THE CURE

A NOVEL BY DAVID LAWRENCE CADE

CHAPTER FIVE

That same afternoon, around 4 p.m., conditions in Worcester were forbidding even for those used to harsh New England conditions. From the hilly areas of the city, as it turned dark, one could make out that the downtown area had lights, but many of the higher areas hardest hit by the storm, including the area of old wood frame two and three story homes where Calvin and Mark lived, were without power.

With flashlights in hand, they went outside, glad that they had a gas store with 4-burners and the gas fireplace. To their left, their neighbors, who lived in a larger updated home with over 2,800 square feet, were standing in the back yard looking at downed power lines.

“Mark, over here,” the mother of the family, a woman with a masters in education who had taught in the high schools and volunteered extensively in civic projects throughout the community, called out. There was a four-foot high chain link fence between the yards and Calvin and Mark walked around to their back and began talking with Natalie and her visiting sister and niece.

“It’s like a war zone. All these trees,” Natalie said.

They had already met the visiting relatives, who greeted the two men softly.

“We’re about to go to the high school. It’s simply too cold in that old house of ours since we only had central heating. The gas fireplace isn’t heating it enough for the kids.”

“We’ll keep an eye on it while you’re gone,” Mark said. “We’re okay. We double-insulated some of the windows last month, just in case something like this happened.”

“Gee, the sun came out and it was okay around two, but now,” Natalie said.

“It’s cold,” the niece, about eight years old, said.

There were two city shelters set up for those who did not have relatives or friends with heated homes with whom to stay the night.

“And it could be Monday, Tuesday,…” Natalie’s sister began.

“Or Wednesday before power is on again,” Natalie said. “We went out to get some groceries this afternoon, and thank God we didn’t have an accident, but all that ice, it just kept falling from the trees hitting the windshield.”

“It was terrifying,” the niece said.

“When we went out around three,” Calvin said, “you could see tree limbs all over the hillside streets, some of it plowed to make a path for cars, and freshly poured salt. Ice everywhere and it’s not melted enough to make driving any safer.”

“We’ll have lots of people to talk with tonight,” Natalie said. “We called friends who live across from the high school who said the parking lot is already filling up.”

She mentioned that their family dog was inside and they had just finished feeding it, letting it out in the yard to relieve itself, and that it was quite comfortable in front of the gas fireplace. “Here,” she said, handing Calvin a house key, “you’ve been so nice before when we went on vacation last winter to let Gracie out to run in the yard a while. Would you mind checking on her tomorrow morning to let her out here for a run? We’d so appreciate it. We left plenty of her dog food in her bowels, and fresh water.”

“We’d be glad to,” Calvin said.

“She’s such a good dog,” Mark said. “Never barks at us when we’re in the back.”

“She’s a doll,” Natalie said.

They parted, with the family getting their suitcases and totebags and heading to the high school about ten minutes later.

Mark and Calvin swept their front steps and walkway for a few minutes and then went back inside. “Thank God it’s warm enough in here,” Mark said, petting their cat which was seated in the living room on an upholstered emerald green chair with pad. They sat talking about Calvin’s newest play.

The constant sound of ice falling outside kept them alert, wondering if one of the large trees in the front yard whose limbs were tipping toward the house would give way damaging their roof. They had bought the house using a conventional mortgage the previous year and the prevailing market values had already declined about ten percent from the time of their purchase, giving them negative equity due to the interest expense on their monthly payments. They were thinking of re-financing due to the change in economic conditions and lowering of interest rates by the FED.

About an hour later, Mark got a call on his cell phone. It was Maria Sigmar, one of the co-founders of peaceforiraq.net.

“Mark,” came her voice. “We’re just west of Worcester, coming in from a long troubling trip through New York up through Albany.”

“Maria!” he said. “Troubling? How?”

“I just meant the concerns we discussed in New York about the war and that no one has any solutions at the present. Are you and Cal all right?”

