have something to hide. I learned that she was incapable of experiencing internal orgasms, and that she wore contacts to cut down on glare because the sun was too bright for her. I learned that the reason she liked sad stories was because she believed that sadness was the base emotion for humanity; she believed that humor got in the way of truth, and happiness didn't move in a wave but in a decaying orbit around a core of bare heartbreak. I learned that she hated being lied to, that it made her sad.

I learned how she died from the old man who gave her a room and fed her. He called me up one afternoon to ask for my help, and told me I wouldn't want to give it. I had been taking a nap. I went over right away, my head buzzing from being ripped out of dreamland. It didn't stop buzzing. The old guy had put Emma into a plywood box with and nailed a lid on top. He needed help lifting it downstairs to the truck, and then lifting it to where she was going to be buried. He talked the whole way down the stairs, into the cab of his truck, while we drove, and while we walked through the wet grass carrying Emma over a foothill of the Cascade mountains.

"She was conscientious, she was. She figured out what to do in case of-- in case of this, because she wasn't supposed to be with me an' the wife. We wasn't legally supposed to have her. She figured out just where she wanted to go and everything, so we wouldn't have any weird questions. We tell the cops that she ran away again, if they ask. But they won't ask. They didn't ask the first time, when she ran away from her foster folks in California. There was a little boy there; he ended up dead, and Emma came up here before the questions started. My wife and me, we knew her foster parents from way back, and we sent them Christmas cards a few times.

"She never was a problem. Talked easy with the wife and me, and always did the chores we asked her to. She said she liked us, and for some reason she knew about being an electrician, which is what I did before I retired. Still do it, sometimes. She knew about cooking, and helped out in the kitchen without our askin'. We're gonna feel her bein' gone.

"I want you to know, kid, I don't judge you one bit. Had my fair share of judgin' back in the day, when I used to build crop circles, and I know that kind of thing can make you lose sleep. I didn't just build the crop circles; I believed in 'em. I thought I was doin' the Lord's work, whoever the Lord was, by making the circles. Like building a temple so the worshipers have a place to go, y'know? Anyway, I got called crazy for years, and my wife, well, she got called worse, so I gave it up eventually. But I know how tough it is to have other people's thought be worth more than your own, right?

"Can't judge you for having a little fun, anyway, and I don't want you to judge yourself, neither, because, hey, sometimes your thoughts aren't worth much, y'know. When they're the wrong sort of thoughts, I mean. So you two had relations. It's what you do. I been with my wife my whole life. Only ever had relations with one other person, and that was only halfway because I was drunk and all she did was put her mouth on my pecker. So what? The wife and I parked over the hill from the drive-in on our first date. Most of the boys had just come back from the war; I had just moved into the city. We could see the screen, but couldn't hear it. It was something to do with aliens. And don't kid: we never thought those folks dressed up in rubber suits looked like anything but what they were. I watched maybe half of it and then she climbed on up me like a bear cub and said: 'You don't know it, but you got me.' Best thing I ever did, and I don't know what it was. Never much for questions, and I didn't start then.

"You should know what happened to Emma, though it ain't pretty. It'll keep you from asking questions you don't need to. Just accept that the world does stuff without your knowing, or doesn't care what you know.

"She figured she was pregnant. Could see it starting, and the wife and me even talked to her about it. She didn't want to say much, just that she was interested in the boy that did it to her. We asked her if she wanted the baby, or if she wanted to give it up. She cried a little, then. She asked us if we knew about genetics, and I said I knew enough to know that Hitler's master race was bullshit. She said that the father and mother and all their fathers and mothers come to a point with the birth of a child, as if there's all these parallel Vs, like the ripples of ducks on a pond, and each child is at that point. She said there was so much wrong between the two of you, on your different angles, that-- I'm sorry, son, but she said the baby wouldn't be worth a breath of cold air.

"We thought she was being dramatic. You know how teenage girls can be."

We were out of breath and digging the grave, now. The old man kept talking, right through his grunts of effort, so every other word was weak from indrawn breath.

"We offered to help, Lord knows, any way we could," he said. "But she said not to bother, that she wouldn't be a burden. My wife mixed up some of her tea for morning sickness. Some old recipe that came down her mother's side of the V.

"I don't think she meant to commit suicide. That's how it ended up, though. I mean, you look at a guy who falls onto a train track in front of a freighter, and, even if he didn't meant it, he's still a suicide, right? He's the one that did it; he's the one that killed himself, even if he tried so hard not to.

"Emma checked out an anatomy book from the library and took a coat hanger from the front closet. I thought a girl her age would know just about where everything was, but there was the book, open on her bed when I found her. She put a loop on the coat hanger so she wouldn't poke through, but it didn't help. What happened was she pushed too hard, kid. I'm sorry it ain't more complicated than that. Just the point of crossed lines.

"She gave a puncture to someplace in her abdomen. She didn't cry out, but she fell off her bed and I came upstairs to make sure, well, to make sure it wasn't you doing somethin' you oughtta not. I knocked on the door and she said: 'Please don't,' but I could hear somethin' dirty like pain in her voice, and I thought, damn it, not until you're twenty-one, girl.

"There was blood coming out of her parts and spreading out like it should have been in some good shape like a circle, but pooled and slurped up by the sheets and then the carpet."

The old man took a moment of silence as we lowered Emma's crate into the dirt. It had been getting lighter all through the hike, and now it was the lightest ever, as though she had vanished from inside. We didn't try and do a good job filling the hole back in; we just swept the dirt back in with our boots and hands, stamped on it a couple of times, and then headed back for the road. I held my hands close to my face, so I could smell the wild soil.

"So don't feel bad," the old man said. "Girls like Emma, they come along once in a thousand years. She's the kind that takes your memories and rewrites them, yeah? She's the gold standard for all your love in the future. Girls like Emma, they're worth pining for. Count yourself lucky to have crossed wires with her."

For once, he seemed to be waiting for some kind of reaction from me. "Yeah," I said. I wanted it to sound like a wall, thick and lead, but the open air took it, and tinted it green, and the rocks almost echoed it back to me. "It's what she would have wanted," I said.

"Don't know about that," said the old man. "Don't know what my wife wants half the time." He chuckled. "You know what this means, son? Means I've got so much in my brain I can talk for three hours without even breathing. I see you ain't much got a word in edgewise, but you don't look like you wanna, neither. I see that. You ain't got the years for talkin'."

