Fires Eternal Morning :

an allegorical novel by Johnes Ruta

Chapter 2

Fallout

Heavy gray coldness outside, he was still lying prone between two garages.  In  the cities and towns no one was left behind, milky gray skies still warm with the spores of the sprouted mushrooms that sparkled like fuzzy silver dust over the map.  

 

 

            In the summer, the warm garden of honeysuckle, which overgrew the page wire

fence bordering narrow walkways between the garage walls, filled the air.  At the base of the back door steps, a copse of green leaves and purple blooms of lilac made  a little shade grove. 

In the small patch of earth between the garages his grandfather kept his garden of eggplant, green peppers, tomato plants, with one fig tree; which his grandfather would wrap and tie up

to keep alive through the snowy  winter.

 

            In their neighbor’s garage a policeman lived, old Rudy next door had told him as
a small boy, so he knew not to go too close -- but he sometimes would stare into the window. They didn't have a car to keep in there, so there was room for a workbench and tools hanging on the bare wood walls, and it didn't look too comfortable for anyone to live in there.

           
A rumble that shook the air above was really a  sonic boom from somewhere in the blue

above the cotton landscape (through empathic eyes).  Down here on the ground there were beads of sweat in his armpits and on his forehead, and that same metallic taste in his mouth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Back as a small child, he was with his mother and little sister Juno, after spending the afternoon shopping at Howland's and Levitt's department stores and especially at the big
H.L. Green 5 & 10 Cent Store in downtown Bridgeport. 

            It was a sunny afternoon on spring vacation, and now they were parked on a sidestreet around the corner from the entrance of the Columbia Records factory on Barnum Avenue where his father works, waiting for his Dad to come out at 3:30. 

            He was  happy today because he has finally gotten something that he had wanted for a long time -- a beautiful set of tin soldiers with uniforms which look like the armies of different countries of World War I: British grenadiers, U.S. "Doughboys", and Germans with spiked helmets. Each one has a rifle or a pistol, standing, crouched, or prone on the ground. 

            While waiting for his Dad to come out of work, his Mom and Juno are up in the front seat talking about girl-stuff, so he starts setting up his army-men, arranging them out on the backseat facing each other from across the upholstery, rumpling his brown jacket out across the seat to make hills and valleys and trenches for them to hide in ambush for each other.  Since it's already warm outside, he also opens the door and moves the battle to the cliff of the edge of the seat and sets up the Germans below on the little flat metal ledge beneath where the backseat door closes,  and the battle is poised to begin.  There they are crossing the field, with the allies above ready to stop them from advancing.

            Suddenly, the car shakes as his Dad opens the front door and jumps into the front seat hugging and kissing Mom and Juno. But when Dad shuts his door the car bounces again, and
all the soldiers on the metal ledge already unsteady now start falling over.  It's too late for him
to catch them as they all fall out of the car and tumble to the ground.

            "Oh, No!" he yells, because he hadn't seen that the car was parked over a sewer grate and the soldiers keep falling, already slipping down through the grate, and he is helpless to catch them. As the soldiers slowly drop and tumble down and down into the tiny bottomless pool deep under the street, for one instant he can first see his own face reflected from above before the water swallows them up forever and his reflected image breaks into small circles ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alone on the beach, absolutely Nothing around was familiar, though he knew  somehow he had stood here before....He had climbed aboard the only bus he saw, and the route had strangely gone down a wide avenue between two, mile-long windowless tall super-structures.  No one else was riding, and now the driver directed him to get off to make his connection, dropping him at a stop before an expansive network of intersecting and branching ribbons.

            On a wide sign post was stapled a flyer with musical notes in the margin, reading simply: "MILIEU NO. 8, a Program of  SCARLATTI, HANDEL and CHOPIN,  4 PM Today Only,  The Pier."

 

     But already it seemed to be getting late, stars appeared in the dimming sky over the south eastern horizon  which looked like two spinning solar-systems (though golden light of twilight still reflected on tall buildings in the distance) ... Now he saw that he actually stood on a two-dimensional ribbon-plane which  had coiled in below the stationary stars; and extended over the horizon to the east.  And  hovering far over that was a deep cylindrical shaft with a glowing orange interior far inside that -- an edgeless,  borderless parabola.