“Yes, but we have no power in the house.”

“I’d like to stop by and say hello, if it’s not too much an imposition given the storm.”

“No imposition at all,” he said.

“We ate an early dinner at a nice roadside restaurant at a hotel along the Interstate and want to get to Boston before too late and wanted to make sure you’re okay in all this. You could always come stay with us in Boston if this drags out the way they say.”

“That’s so kind, but I think we’re just coping with the gas store and fireplace. And we can go warm up at the shelter or downtown tomorrow, something, if we need. Wish we had a generator, though.”

“Yes, but those things are carbon monoxide threats if you’re not careful,” she said. “So, we’ll see you in about half an hour if that’s okay.”

“Just fine. We’ll set out some hot cocoa.”

“That’s a dear,” she said. “It’s just the two of us. See you in a bit.”

He spoke with Calvin about Maria, wondering who the other person was with her. A long-time member of the anti-globalization movement, Maria, age sixty-two, was a peace protestor know for her acts of civil disobedience in actions designed to arouse public awareness when other means of publicity had failed, proud in fact of her numerous arrests for non-violent actions in particular against the war in Iraq and before 2003 against the U.N. sanctions, a native of Venezuela who had grown up in the region of the tepuis.

She had been in New York City that week working with another anti-war coalition concerned that the new administration would betray its promises and forestall again and again the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

“Only now they’re just sending them to Afghanistan by the thousands to murder civilians there,” Mark said. “It’s the same old military con game, one of the worst in American history.”

Around seven p.m., Mark and Calvin heard a car pull up on the ice and stop in front of their house, not far from the vicinity of Beeching Street and Lenox. They went outside and greeted Maria and her travelling companion.

“Hello,” said the other woman, in her late fifties, tall, with gray hair, looking rather elegantly dressed in a fine winter overcoat.

“Greetings, Calvin,” Maria said. “I want you to meet my friend Cassandra.”

“I’m Cassandra Poudintaigne, Vicountess of Besancon, Großherzogin of Reutlinger, and Markgräfin of Ludwigshafen.”

Mark seemed startled for a moment.

“I bought the titles on an Internet auction last summer,” Cassandra said. “Got in at the last moment as the bidding was about to end, split second timing, bought all three titles in a package being sold off by someone’s nephew. I got the papers from the European registry of nobility and so here I am.”

“Sounds so like a paragraph from a nineteenth century British romantic novel, I can’t resist,” Maria said.

“Of course,” Calvin said.

“Glad to meet you,” Mark said smiling.

“Also,” Calvin said. “Vicountess, and Maria, please come inside.”

Cassandra, who went by Ms. on her American legal documents - “and please call me Cassie as all my friends do” - and Maria had met the previous year in Denver, where Cassandra had lived for many years. As they sipped the hot chocolate, Cassandra began by mentioning her late brother.

“He had been among those displaced by the flooding in New Orleans. My fraternal twin, poor younger brother, as they say I came out first, him only minutes later. Such a sad way to die walking in front of that train in Dallas.”

“Oh,” Mark said, concerned. “Actually, I heard of this from a friend in Tulsa.”

“You heard of Andre?” she asked.

“Yes, an artist, as I recall.”

“Yes,“ Cassandra said. “Poor man. Never made it. They said it was an accident. So I tend to believe, unless the night is unusually cold and still and I can hear myself breathing alone, as I live alone, and then sometimes I gaze into the dark and the idea presents itself to me that he walked in front of that train intentionally.

“He had taken out a modest term life insurance policy just weeks before, with a little money he had made selling a painting at a gallery who never gave him much thought. The insurance company never challenged my claim; never said they suspected it was taking his own life. The money helped buy the titles. I didn’t need it as much as he would have. I thought it fitting; he was so eloquent, yet so naïve. Much too much in love with the potential he had as a youth, clinging to the thought that he would be a great artist, but which had been lost long ago. Trying to live in the past is like the lie they keep telling us about Iraq, that it had to be done. Why, I ask, did it ever have to be done?”