"Just don't feel much like it," I said.
The old guy grinned at me and, because of the slight shaking of his head, his eyes twinkled. "Tell you what," he said. "I'll keep talking, and some day, when you've got something to say, you come on over. My wife'll fix you something good to cheer you up."

Uncle Gyro had been full of get-rich schemes since the day I met him. He was an armchair marketing wizard, cursing the TV during the infomercials, saying: "I coulda done that. What idiot doesn't come up with something like that?"

After aunt Edith died, he decided all he wanted to do was watch TV. Mom and I would visit him twice a day to make sure he got his food and to keep the house in a decent state. School was in session, so we'd go once before my classes started, and once after final bell. While mom emptied uncle Gyro's catheter bag, I'd prepare him a meal, usually a sandwich and a glass of milk. I'd hand them over on a piece of his wedding-present china while mom tried to talk to him about the weather or the local politics. He stopped responding, but I always caught the barest film of clever light in his eyes that made me think he was ignoring us on purpose, that he'd finally cashed in on the benefits of being an old man, being stubborn silence, willful helplessness, and the option to yell at whippersnappers.

After a couple of months, it got to be too much for mom, and she made the decision to stick him in a care facility. I think that was all part of his plan, because the place we chose had way more channels on the TV than his home set did.

We still visited him after school a couple times a week. Sometimes, when mom was busy at the church, I came by myself. I think uncle Gyro preferred it when I was alone, because old men and young men have the same carte blanches and I once cheerfully swore at his caregiver for putting too much mustard on his sandwich.

Out of nowhere one cold afternoon he spoke to me. "I'm going to make a fortune," he said. I was doing my homework on a little table next to the window. By the time I looked up from it, he was staring at the TV screen again, if he'd even glanced at me.

"Will you leave it to me?" I asked. There was a comfort in the dark humor, a natural contrast with the snow-reflected light that kept the world from overbalancing.

"Of course I will," said uncle Gyro. "But you have to help me. You have to fill out the patent paperwork, because I can't even grip myself to piss anymore, much less hold a pen."

"What's your idea this time?" Uncle Gyro had been trying to score a jackpot all his life, with as little effort as possible. He used to make aunt Edith go buy his lottery tickets for him. Every so often, he tried to convince mom to invest in one of his ideas, but she never did. "I've got fifty bucks left over from Christmas."
"I'm going to patent the sandwich," he said.

"I think it's been done," I said.

"No," he insisted. "No, it hasn't." His voice slipped up a few pitches. "You'd think somebody would have done it by now, but nobody has. It's like the wheel. Who has the patent to the wheel? Bill Gates? Is that how he got so rich, I'd like to know. Everybody uses the wheel, but nobody owns it. Everybody uses sandwiches, but nobody owns them. But you've got to be specific with these things," he added. "You can't just write a paper that says: The Sandwich, and send that in. You've got to be careful. My sandwich will be bread, of any variety, then mayonnaise, then mustard, then meat, of any variety, then lettuce, cheese, and another slice of bread. That last slice of bread doesn't have to be the same kind as the first one, see. They're separate, so you can't get around it."

"I don't like mustard," I said.

"Well, I don't want you paying me royalties anyway," said uncle Gyro with a grin. His eyes slipped over the TV screen; some flash-in-the-pan company was advertising special picks to hold large sandwiches together. The picks had sharp, hollow edges, so you could stab out bites without jeopardizing your meal's structure. "It's brilliant," said uncle Gyro.

"McDonald's already has a way around you," I said. "They have three slices of bread, and two sections of meat."

Uncle Gyro snorted and sank back into his chair. I had unbalanced the world again. I moved away from the window, so as not to block the light, and dug my wallet out of my pants. I opened up the fold and took out the two twenties and the ten. I had been thinking about using them to buy a gift for Emma, but they had been sitting listless since she died. I dropped the bills into uncle Gyro's lap.

"I've gotta go home," I said. "But just let me know when it's time to fill out the patent application." I started packing up my books and binder. "You're gonna outlive me, uncle Gyro," I said. "All those ideas you have. Something's bound to last forever."

"It's not the root of all evil," uncle Gyro muttered. I glanced up. He was fanning himself uselessly with the three bills. "Your friend, what's his name. The one who killed our little Martha."

"Edgar," I said.

"No," said uncle Gyro. "That's not it. The Telco boy."

"He changed his name to Steve in fifth grade," I said.

"Steve, yeah," said uncle Gyro. "His folks are some of the worst people I've ever known. They're petty and unconcerned, careless. I knew his dad back in the sixties, before he started up with his first wife, before he got in on the computer business. Which wife is he on, now?"

"I don't know," I said. "Three, I think."

"I just had the one, and I was way better at it. So he had the ideas. He had the girls and turned out to have the luck. Me, I hang on to things. I hang on to them; maybe I hang on to them too long. It ain't money that's the root of all evil. Money's keeping your friend alive. So it's not money; it's value. Evil happens when you value something too much, or not enough, or don't even give it a number at all." He shook his head and crumpled my money into his fist. "I hold on to things too long," he said.

I really wanted to say something, if for no other reason than to get him to explain himself, but his eyes closed and his face paled and he fell into one of his episodes. The caregivers said that when they happened, we should humor them, to make it easier on him, or to play along if he's faking it, because laughter has healing properties, or something.

This one was bad and real. I sat down, unwilling to leave him like that. The sun went unbalanced and slid behind the mountains, followed by a brief, jittery sunset. I turned on a lamp and tried to do some more homework, but it didn't seem worth my time. I spent three hours there, listening to him breathe, before a caregiver came and took him away to dinner. The whole walk home, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was three wasted hours, three hours that could have been better spent

A couple weeks later, mom and I went down to the morgue to pick up uncle Gyro's effects. The receptionist handed us a manila envelope and, while mom filled out some paperwork, I took a peek inside. He didn't need a wallet or keys at the care facility, so all the envelope contained was a four-by-six pad of lined paper filled with cramped drawings and upward-slanting notes, his over-the-counter magnifying glasses, two twenties, and a ten.

Harald and I worked the refreshment table again for uncle Gyro's memorial. Harald poured the juice while I kept the coffee flowing. I chatted with the familiar faces from the church and community, faces to which I had never bothered to attach names. Harald kept his mouth in a thin line, nodding briskly to acknowledge the juice drinkers. I hadn't had to tell him about the service, or to ask him to help me out afterwards; he volunteered, and my guess is that it was because of Emma. She should have been there with us, and by his presence Harald made her absence all the more apparent. I don't know if he did it to savor the deep bitterness or to get me depressed; he had done both before.

