Invisible Streets

by Toby Ball

  Thus we come to the second pillar of our project, Ebanks’s conception of man’s mediated perception and the use of certain pharmaceuticals to unmediate. Expanding on Heidegger’s model of the interlocution of the self in perception, Ebanks constructs a system whereby in perceiving things, the self is conscious of its own identity, a culturally constructed lens which distorts the true nature of the things being perceived. It is in the creation of identity—a process utterly unreflected-upon by most men—that modernism is, in a way previously impossible, able to inculcate the essential docility and acceptance of capitalistic values. As Marcuse writes, “Rationality is being transformed from a critical force into one of adjustment and compliance. Autonomy of reason loses its meaning in the same measure as the thoughts, feelings, and actions of men are shaped by the technical requirements … Reason has found its resting place in the system of standardized control, production, and consumption.”

  To bring this to our current, local situation, I have shown that advances in technology necessitate dramatic accommodating societal changes that, in some cases, are more affecting of society than are the products of the technology. At our moment in history, technology has reached a stage so advanced that it is endowed with values and characteristics previously reserved for men and, conversely, men have been reduced to material goods—commoditized. Or, put another way, where technology once served man, man now serves technology. As Marcuse notes above, society has, without perceiving its acquiescence, accepted and internalized this shift into the collective identity, and societal judgments are therefore seen through this prism. This has resulted, in our City, in the New City Project, the urban, physical manifestation of the inversion of the relative valuation of technology and man, with capitalism as the fulcrum.

  In proposing The Drift as a means of perceiving the effects of the partial destruction of the organically evolved City and its replacement with an engineered urban scheme with the creation of capital through the elevation of technology over man as its core, I acknowledge the problems inherent in perceiving the physical world when wearing—as I have earlier described it—the lens of the identity of the self, skewed as it is by the internalization of societally proscribed values. As discussed earlier, Ebanks has described the efficacy of a certain class of pharmaceutical substances, most notably lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in suppressing the obscuring influence of the self’s identity, freeing the self to perceive without mediation. Unconstrained by the influence of society’s relative valuation of man and technology, the individual engaging in The Drift, is capable of perceiving and understanding the physical environment as it pertains to the welfare and happiness of man, as distinct from the creation of capital …

  41

  FRINGS MET PANOS AT THE RESTAURANT IN THE HOTEL LEOPOLD II. THE dinner hour was in full swing, but Panos had a standing reservation, and was already seated when Frings arrived. As Frings followed the maître d’ to Panos’s table, he saw Gerald Svinblad sharing a glass of wine with a couple of men in suits whose faces he recognized, but whom he’d never met.

  He could see Panos waiting expectantly and knew that the progress report would be disappointing to the old man. There were, as of yet, no answers.

  “Do you bring news?” Panos asked, once Frings had sat down and ordered a martini from the waiter. Frings told Panos about the visit to Lenny Toth’s office, about Toth’s paranoia and reluctance to give Frings any information.

  When he was done, Frings took his notebook from his jacket pocket, tore off the page with Toth’s twelve names on it, slid it across to Panos. Panos scanned the names.

  “So, here is Sol.”

  “Do you recognize any of the others?”

  “No. None of them.”

  Frings hadn’t thought he would. “I’ve put one of the new reporters on the case—he’s tracking them all down.”

  “Littbarski let you near one of his impressionable young people, maybe catch a bad case of socialism?”

  “He’s in a good mood because he thinks Deyna is going to break a big story. Stolen explosives.”

  Panos nodded thoughtfully. “Stolen explosives?”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  Panos frowned. “I wonder, with Littbarski, if maybe there is not something more.”

  Frings waited, but Panos said nothing else.

  “Do you know Gerald Svinblad?” Frings asked.

  “Sure, a little. Why do you ask?”

  “I think he’s coming over to our table.”

  Panos straightened in his seat the best he could.

  “Don’t get up gentlemen,” Svinblad said as he arrived at the table. “I saw you over here and thought maybe this was a Gazette reunion, talk about the days when you were sticking it to the capitalists.”