“Indeed,” Mark said.

“No one dares arrest her when she joins sit-ins out in San Francisco,” Maria said.

“No?” Mark said.

“She utters her titles and the genuflecting police stand in awe, about to bow rather than handcuff,” Maria said. “It’s a ploy we hope to use often to get more attention at the protests. ‘You can’t arrest me! I’m a member of the nobility‘.”

“You are like royalty among the anti-globalization movement,” Calvin said to Maria.

“Ah, but if only the world would keep its senses and stop all these foolish illegal wars, the suffering of the poor in Africa, the frauds, the massive swindles ruining foundations that help the less fortunate. All I ever wanted was to sit on the rocks at the tepuis near my birthplace and listen for the song of the glittering-throated emerald.” Turning to Calvin she said, “You know I was born near Angel Falls.”

“Yes, Mark told me,” he said.

“And that is why I am here, Mark, oh Mark of the movement. This is the mark of the movement. The tepuis, the islands of time, high up, the rock formations. This is an island of time, we have returned home, the war movements, and aloft as if floating in the mists of Angel Falls, we watch the world - like the waters falling to the ground below - falling apart. The anti-globalization movement has won by default. The nations that preached greed and the triumph of the dollar over the rights of mankind are beyond help other than the nationalization of means of production and thereby the elimination of multi-national multi-lateral control in the most treacherous sense of those troubling phrases.

“So you are here in this island of quiet, other than the ice, apart from the world of mechanization, at least for this night.

“Just so, we came from New York which reels like a disgraced warmonger of money shown up for what it is, greed incarnate, and that’s one metaphor they’ll remember next time they get up from the spell into which the financial warlords have fallen.

“We came to give you this hope for the movement, for those you speak with every day, to dear Calvin in his message of the human drama at his theater. You can stay in this island of time until the dangers of deception and abuse have passed. No sense in throwing in the towel, or your two shoes. We found refuge in this sanctuary into which the world economic crisis has placed us, like God telling us, ‘be blessed, be at peace, you have served My will in this‘. He will send for us again. We work, we speak, we alert the world to the truth that is still the illegal war against Iraq. But we are sheltered now until we must again fight against time itself to stop the legions who fight against the innocent in Iraq, Afghanistan, and they say, before long, against the innocent in Iran.

“That is why I had to introduce you to my friend Cassandra. She too wants to speak with you about time, and this island of time into which we have entered like ghosts in a parade on the coasts of Maine as the fog lifts at dawn.”

“But that only applies if you have seen a parade along the coasts of Maine as the fog lifts at dawn,” Cassandra said.

“No, I haven’t,” Calvin said.

“Nor I,” Mark said.

“But that I have,” Cassandra said, referring to a holiday parade she had seen as a girl with her twin Andre at her side one Christmas when they were visiting relatives in York Harbor.

“And that is the essence, because I am still the same Cassandra Poudintaigne who saw those ghosts in that parade, in that case, figures in elaborate costumes no doubt rented from some shop for the occasion, ghosts of Christmas past if you will, and across America today we see a spectrum of specters, to paraphrase an anonymous writer of ages past. Gentle my soul, this troubles my heart. Surely you can see that society, global societal movement is today a Herculean iconoclastic angst for wealth against concern for others, force against force now as the world reels from the shock of revelations unsurpassed in scope: the governments have all failed, the economic titans have all collapsed under their own fallacies of greed, and yet there is an ongoing movement to resurrect greed in another image, the printed graven idol that resembles what was once the means of payment, and that now looms as reality itself. Social dogma is colliding, hurtling against societal dogma, one model of society - globalization, so threatened now as never before by the crisis - out to erase from reality itself our model of society which places the good of mankind before the good of the marketplace.