Aunt Riley was the last in line. "My pump's gone out again," she told me with an exasperated roll of her eyes.

"Again?" I said. "That's the third time in as many months."

"I know, I know. I hate calling you up just to flip that switch, but it's really impossible for me."

"No," I said. "I'm glad to do it."

Harald offered her a glass of juice, but she declined it. "Your mom said you and he spent a lot of time together toward the end."

"I don't know how good a company I was," I said.

"I have to ask: did he mention me?" asked aunt Riley.

I shook my head. "He talked to you like you were in the room a couple of times," I said. "He laughed himself silly telling you he got you 'all riled up'."

She smiled and held it. "I always thought I'd get through to him some day," she said, the bend of her lips failing to twist the tone into a happy range. "It hurts, you know? It's hardly my business to say, but it hurts that my own brother could be in hell, now. I can't say, of course. Only God knows the heart, but he's got a book of names, and when I dream about it, I can't see his but way down on the list."

"Mostly he talked about things he could do to get himself rich. For a bit, he thought he had invented ice cream. Accused me of industrial espionage when I went and bought him some from the kitchen."

Aunt Riley gave a rueful shake of her head. "It's like I always tried to tell him: the Lord helps those who help themselves."

"Bullshit," said Harald to his juice pitcher. It was only two syllables, but it contained a spectrum of emotion ranging from glee to frustration. It occurred to me that he may have had a completely different reason for tagging along. He looked up at aunt Riley and shook his head, the gesture too quick to fall into either negation or pity. I could tell he was having fun. It didn't used to be that he'd look out for fun just for himself. I remember in fifth grade, he ran all across the playground to get me so we could torment an anthill together. By the time we got back to the ants, the bell was ringing for us to come inside.

The next year, we were in middle school, and we didn't have recess anymore. We felt as if we were growing up; Harald made the biggest deal about it out of all of us. He wouldn't run in the halls, or aim spit at the girls during lunch break. He lectured me about the way I acted in front of teachers, and generally became a pain in the ass. Later that year, I slept over at his house and we spent the whole night talking about girls we both liked. The next week, I got dirty, pity giggles from all of them, and found out that Harald had told them about my crushes, but not about his own.

I forgave him, clueless as to why, in about a month, but it wasn't until high school that I found out how he had turned into such a dick overnight. It was at another sleepover, this time in some girl's house after a Halloween party. We were down in the basement in a corner behind a couch, both drenched in fake blood, because we had been zombies. The stuff smelled like mold and frosting. Harald had gotten a bunch in his hair when a jock had held him down and given him a noogie. I offered to help him get it out, because he kept complaining.

He said: "You've got to stop being so damn helpful. You remember my dad? He was always so cheerful about getting up to give you his seat, or getting you a drink from the kitchen. Anything you asked, he'd just jump on it. You know why? Because he was desperate to be liked, and terrified of wrong impressions.

"Back in sixth grade, that winter, our furnace went out during one night. I woke up freezing, didn't get warm the whole day. While I was at school, the repairman came over. It was dad's day off, so he sat on the computer doing bills while mom cleaned and the repairman hammered away at stuff in the basement. It always took him forever to get the bills done, because mom always asked him to do things like dust or sweep as they came to her mind. I think he helped her with the dishes-- yeah, his hands were all wet, mom said, when the repairman came upstairs and asked him to run over to the hardware store for some air filters.

"Dad took right off with a grin, dried his hands on the front of his shirt he was in such a hurry. He poked around for way too long at the store, trying to find exactly the right filters. When he came back home, the repairman had left, and mom never told me where exactly she was, but I guess crying in the bedroom. Dad left not long after that, and mom didn't tell me why. I didn't find out until just a bit ago that she had been raped, and that she blamed dad for it. I can't blame her. He was supposed to protect her. That was his entire purpose in life, as much as she needed it."

I tried to go to sleep after that, since I didn't have anything to say, and didn't feel right having nothing to say. The next day, Harald still had the fake blood in his hair, and made fun of me in front of Caroline Grace because we both had a thing for her. So he was a bastard, but he was my best bastard, and he didn't pick on me so much after sixth grade, at least nothing I couldn't give back. Since then, he's been keeping his fun right up at the chest.

"God helps those who help themselves," he said to aunt Riley. He set down the juice pitcher, handle toward her. "That ain't your religion. That one's mine. Christianity is about dying to yourself so you can live for Christ, because there's a limited space in your heart, and you wouldn't want to take up too much, would you? Selfishness is a trait of the old fighting religions. You know, the ones that survived the brutality of human origin.

"But even the selfish dead accomplish more in life than the lot of you!" I thought he was going to jump up on a table any moment. "If Edgar Telco had won out against Martha, he would have been a god among men. All that power in one brief point of change! You have the power to beg, and it gets you nowhere."

Aunt Riley's mouth had drawn up into itself, erasing the potential for anything but a sharp line. "The Lord keeps a book of names," she said. "If Mr Telco had succeeded where he rightly failed, his would have been the last name in that book. Now, I don't know, but the Lord might take pity on the tragedy of suicide, but your friend has got his name so low on the list already, and I don't know that pity will help. When Heaven's full up, they'll turn the sinners away; they'll turn all manner away."

"Cast off your chains!" crowed Harald. He wasn't one to back away from a fight, especially if it was with a bully much bigger than him.

I grabbed his sleeve and tugged him away from the table. Aunt Riley rolled her eyes at me, and not a few other pairs were staring us all the way outside, while Harald chuckled in his throat.

"Jesus," he said when I pushed open the door. We sat down on the sidewalk.

"Think ahead much?" I asked.

"I don't believe in God, man," he said. "I don't believe that other people should, either. It gets you bitter and broken."

"It gets you petty and shallow," I said.

"It gets you nearsighted and political," he replied, thinking it was a game.

"It gets you damn near everything," I said. "It's just life. You try and separate it out, it probably looks pretty stupid, like you with your pants off." I waited for him to snort and turn fully away before asking: "This is about Emma, isn't it?"

"This isn't about anything," he said. "Except maybe about time."

"Couldn't have waited for a better time?" I asked.

Harald grinned and said: "There are those who play the music, and those who write the music down. The music comes out when it needs to, right? Someone calm and scholarly writes it down, later."
I could tell he had been wanting to say it for a while, but he probably hadn't meant for his voice to crack. I figured his mind had jumped the same way mine did at the mention of music: straight to Emma, straight to the evening after the funeral for Martha and her mother. "I have a present for you," I said. I had one small picture in my wallet of Emma. She had taken it soon after our first time, while she was wearing nothing but a skull-and-bones bra, her eye makeup on thick, her eyes let down. It was the only picture she had given me. I dug it out and handed it over to Harald.
"Ain't that simple," he said.
"Maybe she's in a better place," I said.
"Good odds," said Harald.