            Suddenly a jet plane flying out of the shaft barely missed him, skimming the ribbon's edge at about mach-2, with a screaming sonic doppler wave that deafened him and knocked him to the pavement, then plunging him again into deafened silence.

 

            Getting to his feet, he could see two other busses moving along here and there off in the distance, but none coming down this ribbon---

     "---How do I get out of here?" he asked a man standing at the intersection of sunlit plastic paths --

     But impatiently waved away by the man, he trudged on, the sun low in the black sky now beginning to glare with uncomfortable warmth / until he was back again at the Lordship Seawall,

where the waves normally rolled ashore…

An old-fashioned style wooden pier had been built while he had been away, and  many people were walking inside. A fellow he vaguely remembered recognized him as he imperviously watched the scene, asking “Going to the concert ??”  He nodded and he followed along chatting, embarrassed to himself that he couldn’t yet remember the fellow’s name ...

            The auditorium on the pier looked big enough for a recital,  as he was handed a program: a concert hall with a great curved window behind the stage with a sweeping view of Long Island Sound,  the west and east shorelines, and southward out to sea…

            Though before them stood a beautiful grand piano, music began playing from another one unseen, and the program persisted for some time in this way, until a group of children in the front row began to grow restless with the mystery:

            "Let's try this side door that goes farther out on the pier!"/  "It must lead to another hall!"/ "No! It's the end of the pier!"

            But the door was stuck and would not pry open.

 

            All was stillness, as the first piano piece concluded, except for the perpetual rollers that washed themselves ashore/ sweeping along the jetty until  dying at the beach     gray sea reflecting gray sky

(always gray nowadays)  but so  s t i l l

 

     No One was really playing the piano, but without

regard it persisted.  The door  still stuck tight, concealing

 

the piano player's lack of identity

 

waves  rolling,  outside

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

            By the first week of November of his freshman year, his life at this uninspiring college had finally begun to improve: As soon as he received his first acceptance letter from the State Teachers College in New Haven, his father considered it a done deal, with congratulations…
Hauberc liked New Haven, as the late-Beat coffeehouses and the well-stocked bookstores there had drawn him since even before he got his drivers license, the very day before JFK was shot,

but he would have to live at home in Stratford and commute every morning to school.  Now
he had decided to take the initiative in several of his classes, by applying his own thinking and advanced reading in Psychology and Sociology, his chosen major and minor subjects, and ask serious questions in class, rather than just accept these instructors’ conventional renderings by the book. Moreover, he had been an intellectual leader in high school, as an outspoken anti-war advocate which attracted others to his Humanist and individualist values, and he was not so willing to confine his thinking to tacitly accept the status quo and the litany of reasons being given to escalate the war against the poor rice-farmer Marxists in Vietnam. At 13, he had been  watching TV when President Eisenhower gave his farewell address, and  he wondered just what the old World War II General meant when he said the nation needed to beware of the “military-industrial complex”.   What the heck was that ? 
        Now in his freshman year, he had the feeling of being watched.  -- Someone had followed him several times, he was certain, but after several days he finally realized it was a curious-looking pert young woman with long blonde hair and a kittenish face that he had passed alone and remote through the corridor of the main class building. He was sure she had even turned and walked after him, concealed by the numbers of other students -- And now as he walked out into the walkway with that same feeling again, he suddenly turned around and glanced at the window of the exit doorway he had just passed through -- and there was just her petite face, framed by the glass of the little window, her eyes caught for a fleeting second ---

            The following noontime, he took his place in the hallway line going into the cafeteria room of the Student Union hall, leaning against the wall and looking down into a paperback book of stories by Franz Kafka, when suddenly another young woman student with long dark hair appeared next to him in line and smiled subtly, suddenly chatting with a smile. “What are you studying?” she asked curiously.

            “Psychology and Sociology -- but I’m thinking of changing my minor to Literature...”

            “Really ? -- Pych and Sosh -- that’s an unusual combination --  Um... you should meet my roommate Margo, we’re sophomores -- that’s her same major and minor too --”

            Two days later at noon-time, he was there again waiting in line for lunch, and there now appeared this same brunette, this time with another friend, the same petite face he was certain he had glanced  in the window frame...

            But later that afternoon he again passed through the corridor near the administration office, when this time a young man in a suit accosted him, “Have you had your hair cut recently?  Our dress code doesn’t approve of your boots or black jeans...”