  “Hello, Gerry,” Panos said warily, and the two men shook hands. “Have you met Frank Frings?”

  “Not in the flesh, no.” Svinblad didn’t offer his hand. “But like everyone else, I’ve read his work for years. I feel as if I know him.”

  Frings didn’t say anything, and a silence settled upon them that Svinblad didn’t seem to find uncomfortable.

  “Gerry—” Panos began, but Svinblad interrupted him.

  “You’re not letting go of the Project are you, Frank? It’s okay if I call you Frank?”

  Again, Frings stayed quiet, looking at Svinblad with scant interest. Guys like Svinblad thought they could play the bully because they had money, but this didn’t work with Frings.

  “Normally,” Svinblad continued, “I am the first guy to admire someone who says fuck you to everyone, does what they want. But sometimes, you’ve got to know when you’re licked, and, Frank, you’re licked. Your whole fucking ideology is licked. The Gazette is gone. You’ll say that it’s merged, but I read the paper and all I see is the News. You’re the last bit of the Gazette left. You’re like an infected appendix there, not good for anything—holding on until it’s removed. And the Project? Once upon a time, you might have had some weight, made things tougher. But now?” He grunted dismissively.

  “Gerry,” Panos said, sounding exhausted.

  “They never run my letters to the editor,” Svinblad said, sarcastically, “so I thought I’d chat with Frank, here, let him know my thoughts man-to-man.”

  “Well, you’ve said what you had to say. It was nice seeing you.”

  Svinblad seemed reluctant to leave.

  “Good-bye, Gerry.”

  Svinblad nodded to Panos, smirked at the still silent Frings, and ambled back to his table.

  “I’m sorry for that,” Panos said.

  “That? That doesn’t bother me. I just don’t waste my time arguing with people like that. Once you open your mouth, you’ve lost.”

  Panos nodded, his attention turned to where Svinblad retook his seat, laughing with his companions.

  42

  FRINGS TOOK A CAB AT A CRAWL THROUGH THE MORNING STREETS TO Little Lisbon. Rain blew in horizontal sheets. People folded their umbrellas rather than risk having them torn apart by the wind. The cabbie had the radio on; as always, the news was dominated by the rising cost of the New City Project, City Council members affirming its importance, critics raging about corruption and fraud. Frings half-listened in the back, damp from his dash from the front door to the cab.

  They pulled up to a small cafe on a side street. No name, just a sign that read COFFEE. The place was packed—younger bohemian types at some tables, aging radicals at others. It was on the dangerous verge of becoming trendy.

  He saw his friend Bert Oliva—greasy hair a little too long, unkempt beard, heavy-framed glasses—lounging at a table against the far wall. At any given time, the City had a half dozen or so shoestring weekly newspapers running the ideological gamut. Oliva had edited several of the radical rags and was currently at the helm of The Eye, a conspiracy-oriented paper distributed in three languages to factory workers and laborers.

  Oliva didn’t stand, but shook Frings’s hand warmly, his left hand patting th
e back of Frings’s right. He was drinking tea, but mouthed for the waitress to bring Frings a coffee.

  “Nice to see you, Frankie.”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “We’re both busy. That’s how it is in this life.” Oliva had a warm, genuine smile.

  The waitress dropped off the coffee, which smelled strong and dark.

  When she was gone, Oliva said, “You wanted to talk?”

  “About Will Ebanks.”

  Oliva rolled his eyes. “He’s a friend of yours, right?”

  “Yeah, but I’m trying to get a better handle on him.”

  Oliva gave Frings a questioning look.

  “He’s”—Frings searched for the right words—“sort of fallen off the map with all of his interest in LSD, mescaline, that whole thing. The few times I’ve seen him, well, if I hadn’t heard stories I might have put it down to the normal changes over time. But it sounds like I might not be getting the whole picture.”

  “You’ve heard rumors.”

  Frings nodded.

  “And you want to hear mine.”

  “If that’s okay.”