The infinite structural capabilities of the human body vs. plane triangulation

"The infinite structural capabilities of the human body vs. plane triangulation" by Patrick Turk, 24"x24", medium collage imbedded in polyester resin, 2003

Happy Valley

"Happy Valley" by Michael Dickinson, collage, 2006

New Urbanist Rant #1

There's a mall out here called "Victoria Gardens". I have some pretty severe conflicting feelings about this mall. Not the mall, per se, but the perception of the mall and what it says about our current sense of community. Yes, I know. It's a fucking mall. But this mall is trying to be more and, to a VERY large number of people, it is succeeding.

The thing about this mall is that it's "just like a little downtown". It is several blocks square, it is outside, and it has streets that run through it with gutters and plants and stuff. It's part of a new development style that borrows quite a bit from the New Urbanists but with an obvious monetary slant and a disregard for the long-term benefits of actual community development. It's even being called the "Victoria Gardens Lifestyle Center" in the press releases just to make sure we understand that this is different and better.

Part of what makes it similar to a New Urbanist project is that it claims to be "mixed-use". That's a keyword. That's supposed to make you think that there are living spaces and shops and civic areas all nicely blended together. Like actual mixed-use developments, which are good things. But there are not living areas and civic areas and shopping areas all in the same place. There are shopping areas. If you look closer, they say "within easy walking distance from each other." And that's supposed to be mixed use. But it is not.
To get from the (proposed) condominiums (opening 2005), you need to walk across a parking lot. You know, that parking lot that wraps around the entire mall. Yeah, it's here too. There's a development under construction across the street that is a little closer but you will still have to leave your neighborhood and enter the mall grounds, which are quite clearly marked.

But I'm starting to pick nits so I will back off a bit.

Here is why I have mixed feelings: As far as MALLS go, it's an improvement. But that's like saying, you know, for a serial killer at least that Mr. Bundy was a nice guy.
This new mall is an improvement for the following reasons:
1. It is outside.
2. There is green space.

3. There are areas tucked away between and behind buildings (designated and monitored spaces, to be sure) to sit down and get away from the main shopping area.
4. Parking is distributed fairly evenly throughout the mall with large, accessible structures at regular intervals. And there is even limited parking on the "streets" themselves.
5. There's an Apple store.

And I think this mall is not an improvement over other malls for these reasons:
1. The same stores that are in every mall can also be found here.
2. The piped music is kind of creepy and a little too loud.
3. There's piped music.
4. The same god damned stores that are in every mall are here.
5. There's a creepy almost lifelike feeling.

I know that this last point is weak. I tend to think that these discussions break down as soon as someone starts talking about how the place "feels" but at the same time there is a certain environment that is created and shaped by the people and their interactions and the buildings and how people perceive the surroundings. So the point may be emotionally-charged and, if that bothers you, you can disregard it. I will not hold that against you.

The point is that this is NOT a new development that benefits the community, it is a shopping mall. And that is all.
This fact is perhaps the most important because I believe it is the most damaging. This style of mall is usurping public space and replacing it with private space.
I am opposed to this. I think public space is important. But this is private space. So it can be a "little downtown" - where people wander about and there can be open spaces - when it wants to. But if, god forbid, someone actually has the nerve to loiter or not look quite right, they can be asked to leave because well, after all, it's a private mall and we all understand that. It says so right up front. But here's our "Cultural Center (opening 2006)" where we have public events - as long as you don't try to protest anything that might be going on because well, you know, it's a private mall.

And if the public doesn't have a problem with this, why shouldn't more malls like this be built? They're more comfortable, they fit in better, the people LIKE them, it's economically sound, and IT'S A FUCKING MALL!

When businesses "change" (one leaves, the space is empty for a while, hopefully someone else moves in), there are large panels that are inserted to fill the gaps in the walls. You've seen them at other malls, I'm sure. But these walls, I will remind you, are outside. The panels have large colorful pictures on them that are supposed to look like murals. You don't have to look very closely to see that they are blown up prints, like in fast food stores. And they are not real walls. Again, these are exterior walls and they are fake.
And there are old business signs that have been placed outside on several walls - signs that LOOK like old former businesses ("Ray's Shoes" and such), old and tattered with peeling paint but they are fake. These old signs have been placed here, in this brand spanking new mall, to artificially inject a sense of history and belonging into an otherwise lifeless and sterile environment.

It's not as bad as Whatever-the-fuck-the-Disney-neighborhood-is-called, there aren't any old black men in shades sitting on as folding chair playing the blues (which is insulting and unforgivable on many levels) but the... wait a minute. It is.

I was thinking that it wasn't as bad because it wasn't as plastic and antiseptic as the Disneyhood but, you know, it might actually be worse. Because it fools the public into thinking that they are actually in a real little downtown. And that's sad.

Ends

"Ends" by Muayad Muhsin, oil on canvas, 2006

Drawings

"Untitled" by Mark DeLong, 10x13, acrylic and ink on paper, 2006

Declining and Falling

AURELIAN

Aurelian, properly hailed as the "Restorer of the Empire" by senatorial decree and inscription upon a coin now assumed the Imperial title. He was another rough-hewn and hard-bitten man of the countryside, accepting of privation and severe of temperament. Because of this endurance and despite his severity, he was immensely popular with the Danubian legions, and was devoted to serve Claudius. Aurelian might well have been involved in the conspiracy against Gallienus as he, too, frequently was speared by the flight of the darts of Gallienus' witticisms. At that point, Aurelian had been proposed as a candidate for the purple, but he stilled the soldier's clamours and bade their swords strike shield for Claudius' accession as a sign of their favour, and his. Aurelian did not do so on behalf of Quintillian, and when word was delivered of the suicide of Quintillian, Aurelian set out for Rome.

Aurelian arrived at Rome in the autumn of 270 and wintered there, passing a few months meeting with his generals in the palace, discussing and debating, scrawling out on the papyrus the future campaigns that would subdue the Empires of Gaul and Zenobia. In an adjacent marble-lined room, Aurelian's capable wife, Severina, daughter of nobles and well acquainted with their cynical arts, introduced herself to the ministers of state, establishing a dominion over them founded more upon her talents than her buxom appearance. Well provisioned by the industry of Severina, in the spring of 271 Aurelian comfortably departed the city, leading a long procession of military armour and ardour to confront the Vandals in the Balkans.