“I mean that my observations even from the high plateau of Denver convinces me that there is at this moment a forceful personality, diabolic if you ask me, that some mock as the Anti-Dollar, but that appears more than a mirage on the evolutionary horizon.”

“I’ve seen something about that at the bookstore,” Calvin said. “Rather suave speculation at best or is it, this thing about the Anti-Dollar?”

“They mocked Bush when he said he would invade Iraq, yet he found the means,” Cassandra said.

“They mocked the hand that threatened to crush learning and liberty and life in ancient Greece, but the Romans found the means to do so.

“So dear friends, new friends, struggling to cope with this force of nature, I would not distress you. But as the ice melts and your thoughts return to the world of ideas, the ideal of reason and human dignity, you must ask yourselves: is there not a force of illegitimate power hurtling even now against this island of time in which we find shelter? Is there not some force, perhaps human, perhaps cyber, beyond human control now, hurling its lust for power against the rights of mankind, and that leaves hardly a ghost of a chance to those who do not see its heavy-handed sway approaching?

“It is in fact a continuation of the dialectical terrorism, the control of the masses by the denial of understanding and education to the common man, so that the masses have little chance of avoiding the next onslaught of the power elite, such as those who signed the Protocols of Crawford not many years back and as we saw this summer did almost gain total control of the world economies in their thirst for oil and wealth beyond imagining.

“Check The Protocols of Crawford again on the Internet when you can, as you will see the conspiracy outlined step by step by the ones who visited George the Second that odd summer evening before or after, we are not sure, Cindy materialized on the scene with a lawn chair and a spark that lit the universe.”

“Until next time,” Maria said, standing, thanking them for the cocoa. “Much to read when I return to Boston, I’m sure.”

“So nice to meet you both,” Cassandra said. “A toute a l’heure.”

“Oui,” Calvin said, “A toute a l’heure.”

The two men saw the women out to their car, suggesting the best way to make it back to the Interstate, and went back inside to rest and then a late dinner cooked in the gas range.

Mark went next door briefly to look in on the neighbor’s dog, which was happy to see him, the living room with the gas fireplace cold, but the spot in front of it where the big dog sat providing a continual warmth.

The two men slept together on a single bed that they brought out from their guest bedroom and placed not far from the fireplace.

The next morning, Sunday, after they had coped as best they could with the cold, thankful that they also had a gas hot water heater and showering together in their main bath after having sex on the single bed, Calvin sat down in an upholstered blue velvet chair near the fireplace and started his laptop, which still had two hours life in the battery.

He went to the website, believed by some to be a hoax, where The Protocols of Crawford was published, and began to read, noting that the webpage claimed the document had been secretly amended at a recent conference at Camp David.

It was from the section in which oil giants plot to have environmentalists arrested.

When it becomes necessary for us to strengthen the strict measures of refinery and pipeline defense (the most fatal poison for the prestige of corporate authority but we must balance appearances with virtual security) we shall arrange a simulation of disorders or some manifestation of discontents among the Green forces finding expression through the co-operation of good speakers such as those on national television.

If we should admit this thought, as the environmentalists have done and are doing, we should IPSO FACTO be signing a death sentence, if not for our ruler, at any rate for the oil industry itself at no distant date.

According to strictly enforced outward appearances, our ruler in pseudo-retirement, for we know they never give up all their power after leaving the White House, will employ his power only for the advantage of the oil giants and in no wise for his own or dynastic profits.

Calvin shook his head, wondering if the much-publicized anonymous document posted on the Internet for several years now was a fake, or actually an anti-competitive document signed by leaders of the world petroleum industries having met in seclusion in the summer of 2004 at the Bush ranch in Crawford. Only a mediocrity like Bush could conceive such a tirade, Calvin thought. And it did look like the power of oil would rule the world earlier this year. Perhaps that even brought about the collapse of the financial world, the uncompromising, merciless greed of the oilmen?