  “It’s a little uncomfortable, to be honest, Frankie. What with him being your friend.”

  “You’re my friend, too. I need to know what’s going on with him.”

  Oliva drew a deep breath, gathered himself. “Okay, the first thing is that I never actually saw or talked to Will when all of this went down. I just wrote about him. I was editing the Sentinel at the time. You remember that one, a year and a half or so ago, lasted about fifteen editions?”

  “I think I contributed a couple of articles under a pseudonym.”

  “Major Aaho.”

  Frings laughed. “That’s right.”

  “Anyway, Ebanks had just gotten fired by the Tech, and he was starting to have those LSD parties at his place. You might remember that the Sentinel considered itself a real revolutionary rag, exposing the hypocrisy of a mayor who preaches capitalism and all that free-market shit, but wants the government—in the person of Nathan Canada—to rearrange the way the whole fucking City is laid out—where people can live, where roads can go, all that shit. I guess I don’t need to tell you about that.

  “At the same time, the papers are making this big deal about Will being some big radical, and he’s digging it, playing it up. But he’s not a radical; he’s just a guy experimenting with drugs, and we thought that we’d point that out. So we did. We compared him to Andre LaValle, the difference between revolutionary action and self-absorption. We were trying to make a delicate point about violence and revolution on the one hand, and spiritual retreat on the other. I didn’t think that Ebanks came off that badly, we even played up the spiritual angle, not the drug angle.”

  “You contrasted him with LaValle?”

  Oliva chuckled at the memory of it. “We did. We were being provocative. And it worked—with Ebanks, at least.”

  He took a sip of tea, pursed his lips before continuing. “The day after it hit the streets, a couple of dudes came to visit me. They weren’t all that big, but they were big enough, and they had that look about them that they could probably dish it out, you know? Just angry-looking dudes. So they came into my office, slapped this piece of paper on my desk and said to run it in the next edition of the Sentinel. I picked it up and read it through, and it was basically a letter from Ebanks explaining that our article on him was full of lies and conspiracy bullshit. He threw in some “fucks” and called us “cunts,” and it was ridiculous—even if I was a guy who’d run something some asshole had slapped on my desk, which I’m not.

  “So they wouldn’t leave. They just fucking sat there in my office, and I’d get up and use the john and come back and they’d be there and they’d just stare at me while I worked, trying to intimidate me. And the pisser is that it basically worked. Not that I stopped doing anything, but it was definitely unnerving. Finally, there was a guy working there who was involved with one of those black nationalist groups—I can’t remember which one—and he called on a few of his friends—tough, tough dudes—who came down and threw them out. Those fuckers didn’t go easily, though. Kicking and swearing and threatening to come back. But those Negroes were tough as hell, man, and just tossed them out on the sidewalk. I waited for them to come back the next day, the day after that, but they didn’t, which was a relief.

  “You know what happened next. I don’t know how, but they got their hands on a printing press and some newsprint and copied our logo and look and put out their own fucking version of the Sentinel the day before we put out our next edition. I still don’t know how they pulled that off.” He paused for a moment, had another sip of tea. “Anyway, it was a weird rag, a mixture of abusing us, talking about how we were playing at revolution without even understanding what we were fighting against, and then also some stuff that looked like it had been written by Will about how people fundamentally misapprehend the nature of what is real or some bullshit like that and that we all had to take LSD or mushrooms to unlock the secrets, blah, blah, fucking blah.”

  “That’s crazy,” Frings said. “Not just what was in it, but going to the trouble of printing a whole edition of the Sentinel.” Frings shook his head. “And the expense …”

  “I still don’t understand it, man, and I’ve thought about it a lot.”

  “You think Will put up the money for it?”

  “Will? No, he doesn’t have that kind of scratch.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “Not from what I understand.”

  Frings frowned. He thought Oliva was wrong about that.

  “Anyway,” Oliva continued, “we went to court and got the remaining copies pulled off the street. But the damage had been done and our advertising and our money guys pulled out and the Sentinel was gone in less than a month. Just one of many temporary ventures.” Oliva half-smiled, his eyes not quite on Frings.