Freshly arrived from Swedish snows, the Vandals had sought their share of plunder and their war bands rapidly cleaved the flow of the Danube and, as in previous years and reigns, the villages and the farms of these unfortunate provinces were devoured by the rapacity of a savage. The Vandals had but a short time to engage in their atrocious deeds as the energetic Aurelian and his host had passed the Alps, their march sounding as thunder. The Vandals paused, heeded this glimpse of the Roman arms, and quit the village and farm and sought the greater wealth that was reinforcements on the far Danube bank. Aurelian was fleet in his denial of the Vandal aims and engaged them in battle, punishing their crimes in a massed clang of steel. The Vandals suffered a crushing defeat, and retired.

Aurelian at once wished to continue to the eastward to smite Zenobia, but word that Chieftain Vadomar of the Allemani, who had previously stormed the wall of the Alps during the Claudius II's reign, had passed that range again and was raising tumult in northern Italy, caused the direction of march to be suddenly reversed. The rugged expanse of the Balkans was again bounded over at the velocity of Emergency, the jagged and rocky scatter of the Alps passed, exacting a dreadful toll on Aurelian and his host who issued onto the valley of the Po River, exhausted and bereft of vigour, their supplies spent, their boots worn away. Nonetheless, they maintained valour and mustered below the standards, seeking an encounter with Vadomar. Vadomar and his men had feasted on the plenty of Italy and met the sally of Aurelian with force and ultimately, defeat. A panic seized the camp of Aurelian, broken up in a hurry, messengers sent to Rome where Severina was commanded to rouse the gladiator and the senator to arms, hefting high a sword before the very Coliseum if required by the bloody avarice of Vadomar, advancing with rapid stride upon Rome. Severina next ran into the temples beseeching the intervention of the gods, compelling the priest and the augur to quit the statues and the incense and join a vast procession of piety that would wend its way around the city, its path strewn with garlands and slick with blood of bulls, calling forth on Jove to gift them with deliverance.

Deliverance came in a second battle, when Aurelian's soldiers, strained to their limits, made a quick march southward to outflank their savage adversary who tarried in the olive groves and the villas of Tuscany seeking plunder, and burst forth upon Vadomar administering a mighty defeat. Vadomar's winged helmet and the head it attired were struck from the neck and rolled in the dust as his forces fled in terror and disorder northward. Aurelian exhaled deeply, and led his battle-scarred dusty forces back into Rome to receive accolades offered by Severina and the proffered hospitality of the entire city.

Aurelian and Severina then retired to the palace and there it was decided that the state of affairs in this new and strange world of the barbarians storming with impunity deep into Italy itself required the construction of a stout wall about Rome, seeking a protection and a defense in stone that once was guaranteed by the valour of a Roman Army providing a defense in steel. As the stonecutter and the mason busied themselves, plundering materials from old structures left to fall to decay in the city assembling a hasty and ugly construction, Aurelian busied himself with his generals scattered about the lemonwood in a palace chamber as his attention again was taken up by the need to vanquish Zenobia and restore the sundered unity of the Empire.

After a lengthy rest and lavishly supplied, Aurelian and his legions departed Rome in the spring of 272, a Palmyra destination firmly in mind. After renewed bloody salutations with the Vandals along the way, Aurelian passed the Hellespont and crossed over into Asia Minor, swords high, horses lathering. They first met Zenobia's forces at Immae, and animated by dreams of an Empire again under one Caesar and the granary of Egypt restored to the Roman use, administered a resounding defeat on the Palmyran forces. The army of Zenobia retreated in some disorder, disgorging the gem of Antioch from Zenobia's keeping along the way, seeking the comfortable precincts of their oasis home. Aurelian pursued them, bounding forth upon them at Emesa, forcing another battle and the attendant slaughter of yet more of Zenobia's forces left scattered in the sands behind them.

Zenobia hissed fury at Aurelian and raced towards Palmyra, there, within its walls, to make a last stand. She presumed that Aurelian's men would be unequal to the rigours of a siege in the desert and opposing the alliance she hoped to forge with burning sun and excessive heat that would break up the camp of Aurelian in short order. Aurelian, not to be dismissed so easily subsisted in the shade of his tent and in a careful consumption of the plenty of his supplies while within the walls of Palmyra, the supplies of Zenobia were rapidly and insensibly devoured. Privation and its son, Famine stalked about the city, smiting the denizens at will and compelling notions of surrender. When her earring-clad ministers counseled such a course, Zenobia screeched in rage and quit the conference table, jumping onto a fleet camel under the cover of darkness and resolving to make a rapid flight across the Euphrates to seek the possible help of Sapor. Aurelian was quickly made aware of her intentions and sought to intercept her, dispatching a detachment of cavalry to sink hooves into the Euphrates first. As Zenobia paused upon the near bank, her tiny party was surrounded on a sudden and she was compelled to dismount. Zenobia was immediately divested of her majesty, but not of her dignity, and this dwelt in the baleful eye she fastened upon her captors as she was returned to Palmyra. In her palace that victory had presented to Aurelian, Zenobia proudly stood before Aurelian and defied his storied severity. This sufficed to save both Zenobia and Palmyra from plunder and ruin as Aurelian esteemed bravery and those who would not woo his pardon with tears. Zenobia was brought to Rome and the eastern provinces that had given their allegiance to her were peacefully accepted back into the magnanimous embrace of an Eagle's wing.

At length, Palmyra was inclined to answer Aurelian's leniency with ingratitude. Roman authority was again sundered by revolt in 273 that crimsoned the streets in the blood of a legion. Aurelian at once hurried back to Palmyra, this time, Severity indeed riding in the train of his army. The revolt was crushed in the most brutal of manners through the ample application of fire and sword. The gates of the city were torn down and plunder and rapine rampaged about, the blood of the legions requited by an even greater flow of the blood of the inhabitants. Palmyra, the oasis-metropolis of the east was then abandoned and left to sink into sandy obscurity.

