Desiree greeted them, ready to head out as soon as
the boss showed up. And their timing of return must have been impeccable, for
soon Garconteaux himself drove up and parked his car behind Roget's against the
greystone fence. His portly figure commanded any room he entered, and by sheer
force of personality, he inflicted himself on the world.
When he knocked on the door, all of them were
ready. The Mobieles, Guru, and Jenifer, all greeted Garconteaux as though he
were some Pere Noelle- and his jovial mood only broke the possible ice and
tension. The five of them now made their way down the roadway into town.
The restaurant which was their
destination, "La Cafe De Les Grenouilles Violet" was situated in a
pleasant spot on the shorefront street, facing out over the English Channel,
with an upstairs portion, which is where Roget had arranged the reservations.
They were led up the stairway by a woman no older than thirty, no younger than
twenty, who seated them, and returned with wine and bread in a basket.
"Haven't had enough wine yet
today?" commented Jenifer, when Guru made a grab for the bottle.
"Oh, I think we can suffer a
glass or two more. Helps with the digestion, you know." He winked.
"Monsieur Abbryggdd–"
Garconteaux had the pronunciation perfectly correct–"You seem to be one of
these Renaissance Men yourself. You helped create Le’ Eye Patch Troiseme, you
helped make the OtherNet, you are talented and respected 'developpeur de
logiciels', you are well known thinker on the subject of l’evolutione
psychedelique…"
Guru held up his hand. "Wait- I'm
only some of those things, halfway. I'm not Leonardo, you know. I'm aware my
reputation and my work have taken on a life of their own in the minds of the
public. But Renaissance Man? I'm a specialist. I have a couple of side
interests. But I am still only a specialist. What I do I try to do well, and as
simply and elegantly as possible. To suggest I am some kind of genius,
though... I am not half the genius of Boffin Syznic."
"Ah, Monsieur Syznic! I have long
wished I might meet him!"
"Well, I for one wish he were
still around to meet. I have not heard a peep from him in nearly a year, now.
It's anybody's guess- he was in a coma, last I heard. I only can send thoughts
to him, but, unfortunately for me, he doesn't send them back."
"Maybe you could pick those up if
you wore the Patch more...?" asked Jenifer.
"Well, yes-ah, I just do not
know."
"The Patch! Mais oui, c'est le
plus expensif! Did you know that it costs over €100 here?"
"Outrageous!" replied Guru.
He and Mike Chen and Syznic had all agreed they wished to keep prices minimal
in order to distribute the Patch far and wide, making it available to one and
all. The idea! The gall! More interference from do-gooder government bureaucracies.
They all need someone to police. May as well police the most benign things–
they're so much more likely to not offer resistance!
Garconteaux explained.
"Our Economic Union has decreed
that, it can only be accessed with the prescription of a doctor, and high trade
tariffs are pushing it up, up, up! I only manage to get my supply by traveling
to London, or sending a friend, to get them. Since England is not in the
European Union, it's a little bit less. But it's still frowned upon even there.
The medicine system in England, also, tends not to recognize these new products
so quickly as they caught on in the USA. But..."
"But what?" Guru cocked an
eye at Garconteaux, who talked on, before losing his train of thought on the
vision of the first course, a steaming bowl of cioppino, being ladled into
their bowls.
"But let me tell you, how it
works! I have had sleeplessness for years. I tried everything- Xanadu, LoDose,
Pax-All, melatonin- and nothing worked for me like the Third Eye Patch! Once I
began using it my sleep relaxed - I was sleeping only five hours, each and
every night, before. Now, I stay in the bed until past dawn, and my dreams...
they are often as not very pleasant."
"That brings me to something
else," said Guru. "Boffin Syznic as you probably know developed the
Akhenaten Solar Panel Array. If you are interested in placing these in your new
urban redevelopments- here at Trouville- I know that I can provide you with
discounts importing them in from California. There will be shipping costs, of
course, but the actual panels can be had at a fraction of their retail value
even at US prices. Would you be interested in that?"
Roget's turn, now, to cock an eye
towards his boss. "I would certainly like to incorporate them. They assure
the residents of Trouville would have access to the OtherNet, and that we can
continue with our Green Certifications program compliance."
"Walkability, Livability,
Sociability"- our motto, yes Roget?" Garconteaux was only just
getting started.