            Hauberc looks up, amazed at the man, who introduced himself, “I’m John Gunnar, Assistant Dean of Students... What’s your name, young man?”  The pronoun phrase seemed strange coming from this fellow, who looked only in his own mid-twenties, sandy-haired clean-cut.

            “No one ever criticized me in high-school for my taste in clothes..” Hauberc replied.

            “You’re in college now, young man, and you’d better dress for success! I want to

see you next week in some conventional attire and a haircut. Come to see me Thursday
at 2 PM, Office 222.”

            By Friday he was so preoccupied with thoughts about his late-night dates with Margo, who turned out to be the same girl with the kitten face, that his one encounter with this “juvenile authority” seemed really remote.  Having to live at home and drive the second family car to college every day, his father didn’t seem to be aware that he would get home from Margo’s off-campus apartment around 4 AM several nights a week, so that the car would be home when his parents got up at 6 AM.

            His Pysch class was an  auditorium full of kids with a panel of  team-teachers on the stage.  -- No one from the audience asked an interesting question .  After a month of this, he had gone to the office of the most knowledgable-looking of the “team” --  “Will we read anything of Freud’s this semester?”

          “We’re not so devoted to Freud in the first-year study, we want to give a wider background in clinical principles…”  

      “Well, what about Georg Groddeck’s clinical theories -- he was a correspondent of Freud

who did mostly clinical work, and came up with a theory in “The Book of the It”, about the independent actions of the Subconscious in the individual ?”

        “The term Freud used was “Id”.”  
        “Even Freud gave Groddeck credit for inventing it,” I rejoined, “in The Ego and the Id.”
Feeling now out on a limb, I tried to balance this statement, explaining with a smile, “When I was 12, I loved  “Adventures in Paradise” on TV and reading Two Years Before the Mast  and Moby Dick  and I wanted to go to Tahiti -- I was looking for books about the South Seas and I found a book called Totem and Taboo -- and was pretty surprised!” 
        Dull thud, “Oh.”

       “When I read The Ego and the Id,  it reminded me of Moby Dick submerged under the waves, tormenting Ahab, the father figure.” 

 

        That morning, in “Sosh” class, the topic got around to the “nuclear family” structure,

and mentioned how young people were moving away from their families to start their own lives working for big companies being paid enough to support themselves.  Sitting in the back of the room, Hauberc had raised his hand and asked, “The Organization Man talks about that, but what about young people who move away from home in order to find their own individuality…?”   The woman instructor simply paused for twenty seconds, then went on to the next question from the front of the class.

 

        Now he felt that he had gotten himself in “solid” with his teachers, ironically. It was past

1 PM, and he sat alone at a dining table in the Student Union wondering if he had already missed his friends for lunch, another face, the young Dean of Students was suddenly looming over him as he tried to chew his food. Now he had begun to hear crazy stories from other students, even  those with only short hair needing a trim over their ears, that they too had been stopped in the corridor. “You missed your appointment with me yesterday, Mr. Hauberc.. Please show me your Student ID card.”  Hauberc took out his card from his wallet and handed it to Gunnar.
        “OK, thank you,” Gunnar said, putting the card in his shirt pocket. “Be in my office next Tuesday, November 9th at 2 o’clock with your hair cut according to school regulations, and you’ll get you ID back, or else you’re automatically suspended.”

            Hauberc in the hasty encounter neglected to mention  that he had a Math class at 2:15, Tuesday. But on Tuesday, before class as he lingered outside his math room, a messenger walked up to those standing by the door. “Who’s John Hauberc?”  But no one else answered, and neither did he..

 

        Inside the class, fifteen minutes later, the messenger this time entered the room and spoke to his instructor.  “Mr. Hauberc, you’re wanted in the Dean Gunnar’s office right away..”

            When he walked into the office, Dean Gunnar spoke succinctly, “You’re already under suspension as of 2 PM. I want you to leave campus until you make another appointment to see me personally under the conditions we discussed.  That’s all, Mr. Hauberc!” 

            Hauberc walked out of the office, both terrified and almost laughing. He went back to his car and sat in the parking lot and studied and pondered until 4 PM, then drove to his part-time job at Dow Corning in the Trumbull industrial park, arriving at the manufacturing plant at 5:15 where he worked four times a week as a night watchman.