All that remained to restore the shattered unity of the Empire was the reduction of the vestige of the Gallic Empire. After another winter passed at Rome, in the spring of 274 Aurelian set off for rebellious Gaul, charging down from the pine-clad slopes of the Alps sped forth by the terror of his name and of his severity. Behind the trod of his horse, all at once easily fell again into the dominion of Rome, as the opposing realm contracted again and again before Aurelian's advance. Tetricus, the last of the Gallic Caesars, had succeeded to the realm and beheld its rapid dissolution. He was quite aware that Fortune had fled Gaul and settled in Aurelian's camp. Tetricus disdained a supine surrender, and assured his generals that a last battle would be sought. At Ch�lons-sur-Marne, Tetricus gathered his few remaining horsemen and mounted a sally against the host of Aurelian that gratefully swallowed this reckless morsel. In the aftermath, Tetricus was found, still vainly swinging spear, pounced upon and conducted to Aurelian's tent. There, flanked by grim and scarred centurions, Tetricus affected a brave and noble air that impressed Aurelian and moved him to spare the life of his adversary.

Tetricus was brought to Rome, and along with Zenobia were paraded as prize trophies in an immense and deserved victory procession. The denizens of Rome, still smote by calamity, eagerly flocked to the streets to behold the parade and remark over its storied wonders. After the chariot of Aurelian and a vast march of his legions arrayed in polished and gleaming armour, eyes widened to see the approach of Tetricus and his son, attended by the Gaulish nobility striding forth, adorned in long auburn locks of hair and clad in capes and buckskin trousers that caused a sensation in a world still attired in tunic and toga. The Roman multitude had scarce chance to still their excitement when the car that bore Zenobia followed, the former Empress of Palmyra attired in silk and weighted down in heavy golden fetters, her pride supporting the burden under which any lesser mortal would have sunk. Both Zenobia and Tetricus were relieved of their disquiet; Zenobia was presented with a lavish country villa and at length wed a senator, living out her years in ease and tranquility. Tetricus was established in the far southern reaches of Italy and given an administrative post and an impressive villa of his own. Both rivals lived on for far longer than might have possibly been expected of any who raised the standard of revolt against Caesar.

The empire restored, the army resting and his private hours turned to a sun worship, Aurelian at last focused on civil matters. He strode forth before the Senate, lost to cheer and adulation and accepted the title "Restorer of the World" stamped onto innumerable coins. It was this attention to currency that drew Aurelian's severity. Since the lamentable reign of Alexander Severus, the coin of the realm had been debased as a consequence of accelerating inflation, the silver content steadily reduced until by the reign of Gallienus, 'silver' coins were of bronze bearing only a light silvery wash. This worthless currency was widely rejected in the travail of the times and there was a reversion to barter. Aurelian sought to arrest the decline and called in all the debased specie. The moneylenders of Rome rose up in revolt, and Aurelian enraged by such a mutiny in the heart of his capital, dispatched his veterans to chastise their obstinacy. The moneylenders retreated to their quarter, and in the maze of the narrow streets engaged the soldiers in a pitched battle, thousands falling, bodies piled up in the lanes, of lender and soldier mingled in the heaps of the slain, before the fury of Aurelian was appeased.

Aurelian's ever increasing devotion to the sun at last passed the limits of his private veneration and was promoted in a public sphere. Sol Invectus, or the Unconquered Sun became the favoured deity of State, and Aurelian saw to it that scores of temples and a myriad of shrines were erected in his honour, above all an opulent structure in Rome that sounded forth the devotions due to Sol. The worship of Sol was eagerly encouraged, and in the army it was received with particular favour, its robust rites and the ox-blood washing away their errors appealing to them, although its appeal amongst civilians was rather limited. Aurelian was devoted to Sol and resolved that all knees would bend to him. The votaries of Jove and Hercules would easily transfer their affections but not those of the Nazarene. Another bout of Christian persecution seemed to be coming, when such was interrupted by a new outbreak of Sassanian mischief in the east, and Aurelian quit the temple and retired to the palace to confer with his generals and plot out a Persian campaign. His vaunted and practiced legions were gathered, hoping to mingle the blood of moneylenders with that of a Persian on their blades. In the spring of 275, Aurelian set out for the east, again carrying along on the expedition his severity that ran through his reign as a gory red streak. As Aurelian aged, his temper grew worse and threatened all who vexed him with the headsman's axe, a grim list growing as the army approached Asia Minor. Eros, his private secretary, fulfilled all requirements of vexation, and speedily saw his name on a list of those condemned to execution. Eros was a calculating man, however and bound his panic in the energizing ferment of a plan for survival. At length, he convinced one centurion that Aurelian had been involved in a smouldering dalliance with his wife while at Rome. His devotion to Aurelian was evaporated at once, boiled away in a fury. He surprised Aurelian in his tent and at once cut him down. Calculating Eros, careful to turn away the fatal glance of suspicion, saw to it in prompt manner that his gnarled and leather-clad centurion-saviour was cut down in his turn, and then led the camp in a massed cry of grief, stealing across the fields to mate with the echoes that still mourned Caracalla, and loosed a race of tears that bound the empire in melancholy. Aurelian, though severe, had used that severity to restore the unity of the empire in a splendid series of campaigns that scarce have any equal in all Roman history. The reunited realm was now left to the decidedly inferior hands of his successors.

TACITUS

It is mentioned by several historians that the soldiers, though gone feral long ago, still maintained a small measure of civilization within them, a drop of civility held in tenuous grip somewhere above the spleen. Such was apparently expended when one of their numbers sent word to the Senate of Aurelian's demise and a request that the Venerables nominate the next Emperor. The Senate, still smarting from the affected 'friendliness' of Aemillianus, the passing figment of royalty who preceded Valerian, and the jabs and jibes of Gallienus expressed unease, sensing a soldier's snare, but at length nominated one of their number, one Tacitus, a cultured man of learning with a taste for lettuce drizzled in honey. However, cutting through the pretty embroidery of a dubious tradition, it is far more likely that Tacitus was a retired general, fled to his villa in the southern reaches of Italy, riding out the general tumult, and called forth by Aurelian's soldiers after a short interregnum. He established himself in Rome and enjoyed the full blessings of his new station before Duty blew its harsh and discordant trumpet, and with a sigh, and replete with regret, quit the palace, mounted his steed and joined the Army still in Asia Minor to continue Aurelian's Persian campaign in early 276. He departed from the campaign to engage in a punitive expedition against a local group of Goths who had separated from their fellows in their Aegean sojourn and had established themselves deep in a rocky fastness, whirling out from their hut and hovel to despoil the local villa and village. A victory was soon won, smoky ruin in Tacitus' wake. Titles followed, but not extra provisions of years, for in July 276, Tacitus was cut down when he vainly attempted to punish a display of insubordination and suffered the swift and sure punishment of those who would abuse the latitude of soldiers of such an age.