"Let me explain. When I was
beginning the practice and met Trouvet, we were both quite adamant followers of
Paolo Soieri and Buckmister Fuller. We wanted to provide design for living
spaces which was both aesthetically pioneering, and environmentally sound and
sustainable, and cost effective. This was not to say we wanted to do things
cheap, but more to do things right the first time. And to make these
communities places where people would feel they could remain forever. It's
important to me that we turn this community- the Honfleur basin of the Seine-
into a place where young people will want to remain, and stay, rather than
provide no futures, so that they will necessarily want to travel to Paris for a
better shake in life. Now, we have this fantastic opportunity, and the more we
are seen as revisionists, or innovators, the better off we will be not only as
a firm but as fixtures of new French modes of design. We are perfectly willing
to adapt new American technologies into our projects, because, as I am sure you
are aware, intelligent ideas know no borders.
"Ah, but I wish there were such a
time, that there were no borders! It's a huge inconvenience, and if only people
might learn to think around them– like looking down at our vast great planet,
we see, borders are an artificial, and now, almost needless– creation of states
and superpowers– the people of this planet need to get beyond their narrow
thinking and consider us as all one species, before we kill ourselves, and
choke on our own exhausts."
At that, he leaned back, tucked a
finger into his belt, and with his other hand, began going for the soup.
Jenifer and Desiree were quite quiet.
Jenifer, who sat facing the sea, and Desiree, who sat opposite the table,
with Garconteaux at the head, were absorbed in the dish, and Jenifer was
dipping hunks of the white bread from the basket into it, and scooping up soup
and loaf both.
"Monsieur Garconteaux? I wonder
if you know anything about this man that Guru sometimes mentions- this Nigel
Flinth?" Her question was acknowledged with a nod.
"Oh- him? He is a product of that
media crowd over in London, The Gallows Group. He's one of their pet
mouthpieces. He was once a music critic- now he goes out on vastly silly
expeditions, like, say, after stories like the Third Eye Patch, as Guru well
knows..."
"I testified with him in
Washington DC last year. He's a bit of a twit."
"And Sir William Gallows himself,
he was but a chocolate-cream knight. Everybody knows–" (he lowered his
voice) "-and nobody tells, but he was a mobster most nonpareil, unless one wanted to compare him to his
nemeses, the Dankos. Whom they say he had executed..."
"A wonder such a louse ended up
knighted," scowled Guru. "Better men than that have gone
wanting."
Desiree had become curious, now.
"Monsieur Shank mentioned him a great deal - he said he had been a pet
guinea pig for a little game that a friend of his create. My Next Life? I had a
look at the website. How silly. A game can determine your future incarnation?
He mentioned that Monsieur Flinth was the most interesting, highly evolved,
player of this game."
"Steve was being sarcastic, no
doubt, Desiree!" Guru affected his "I am one unamused bunny"
face. This involved wrinkling his nose and wiggling his eyebrows. The sight of
it caused Roget, as well as Jenifer, to laugh out loud.
The waitress reappeared, taking their
orders. Guru decided to have the grilled octopus, Roget and Desiree who had
often dined there, went for filet of swordfish, Garconteaux had a plate of
barbecued elvers, and Jenifer had cracked crab. They were all quite ready to
take on their main course, as the sun slipped over the western horizon, and the
moon rose off someplace to the right hand shore of England in the north, and
with the night, the awareness that a good meal amongst friends was perhaps its
own reward.
"But to get back to my first
topic, which concerns me, Monsieur Abbryggdd. The times when drugs were raging
across the world, the heyday, as they call it, of the psychedelic revolution...
those days are over. Do you think that your identification with the newer
developments in that field will help
or hinder you in your quest to become, as they say, a Lord, again?"
"That's not a bad question, Mr.
Garconteaux. There are pluses and minuses to all that. It's quite nice that
those things are getting a revisit by the same people who declared them illegal
and dangerous back when . However, I found the attitudes of some of the
so-called new "experts" to be about as retarded as I did that of the
"old schoolers" in many ways."
"How so?"
"In that they are demanding
clinical evaluations without taking into account, already, the experiences of
those that survived those early years of public experimentation. The new
researchers, it would seem, are often just as willing to persecute the old
heads as they are to insist on sterile settings and diagnostics, pencils and
paper, quantifying the supernatural if they can reducing it to numbers and
figures which governments can understand. The better to undermine an experience
that is basically anti-governmental."
"Well, if these drugs were legal
again, perhaps these governments would have less reason to fear them as once
they did?"
"Not at all. No government wishes
its citizens to wake up from the slumber of their comprehensive systems of
social programming. The psychedelic experience lends itself not to
suggestibility and gullibility to propaganda, as governments had once hoped,
but to questioning the basis and fabric of the universe, and that programming
in particular. I cannot see this ending very soon, in fact, I think the more
placidity is involved in accepting such oversight and funding, the more likely
governments will continue to assert authority and unwillingness to accept new
modes and ideas for the spiritual life. Which these drugs can, and often do,
awaken, or reinforce."