            His father was also on the staff here as a production planner, and he greeted Hauberc with his usual mix of off-hand pleasantry and inward scowl.

            Hauberc was suddenly perplexed though, wondering how he could tell his father what happened today at school.  “No,” he thought to himself, “I’d better wait and figure this out first..”

            Almost 5:30, Hauberc walked down the corridor, to the door to say goodbye to his father and the other dozen or so office and plant employees done for the day. “See you home…” Dad says non-chalantly as he exits the door, and Hauberc follows, thinking “Well, I didn’t tell him..” By the time he reaches the door and peeps out the little window, his father is already getting into his car, parked right outside the door, and is starting the motor, gesturing a quick wave with no smile.

            At this instant, the florescent lights in the hall began to flicker and dim for several moments, then all popped out at once, and the building goes dark, and the parking lot lights off

too, in the dimming November twilight.  Hauberc opened the door and shouted to the guys still in the parking lot “Hey, the lights just went out!” 
        His Dad and several others began to filter back inside to check the fuse boxes, the main circuit-breaker, the outside lines. Eerily, the early dusk seemed to plunge the whole neighbor-hood into darkness.  One of the guys walks back into the building saying, “CBS Radio just said the whole Northeast just went out !!”

        The telephone still worked, but with a strange winding sound.. Turning the dials of the secretary’s transistor battery radio, they could tune in only one weak signal, the local station

in Bridgeport.  “We are still on the air with our own auxiliary power…At 5:28, a few moments ago,” the tinny voice says on the little transistor radio, “telephone reports are now coming in from all over New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Massachusetts, that the entire region lost electric power. Telephones seem to be working, on a separate circuit.”  A few minutes later, the second report  adds, “The Niagara Falls Generation Plant has caught fire, and all linked power grids in the Northeast have shut down.”  

It was November 9, 1965.

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                         

 ----->               An odd place

                                                            to find himself waiting on his first day in Boston.
Waiting, waiting in the sitting room of Dayan’s dorm, waiting for her to show up well into
the night. It was now 11:30 PM and no sign of her.  Five years ago, he had first seen her the
first day of 10^th grade homeroom in their high school, standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, but she would never accept his invitations to go anywhere together without others along, like Opal. 

She had now invited him to come and visit her at school in Boston before his departure over-seas, and was to have had a place for him to stay with a friend nearby named John, off-campus. 

 

        Now it was the beginning of February, Margo had broken off their romance, and he hadn’t been able to get his father to agree to let him transfer to another college. He had decided to let re-registration for the Spring semester pass by and to leave home for as long as he could with the money he made from being a night-watchman.

 

        For the rest of the Fall semester, he had managed to stay out of Assistant Dean Gunnar’s sight, after the situation had mushroomed out of control, thanks to Margo’s friends on the staff of The Yale Daily News having published an interview with him, misquoting him as mocking

the president of the State Teachers College as being bald … He had finally gone to Dean Middlebrooks,  Gunnar’s superior, and apologized for the whole episode, saying that he just wanted to get an education, be a serious student, and not cause trouble…. The thoughtful Dean looked at his high-school record and had written him a pass to go back to classes on the agreement of a hair trim.

            But still the same pattern of social programming persisted in his main courses, and he

was pulling B’s when he could tell his reading background was further advanced than the students getting A’s who parroted the instructors ideas….  Instead of registering for the next semester, he got his passport and booked passage to split on a Yugoslavian passenger-freighter.

 

            OK, being here, stranded in Boston, was a dry-run of traveling alone, and he tried not to connect this situation with other disappointments, and not to be discouraged by Dayan’s neglect of his stated feelings, unrequited yet kind yet twisted.  Already the same pattern beginning to repeat:   he had waited here fruitlessly five hours for Dayan to meet him, sat in the lobby of the Boston Conservatory administration building, then in the entry waiting room of her dorm.

Now past midnight, they asked him to leave. He ventured out into the February night, called
the YMCA, no rooms available, a hotel room would spend all the money he had. He went to South Station, and sat in the waiting room, would try to read all night, but around 2:30 the guard told him the station was closing. Finally walking to find the Y, where he would sit in the lobby, but they sold him a room. 

            He climbed under clean white sheets, exhausted, passed into a future story: A sunny day in Boston, at first it was tomorrow, he knew Dayan was coming to meet him at her cafeteria.