FLORIANUS

Power then passed to Tacitus' commander of the Praetorians, one Florianus, a clear choice, as he was the half-brother of Tacitus and easily achieved Senatorial sanction and the recognition of most provinces. Thoughts of the revenging of Athens animating his soldiers, Florianus resumed the campaign against the Asian Goths and brought near total destruction upon them. Tidings were then received in the camp of a revolt in Egypt in September, 276 where one Probus, a popular figure who had served under Aurelian, had been acclaimed and gifted with the purple by his army,. Florianus blanched white and commanded that his centurions rouse the men from the Gothic attentions and transfer them to the crushing of Probus' pretensions. An outbreak of plague and the rigours of a climate deleterious to Florianus' European units intervened on behalf of the claim of Probus. Florianus inveighed his men to overthrow the grip of fever and stride forth to avenge his affronted majesty. The morale of his men shivered in chills, all entirely inert upon their cots. This proved an advantageous situation to the agents of Probus who had infiltrated the camp and in whispered tones assured the soldiers of rewards if Probus' claim to the purple was advanced. Florianus at length was made aware of the secondary infection spreading in his camp, and sought a cure through steel. He rushed from tent to tent to seek an ally, finding none. When the danger to his reign and life was expressed in an abusive rant to one tent, one soldier arose to apply steel deeply into the breast of Florianus and he fell after a reign of 88 days. Three Emperors had fallen in a year, and once more crisis loomed.

PROBUS

The murder of Florianus installed on the throne Probus, a sturdy frontiersman of Danubian vicinity. He had fought with distinction in the army, rising through the ranks in the style of many of his predecessors to positions of authority and importance, aided by a benevolent reputation that would serve him well as his reign was a continuous welter of struggle against barbarian and Imperial pretender.

In 277 another Frankish and Vandal invasion erupted forth from the tottering and perforated Rhine frontier, tearing through the already ravaged body of Gaul. The suffering peasant fled to the safety of forest and fortress, abandoning his humble plot to ten thousand capering and cavourting minions of destruction, who plunged deeply into Gaul as a wave, bringing with them the sum total of the barbarism that now swept from a burning cottage on the Seine all the way deep into a woody tract in the wilderness of Siberia.

Probus faced this crisis with determination, calling his troops to arms and racing to Gaul to arrest the further foray of the Frank and Vandal in a series of campaigns that lasted into 278, concluding with a restoration of the frontier. A fresh eruption of brigandage in Asia Minor next ordained the course of march as one Lydius, a local criminal, had gathered about himself a brazen and intrepid band of robbers, and in their search for plunder and spoil had terrorized Anatolia from the island-skirted west to the confines of the Caucasus. After a sharp and rather savage encounter, Probus scattered the band and restored order and at least a portion of spoil was restored to the villas that had suffered from the ravages of Lydius.

Probus felt sufficiently in control of affairs to strike camp and make a return to Rome in 279, there to make a better acquaintance with the palace, trade the grip of a sword for that of a goblet, and swaying, foray out to the Senate House to gather up a few more titles of praise, pronounced in the silver and gold of a coin, and spending his acclamation in the sighs of a host of Roman women who apparently found Probus a handsome man, the equal of Apollo. In the limpid pool of a maiden's eye along with ardour, one might have discerned a growing trust in stability.

In 280, such a judgment was revealed to be a fitful figment, denying the ability of an Imperial device to capture it. At Cologne along the Rhine, two men were elevated to a co-emperorship and they and their mutinous partisans worked quickly to secure the allegiance of Gaul, and Spain and Britain seemed quite likely to grant theirs as well. Probus was forced to quit the glance of female Latinity, and again summon his soldiers to the standards and make another rapid crossing of the Alps to bring a certain conclusion to the pretensions of these two pretenders. Over the next several months, Probus wrested back the allegiance of Gaul through a sword's persuasion and at length one of his rivals sought escape from the justice of Probus in suicide and his partner, after attempting battle with Probus was seized in its aftermath and made a prey to the axe. But Rebellion was a many-headed beast, and it raised up in Britain, and in Syria under one Saturninus. The revolt of Saturninus, abetted by some of the finest legions still to be found in the Empire was a rather dire affair that prompted the immediate presence of the Emperor, and Probus' encampment was the scene of tumult as hasty and rapid preparations were made for an eastward march. These were interrupted by the welcome tidings that the revolt of Saturninus was at an end, the figment of royalty devoured by the fickleness of his own men. As the revolt in Britain also collapsed, Probus was allowed a long exhalation of relief and left free to return to Rome in early 281.

In Rome, Probus presided over a dazzling Triumph, more sanguine and gory festivals and displays of the art of the gladiator and the beast-slaying venator. Captured Franks and Vandals were chained en masse, led into the amphitheatres and arenas before both the dregs and the nobility of Rome and finished off in a lunging storm of steel. In another event held to entertain the masses, the Coliseum was stocked with stones and planted with trees to invoke the feel of a forest, and panther and boar from afar were released in this artificial wood to be the food of spears and the tastes of the mob, cheering on in a frenzy. Probus, arrayed in purple, beamed genially at one and all, surmising that his possession of the throne was unassailable.

In 282, seeking yet more glory and its ensuing titles, Probus decided to mount a campaign against the Sassanians, aided by his Commander of the Praetorians, one Carus. A man driven by ambition, Carus had long presumed his shoulders would be a far fitter habitation for the purple than those of Probus, and esteemed an army campaign as a most advantageous circumstance to make his bid. The campaign proceeded in a desultory manner, Probus insisting along the way that his men repair the ravages of past calamities, rebuild the canals, erect new walls and replant the vineyards on ground gone out of cultivation. The soldiers seethed under the burdens of such menial duties and listened eagerly to Carus' promises of relief from these odious tasks. By early September 282, Carus had been proclaimed and proudly allowed the purple to be fastened upon him. Probus, on hearing of this, ordered a detachment to crush the revolt and divest Carus of both the purple and his head, but these soldiers, committed to labour on a muddy slope, were inclined to advance the cause of the usurper. They refused the Imperial order, and declared that Probus was Emperor no longer. Probus, confronted with this latest and fatal mutiny, parted company with Resolve and dashed away in the clear symptoms of panic, at length taking refuge in a lookout tower, where Doom pursued and then cut him down, the soldiers putting torches to the wooden structure and watching with a deep gratification as the structure was consumed in flames, Probus mounting a plume of smoke to other realms. Carus was called to watch the demise of his predecessor and condemned his memory, initiating a fall of stature and an erasure of inscription, but Probus was very much the hero to later historians, an able and devoted emperor, who was the latest to be consumed by the fickleness and violence of his soldiers.