"Very well-spoken. I do hope they
give you that seat in Parliament."
The waitress came back to ask if
everything was "alright."
They assured her all was fine, and she
mentioned she would be back soon with their desserts, and coffee.
Guru kept on his topic. "What I
mean by all that is one can see from just a few moments hanging out with them
(if they'll let you) that the new researchers- some, not all by any means-
possess all the hangups and uptightness that their forebears did, who helped
make these substances illegal to begin with, and who continue to impose their
own blinded mentality upon the person whose experience is limited to a casual
environment without support of other trained and trustworthy experiencers. By
demanding "sober" data that by itself precludes their ability to
absorb, by proximity, the joy the experiencer may be undergoing internally.
There's no possible way you can convince some governmental bureaucrat- no
matter how many degrees he holds- of the depth and beauty possible in the experience,
if that third party is unwilling to undergo the journey themselves or even
acknowledge these drugs aren't
possessed of some demonic energy. If they keep feeding that vibe, well then,
who can blame the person on the experiencing end when they begin to feel
uncomfortable with that "impartial" observer?"
"Some of the bravest people I
know are those who went into the psychedelic experience with their eyes open
and wide eyed innocence. That so many have often been persecuted by a system
that refuses to value the resulting changes in personality as a social good,
should be considered a disqualifying judgement about modern psychiatry and all
it purports for the "well being" of its constituent population."
"Ah well. I know I bore the hell
out of you..." Guru fell silent, remembering the little bit of paper
resting in his slip pocket of his jeans. He remembered it, faintly, but he'd
run the jeans through the wash already, so, it was just as much as if he had
never bothered seeking out the dealer he had bought it from. Just as well. Like
Jenifer had told him, it probably would not be a great idea to take any such
journeys while the struggle for the Lordship was underway. Besides- they had
the Patch! It would be worth it to keep on with whatever it might do for him, after
all, he'd make an excellent spokesman for it, if he could but move beyond the
perception of men like Garconteaux who might think he was "living in the
past" and in a new world, "post-psychedelic" - involving the new
doors the Patch was opening. He wanted to write Dr. Dryer and ask if she would
consider opening a new study, purely of the patch and meditation... perhaps
incorporate some of Steve Shank's Tibetan monk buddies... he made a mental
note, that that would be a good idea.
Meanwhile, Garconteaux had become more
excited in discussing his own life as it related.
"Non, non, not at all! I like
hearing this! I had me some "trips" myself back in the day. I would
even say they helped steer me toward my current career! Especially the
mushrooms!"
"Mon Dieu! you have been through
all that, yourself? I never would have guessed by your person, or your
demeanor."
""Well you know,"
replied Garconteaux, "and as I hope you are aware, appearances certainly
are not everything. It's possible to hold a great many dissenting and difficult
opinions, here in the West, just so long as you don't look like you do."
At that, Jenifer blushed and nervously
fingered her dreadlocks.
"I prefer the organic entheogens,
as a means of connecting with nature. Although the other analogues, such as
lysergic acid, are definitely capable of bringing one to a consideration of
oneself as both particle and wave..." Guru's long stare deflected from his
companions, and reverted to the ocean waves as they broke on the shore. He
snapped back to attention as Garconteaux continued.
"You would not approve one over
the other?"
"Nah. Mushrooms were always more
of a "body trip" for me. Whereas LSD goes straight to the brain,
blows out the dust and the cobwebs... The organics, for me, anyway- remind me
that you are the cobwebs, too. Does that make sense?"
"Wel, yes, in a way. But consider
how many people have used these drugs and how many real contributors to
culture..."
"Like Trabajo?"
"Yes, exactly, like
Trabajo–"
"I knew him personally. Not a
completely successful example. He may have come up with the basic machinery,
but, I don't think acid did anything novel for his arrangement of a business
model. He was a Savanarola or a Macchiavelli, not a Jefferson..."
"Now there's a complex
personality!"
"Yes, I'd agree. He wanted to set
all the slaves free, but some of the other signers did not agree. Or he would have written it into the American
Declaration."
Jenifer spoke up. "I like old
Tom. He must have had a little "jungle fever" going on. What a
different society we'd have had...."
"If Thomas Jefferson had been a
tripster!" Garconteaux smiled, pleased with himself to have completed the
sentence for her.
The table broke up into laughter.
Everyone by now were clearing their plates. Garconteaux wiped his plate with a
piece of the bread from the basket.