 

             Built on a crescent-shaped block, the street called The Fenway overlooked the swampy-edged meadow, the famous baseball field on the other side.  Now it was next year in his sleep, Spring after he has already come back from Europe wanting to find her again, still. These buildings seem unchanged since his first visit, but yet this school corridor did not even feel familiar since last evening.

                                     Unknown people

                                                                        walking by him, just as a stranger

                                    coming late into the semester, he would be a student here too …. .

                                                Then Dayan, pretty and demure piano student, like a stranger

from his home town, a stranger from his high school home-room, finally comes in view across the corridor, floating up to him, as simple as though having seen him every day,

                        to say "..hello."  (in perfect bathos).

                                                He had envisioned that she would come walking

in through the glass door (an ectoplasmic entrance),  to embrace

and kiss him hello/ 

            -- But walking with her he begins to feel happier, becoming re-accustomed to her reticent, slightly awkward manner,  yet he is still apprehensive about starting new classes...

The busy lobby now beginning to clear, the walls come in view as wood paneling.

                                    Across the room walking toward the modern escalator,                                     riding up to the annex of classrooms, he wonders  aloud that his classroom must be

like the deck of a   sailing ship since the musical instrument he will major in will be the

                                    Capstan   (with strings and bow).

 

                                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back from overseas, he was hard at work there for months already, a factory in the west end of Bridgeport, a job given him as a material handler in the manufacturing production of military ordnance.  Cast back into this purgatory, thanks to his Uncle Simone, who would keep him from being shipped off to combat in Vietnam, as long as Hauberc did a few things for him. -- A depressing, grinding factory workplace, but he still felt more sympathy for the others in this industrial dungeon, than his own misery at being given this secret security assignment, as they called it-- so secret they wouldn’t even tell him until he had actually arrived. Rather than face a bad discharge now, he could eventually redeem his situation. 

            Lines of long assembly-line work tables on one side of an open warehouse size room, windows overlooking the stone railroad viaduct where the trains chugged by every hour. Women of all ages were seated women on stools, piecing together tiny electrical parts to be bolted together inside cigarette-pack size olive-drab triggering cases; and, on the other side of the room, from asbestos-sided oven conveyors there emerged a steady stream of plate-sized devices still hot, , their component parts were ball-bearing pellets of steel sealed in layers of hot grey Devcon plastic, each encased in an olive-drab curved panel: Anti-Personnel Land Mines!  

            As each unit comes out of the oven conveyor, it is picked up off the warm steel grating  and its plastic casing pulled apart – revealing its layer of ball bearings pressed down with knob-handled bolts and cooked into its Devcon mold. Each unit is handed off to another man who deftly uses a triangular sided metal blade tool to scrape away all the excess hardened glue while still warm and soft thus producing one more diabolical device ready to be packed for the field with a pouch of explosive powder.

            Hauberc knew where these pieces were going once they were packed into cases of twenty-four sections each and shipped off, first to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, then to Vietnam.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            He reminisced his trip to Boston, more than a year later now, as he waited for Dayan’s face to perhaps appear around a corner.  The following days with her when they had jaunted through historical houses in Cambridge, philosophizing Pythagoras, singing and harmonizing  Beatles' songs, Eight Days A Week and If I Fell In Love With You, their voices weaving together in perfect counterpoint, their eyes breathing all their memories, and their future memories of this moment  ---

 

            The first morning he finally caught up with her, after wandering around Boston, she had led him immediately to her first class of the day  in a large auditorium, where they couldn’t even find two seats together.  He had watched her from across the rows, soon realizing that the conceited, affected young man sitting with his clique-ish friends several rows ahead of her,

was the same "virtuoso piano student"  she had spent the previous evening with, and who would now barely acknowledge her presence... 

 

 

 

 

 

            But another year later, when she came home from school the second week of May, she telephoned at 7 PM and asked him to come and pick her up at the train station. It was a Wednesday, the night before his 20^th birthday. When she got into his car, she asked him to stop on the way for a cup of tea and a sandwich. “I haven’t called home yet,” she softly said as they sat together. “I told my Mom and Dad I was coming home tomorrow.”  “What are you going to do?”   “Can I stay at your house tonight?” 