CARUS

Carus now ascended to the heights, on a wave of soldier's popularity, and at the advanced age of 58, by Roman standards, with the end of his career approaching, beseeched Opportunity that a military campaign might afford, and fed it Probus as the required sacrifice. Installed in the Imperial position, Carus at once returned to Rome, in the company of his two sons, Carinus and Numerian, having joined their newly Imperial father along the way. There, in the midst of ancient ceremonies of garland of incense, Carus gifted them with the titles of Caesar in opulent style before the burning braziers of the Senate House. Carus resolved to continue the Persian campaign, seeking the glory of the capture of Ctesiphon and soon thereafter in early 283, departed Rome. The elder son, Carinus, remained in Rome, entrusted with the rule of the West while Carus and Numerian retired to the East, the compass of their affairs.

Along the way to Persia, Carus and Numerian were obliged to draw swords against an influx of the Sarmatians, a nomadic people from the steppes of Asia, freshly fallen upon the Danube. The Sarmatians were stymied in their attempt to breach the river. In a triumphant mood following this victory, standards hefted to the sky, Carus and son resumed the march to Persia. Persia had declined in power since the days of the formidable Sapor, and the Euphrates frontier collapsed before Carus, the Sassanian host scattering, the road to Ctesiphon beckoning, a short march through lush grove and field. Again the Eagle Standard was planted before the walls of the Sassanian capital, again the king trembled and the vizier whispered flattery. The Sacred Fire dimmed and sputtered, the whole of the Persian realm tottering, open to an uncontested Roman advance to the Indus. Carus gleefully pored over maps in his tent, entirely engrossed. Carus paraded plans for the division of Persia into provinces and proposed Roman operations along the Ganges as he presumed the very elements were to be bound up and laid before his feet. Rumbling sounded in the distance as Carus , flushed with wine, continued to ordain the course of the world and he seemed quite unaware of a gathering storm that piled cloud and thunder above his tent, at length sending a stab of lightning down that felled Carus. Such is the official story that many an historian has related quite seriously. A more certain investigation into the matter seems to show that the ambitious commander of the praetorians Aper, and the Head of the Imperial Bodyguard, Diocletian, wielded the 'lightning' in a rapid motion of dagger, replicating that spectacular element. Here, I but conjecture, however.

NUMERIAN

Suddenly the reins of authority fell into the hands of Numerian, the younger brother of Carinus. He was the cultured sibling who had composed poetry that had received much acclaim, but his abilities were not seen to extend to exercising an effective reign. Numerian was widely seen as unfit to rule, evidently by Carus as well, who had given him scant authority in the East, unlike that of Carinus, the Master of the West.

Numerian's inabilities were compounded by his contraction of an ailment of the eyes that had made them very sensitive to sunlight, and virtually the whole of his reign was spent within the enclosed drapes of his tent or the dim confines of a closed litter. The easy capture of Ctesiphon in 284 allowed for Numerian to declare victory, and since his delicate nature was unequal even to an unopposed campaign to the Indus, he made an end of the Persian enterprise and began a withdrawal to the West.

The procession made a good progress passing out of Persia and soon had made its way into Asia Minor. Numerian, as usual, was hidden away in his litter at a stop along the way to replenish the denuded supply magazines when Aper deftly struck down the incapacitated Numerian which scarce a struggle, and was well able to take advantage of the usually concealed condition of Numerian to conceal his crime for some days. During this time, the march was resumed, the corpse-bearing litter blithely carried until a growing stench at last betrayed the secret of murder. Sensing his opportunity and the end of an uncertain and doubtful alliance with Aper, Diocletian arranged to pull open the litter drapes before a collection of the troops, and accused Aper of the crime. The troops, rather suspiciously on cue, suddenly rang sword against shield and bellowed out the accession of Diocletian. Diocletian's first Imperial Act was the summoning of Aper who had taken refuge in his tent, cursing his tardiness in manipulating the situation. Dragged before Diocletian, Aper was slain by Diocletian's own hand to the massed cheer of the soldiers. Diocletian was indeed involved in Numerian's assassination, and was determined to act before Aper, thusly ascending to Throne as his rival descended to Tartarus.

CARINUS

Carinus was still in charge of the West at the time of Numerian's murder, having secured his position by a series of successful campaigns along the Danube that saw the Sarmatians chastised again, and the celebration of a Triumph in early 284, before, having purchased his ease, returning to the palace where he indulged the powers given to an Emperor in full, especially in the realm of his carnal appetite. For the first time since Elagabulus, the palace teemed with the shrill and obscene laughter of harlots and catamites, scampering about rose-strewn banqueting halls, wine and lust gushing. The tables groaned with the plunder of the Seven Seas and the yielded edible luxuries of countless provinces, some of which, in the form of apples and melons thrown into a pool with boys and the wives of Senators and his generals proved Carinus' favoured dessert.

In 285, these idylls were suddenly interrupted by word of Numerian's death and the subsequent tidings that a usurper, one Julianus, had proclaimed his Emperorship in the north of Italy. Carinus bade himself to leave the pool bobbing with produce and promise, called for his armour and hastened northward, administering a rapid defeat upon Julianus.

Barely had the blood been wiped away from his sword when Carinus was informed of Diocletian's bid for Empire. Diocletian, in charge of affairs, had bade the westward march be continued, and Carinus resolved to smite this latest pretender, roused to fury that his return to the pleasures of the palace were postponed. The forces marched at top speed, and near modern Belgrade, were met in battle. Carinus brought numbers and the advantage of fresh troops along with him, and after a gory clash of converging steel, Carinus seemed to be winning the battle; indeed he may have already won the battle, when the consequences of his indiscretions were visited upon him in the guise of one of Carinus' generals who had nursed a grudge nurtured in the knowledge that Carinus had seduced his wife and he sought to quench the thirst of his revenge in a gush of the Imperial blood, accomplished through the assistance of several compatriots who had had their wives compelled to appear in Carinus' pool. Carinus fell under the rain of dagger and sword while attempting an escape, and at once, messengers were dispatched to the camp of Diocletian, the scene of terror and tumult, Diocletian attempting to make flight when he was presented with the tidings of an unexpected victory. He gratefully accepted the acclamation of the Carinus' men, and cast the memories of Carinus, along with Numerian and Carus into oblivion, assuming the burden of Empire.

The end of 50 years of crisis and calamity had come, for Diocletian brought forth a new age, a new empire and a resurrection of order that had expired with Antoninus Pius over a century earlier.