  “You say you never actually saw Will during any of this. Do you think it’s possible that he wasn’t involved at all? Maybe it was just overzealous friends of his or something.”

  Oliva shrugged. “I guess it’s possible, but I doubt it. If nothing else, though, he had the power to stop it. I have no doubts about that.”

  This seemed right. “One more thing. Those two men who came to visit you? Was one of them Sol Elia?”

  This surprised Oliva. “What, Panos’s grandkid?” He shook his head. “No, I would have remembered that. Why, is he mixed up with Will?”

  Frings had no idea.

  43

  FRINGS HAD TASKED A REPORTER NAMED CONROY TO TRACK DOWN THE whereabouts of the people on Toth’s list. Conroy was fresh out of the Tech, and like a lot of the young guys at the paper, he was at once awed by Frings, and fearful that management would take a dim view of any association with him. So, while he was thrilled to help, he declined Frings’s offer to debrief over a beer at a local bar, instead preferring Frings’s office, which seemed more professional and less chummy. Frings understood Conroy’s calculation and was just as happy to skip the beer.

  Conroy, who had a broad, reddish face, and carried thirty extra pounds, looked nervous as he handed Frings a page of notes.

  “Are you okay?” Frings asked. “Go ahead and sit down.”

  Conroy lowered himself into a chair. “Look at the notes, Mr. Frings. They’re, well … just take a look at them.”

  “Call me Frank. We’re colleagues.” He looked at Conroy’s notes.

  Sol Elia —??

  Roger Phaneouf — 143 Albemarle — laborer

  Edward Sand — suicide

  Philip Hammer —??

  Benjamin Diamond — suicide

  Lester Finch — 18291 Galilleo — unemployed?

  Oswald Mason — suicide

  Joseph Millhauser — suicide

  Elgin Holland — 1003 Leipzig — bank vice president

  Linus Embry — died, July 1962, cause indeterminate

  Stephen Sedgewick —??

  Joos Vander K
ierkoff — City College Hospital for the Deranged

  He stared at the sheet of paper, thinking.

  “You’re sure about this?” he asked. It was a stupid question, but he felt the need for some confirmation. The information was jarring. He could understand Conroy’s nervousness. The information certainly seemed wrong.

  “I’m sure. The deaths—suicides—I got two sources.”

  Four suicides and a death. Nearly half of these men were dead, all of them in their twenties. Maybe more than half, depending on what happened to the people that Conroy wasn’t able to track down.

  There was a click and air rushed through the ducts. Conroy started at the sudden noise.

  “What do you think about this list?” Frings asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there’s definitely something going on. One third of the people in the study commit suicide?”

  “Yeah. Hold on, there’s more.” He pulled a reporter’s notebook from his jacket pocket and flipped through a few pages. “Let’s see, the one death—Linus Embry. He somehow fell off a roof. Ten stories or something like that. The police couldn’t determine whether he jumped, fell, or was pushed, and, frankly, it didn’t look like they put themselves out over it. We can probably chalk it up as another suicide.”

  Frings nodded.

  “These others, the survivors”—Conroy continued—“look at them. Laborer. Unemployed. Hospital for the Deranged. Out of twelve people, all graduates of the Tech, only one has anything like what you’d consider a successful career.”

  “If they all graduated. Sol didn’t.”

  Conroy looked chastised.

  “Regardless,” Frings said, “this is a troubling list, to say the least. I appreciate your work on this.”

  Time now, he thought, to knock on some doors.

  44

  THE ALARM SCARED THE HELL OUT OF GRIP, PULLING HIM FROM A RESTLESS sleep. He banged the clock off and lay back on his pillow, heart pounding, the first hints of sunlight revealing the dark silhouettes of the furniture in his room. He caught his breath, felt with his left hand along the floor by his bed, finding the familiar steel of his gun. He looked toward the door, and at the bureau he’d propped in front of it.