 

            At 9:30, he went in and asked his parents if she could stay overnight. His Mom looked puzzled but sympathetic, Dayan would have his room, and he the living-room sofa, but as he

briefly said good-night to her, she pulled a cotton nightgown from her suitcase.  Instead still dressed, before bed-time, they sat together on the living-room floor in front of the stereo listening to two of his new Rock albums that she wanted to hear. Playing a song on Fresh Cream, “Dreaming About My Life,” she told him over the volume, employed atonal harmony, and Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” carried out the constant line of a Baroque continuo.  

At 6:30 AM, his parents were up, and he entered his room and sat on the chair next to the head of the bed, watching her softly sleep for a long time before touching her face to wake her, and her amber eyes opened smiling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     On the first Sunday of June, two and a half weeks later, he picked up Opal and Dayan at 1 PM and drove down to the beach at Stratford, facing Long Island Sound to the south. Uncle Simone still kept calling him, telling him to get Opal to tell him the code to reset the Communications circuit which she worked on at the phone company. He couldn't just come out and ask her...?!  And now Opal brought along Dayan, to complicate the whole thing.

Opal and Dayan wanted to go to an art opening in Milford this afternoon, but Opal had something good to smoke in the car first, so he drove down toward the beach past Lordship. Sitting three across in the front seat, they passed it back and forth, until they were all blitzed.

 

Listening to a New York Rock AM station on the radio, he was hoping they would play some

Stones, to match the mood he was now in, but now they were playing the entire new Beatles album on the radio, "Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band," just released on Friday, and the last song started as he pulled into the long parking lot and parked facing the unusually big waves smashing the sandy shoreline. The sunlight glinted through the waves and flying spray, creating a prismatic rainbow of colors…. Lennon singing: "I read the news today, oh boy……" The song went on and on about 4000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire and the Albert Hall, and Paul riding a double-decker London bus. The music finally rose to a crescendo at the coda, then dropped to sudden silence. He thought it was over, but then it pounded an enormous punctuation at the very end, which came over like an Exclamation Point of History ...

The enormous organ sound slowly diminished, slowly trailing off a long decline to silence ……

Next to him, Dayan said quiety, almost to herself, "Augmented, sustained, then diminished...it's beautiful."

         Stunned all together by this crescendo, they got out of the car and walked down the beach. Dayan walked further down the shoreline, lost in mysterious thoughts. Hauberc climbed on the big rocks of the stone jetty and walked out towards the end of it, staring out to sea, as the large waves splashed over the rocks, sending up a rainbow of colors in the high spray. These could be the Last Waves, one after the other.

The feeling was the foreboding of Time, endless Ending.

Opal came up behind him during this reverie, asking, "Did you get that Punctuation Point? That’s John Lennon’s message -- it’s the End of History ….!"

At the art and photography opening in Milford, they chatted with artists friends and drank allot of red wine. The art show was in a common room at a Howard Johnson’s motel, and when the party wound down, one of his friends had taken a motel room for the day across the lawn. After three more bottles of wine, they were giggling and somehow all lounging back crowded on the two beds. Now Dayan was really next to him, both their heads on one pillow, and he reached out to put his arms around her and held her close to him for the first time since he ever saw her, kissing her face, her soft cheeks, her eyes.

Someone on the other bed started to kiss Opal and she called out "It’s a play orgy," quickly sitting up; then everyone got up to go home, it was late.

 

 

He awoke the before the alarm went off the next morning, a Monday, with the second sensation still under his eyelids from last night, of Dayan softly tracing her finger tips on his face, sitting next to him as he drove down the River Road taking them home. Now the clock-radio clicked on, an early June Monday with the first sunlight coming in the window when he opened his eyes.

But the clock-radio now spoke "It's June 5th. War in the Middle East today: The UPI and Reuters reports that Israel Defense Minister Moshe Dayan is battling neighbors on all sides. Israeli jets are attacking Cairo, and Israeli armored divisions moving into the Sinai Peninsula, against Egyptian tank battalions. Jordan has opened artillery shelling on West Jerusalem."

After a few minutes listening to understand this, he heard the phone ring in the other room, and his father walked in and handed him the receiver on its long wire, "It's your Great-uncle." It was General Simone's voice, "I thought you were supposed to call me last week, last night?! All Hell is breaking loose, we're already bumped up to Red Alert with the Ruskies. Our jets are scrambling ! I think you fucked up your job!"

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