"So yes. Please let's approve the
deal. Roget, you send me the estimate of how many Akhenatens you want to order,
that you will need for the project to succeed on your terms. I'll sign off.
We'll get ahold of you by YakMail, Lord Kwyldyr, and you can go ahead and
arrange things on your end."
"I'm sure that Caperbaum
Associates, and the Syznic factory in Chico, California will be happy to take
the order. We can do it for a thirtyfive percent discount. I'll get them to estimate
your shipping cost. We can get them to you within five to six weeks, if all
goes well."
Roget now spoke up. His silence had
been reflective, and a courtesy to his two guests.
"That is certainly a most welcome
development! I'd love to incorporate them. And the whole city will get OtherNet
capability. I don't see the government being quite as willing and noncompliant
as they are with the Third Eye Patch..."
"I'll also make sure that You,
Monsieur Garconteaux, receive a lifetime supply of Patches delivered to you
personally. We have our ways!"
Desiree, who had been even more silent
than Roget through the whole meal, was now hoping the waitress would return,
but as soon as she thought it, the woman appeared climbing the stairs. She
brought a platter with a number of pastry desserts.
"And the coffee, too?"
reminded Garconteaux.
"Oui, Monsieur," she nodded,
sounding rushed. "I can only carry so much at once!"
She turned and was gone, back down the
stairway.
"And for you and Desiree,"
Guru continued, turning his attention to Roget, sitting at the head of the
table, with his spoon making initial dips into a lemon custard tart, "I
will also make available a lifetime supply. I'll start by leaving each of you a week's
worth from my own pockets. I know that it will help you at the very least to
make an initial effort. Like I said, it's mainly in the mind. The body does not
enjoy the insult of the smoke but the brain loves the nicotine. And the best
part of quitting of course, is when you have been quit for a decade, and your
lungs are replenishing cells with less probability of cancer and
mutation..."
"Thank you, Monsieur Average. I
will look forward to all that."
Jenifer had chosen a kiwi and
strawberry tart, and Desiree took the three madeleines. Guru began working on a
small piece of pineapple upside-down cake. The waitress soon returned with a
new platter full of cups and saucers, and a hot pot of coffee.
"Now," Guru began speaking
again, "Now we get to some of the interesting ideas that Dr. Dreyer
postulates are some of the "side effects" of the Patch. One of these
is, of course, that those who are drug users of the "recreational"
sort tend to slough off their recreation and get involved actively in
meditation and yoga groups. Perhaps it is the supportive nature of the group,
but more probably it is because they suddenly find themselves dissatisfied with
the life they are leading, and see they are going noplace with it. Even that
sage old American acidhead Ken Kesey tried to warn people off early in the
game- he spoke of going "beyond acid." I think that this is one of
the things which the Patch is doing- it is actually shrinking the population of
drugs-minded individuals. Not to say that the psychedelic experience is not
valid– I think, indeed it is. But the Patch is helping to place it in a more
normal, sacred perspective– and people are taking less trips, but learning
more."
"That's interesting, Guru,"
said Garconteaux. "I should look into that as well. I wonder though about some
individuals- are they not "strangers to themselves" after all is said
and done? Can the Patch really help them find their rootedness, and actually
ground them?"
"Doctor Dreyer says that the Patch,
indeed, helps in the awareness (or creation) of a more socially conscious ego
manifestation. The more one lives in the community of Patchlings, the more one
draws on its support, and is supported. Quite the opposite of the addicted
community, in which it becomes all too often 'every man for themselves.'"
"One then could also conclude
that the Patch perhaps ought to be mandatory for those in civil service and
politics!"
"So far, however, Monsieur Garconteaux,
we have seen nothing but resistance, or at the finest, a condescending
indifference to such ideas. Boffin gave away hundreds of them to the United
States Congress. Most of those wound up on the capitol steps, used as
frisbees."
Garconteaux stopped, and pondered.
"Well, since the Foundation are
still, more or less, yet intact, are there more plans, more projects lined
up?"
"I'm neither at liberty to
discuss those things nor am I in the loop as to what they are all doing. I came
back to the continent to focus on my place in Wales. I could give you several
of the Foundation members' YakMail addresses, and a short introduction might
get you further along. But I wonder..."
"Yes?"
"I wonder, how long can you call it a start-up before it’s a
run-down?”
They all laughed. It was clear dinner was done,
and after another refill on the wine, all were ready to take to the streets.
Garconteaux motored away, his pocket full of a strip of Third Eye Patches, his
tummy full of that wonderful channel seafood, his head a little lighter for the
carafe of wine he'd downed.
