Patina and the Fallen Angels. Chapter One.

Patina and the Fallen Angels

PREFACE:

The simple absence of warning is the one ingredient guaranteed to make a pitfall infinitely more dangerous. Falling foul of such an unposted hazard would be all the more regrettable, pitiful or even tragic, because the suffering arising from it is needless, and yet, this is simply our lot in life.

We are given no warning about the very thing most likely to make our lives a misery, and this leaves us bereft of an adequate means of protecting ourselves. We might blame our forbears for this lamentable state of affairs, but their fault actually goes much further than a mere sin of omission: they actively lead us into danger; they push us headlong into it, then leave us to cope as best we can.

They do this without malice and with the best of intentions. But good intentions are fraught with unintended consequences. Without even realizing it, our forebears end up maneuvering us to the slippery edge of a spiritual abyss, from which precarious point many will lose their footing and fall into a bewildering conundrum, which is sure to confound and stultify even the best of us.

It all begins, innocently enough, with the eradication of vanity and conceit in children. This socializing process might appear necessary, justifiable and even eminently reasonable; but it has a costly downside, the consequences of which go largely unseen.

Where does pride and vanity come from in the first place? I am not entirely sure, but there is certainly no shortage of it--on the contrary, there is a vast oversupply, a surplus so big in fact that the government enlists the paid efforts of schoolteachers to help stamp it out.

It is like a part of their job-description to reprimand our vain boasting and bragging, our showing off, our arrogance, our every outward sign of conceit. They chip away at it, they disapprove of it, they cajole, they rap us across the knuckles; with unremitting repetition they try to drum the vanity right out of us.

But how can we as mere children, in want of a depth of insight into the spiritual complexities of pride, how can we make our vanity just disappear simply because a teacher tells us to? Even if we want desperately to do that, even if we try real hard, how can we, as mere children, make our vanity disappear?

If this expectation is not already an impossible one, it is made even more difficult in a world filled with contradictions; a world where children are routinely exposed to so many conflicting messages:

Matinee movies imply that pride and vanity are acceptable and even praiseworthy, because the hero is typically a vastly superior human being; superior in looks, strength, intelligence, courage, assertiveness, self-esteem-—superior in every way. Superiority in games like football is also viewed as acceptable and even desirable--the coach openly encourages our team to take pride in defeating rival teams and is likely to express disappointment and disapproval if we fail to achieve that end. But in church they tell us quite the opposite: that pride goes before a fall. In School they tell us it is good to take pride in our work. Our parents normally react with delight to see us come first in the class--but this very same result could also see us hated with a vengeance by some of our classmates.

As we grow into later childhood, we are also likely to notice, and be disquieted by the fact, that some adults, including teachers, are noticeably vain or even downright egotistical. Such apparent hypocrisy serves to further increase a child’s level of confusion by suggesting that bad can sometimes be good, but without their ever knowing when or why. It also introduces elements of unfairness and arbitrariness. The unfairness of "Don’t do what I do, do what I say" is likely to cause resentment, while the arbitrariness is likely to suggest there is no firm moral basis for eradicating vanity in the first place.

How can a child reconcile so many discrepancies and still proceed with the earnest intention of becoming truly modest? How can a child become modest in any case? What if you are a little guy (a runt or a little brother) who is routinely bullied and ridiculed? Boasting might be necessary to make you feel better about yourself—-then how can you just stop, change what you feel, do a complete about face, and become modest simply because an arbitrary edict demands it of you?

What children are actually confronted with is something like the following: Rule 1: You must be modest. Rule 2: If you can’t be modest, see Rule 1. Such an edict totally ignores what is in a child’s heart; and, in making no allowance for what even an adult is capable of, it amounts to a veritable attack upon the sincerity of a child. You can’t become vain simply by being told to be vain; similarly, you can’t become modest simply by being told not to be vain. Vanity does not work that way.

Other than get twisted out of shape, what is a child able to do in response to such absurdity? How can a child react to it? If you think about it there are really only three ways that anyone can react to it: (1) They can be openly defiant by continuing to make conceited remarks--but these are unlikely to continue unabated unless one can harden oneself totally to criticism and disapproval.

(2) They can consciously pretend to be modest in the presence of authority figures, other important people or for special occasions, but be openly conceited at other times. (3) They can resort to the delusion of modesty: With prolonged exposure to the indoctrination into modesty, children might easily come to believe that vanity is truly wrong, and this could cause them to become ashamed of any trace awareness of it in themselves. But being unable to truly eradicate their vanity, they can only resort to pretence. Denial could serve to keep the painful awareness of vanity at bay, and thus defend against the feelings of shame associated with it; it could also cause a child to believe he is truly modest even though he isn’t.

Strategy three commends itself over strategies one and two because it allows us to escape the disapproval of people who have the power to punish us, as well as the guilt of being knowingly deceitful. It (denial) solves the immediate, childhood problem, and that is why so many of us rely upon it. But the shift to this strategy is a fundamental one, and it has profound consequences:

It enables children to hide their vanity--not just from teachers but from themselves, and this is the crucial crossover point that changes everything; it is where the great sham is switched to the ‘on’ position; it is where we begin to lose contact with who we really are.

By their impatient efforts to eradicate our vanity, the civilizing forces of culture, which hope to make us better people, instill in us instead a shameful phoniness. The shame associated with this phoniness, in turn, causes us to deny the very existence of the delusion of modesty; and this, in turn, causes us to unwittingly pass it on to the next generation; which, in turn, serves to maintain this deep-seated problem in a veritable state of perpetuity.

The delusion of modesty is the greatest sham; is like the font of all phoniness, and it is collectively our best kept secret. It is our most paramount secret: the secret so momentous that we keep it hidden even from ourselves.

Deep down, and to varying degrees, we are all in love with ourselves in any case. But, with as much of our vanity hidden away as is necessary to make us feel comfortable, we can begin to happily think of ourselves as being the good guys who meet with the approval of ourselves, our parents, our teachers and society at large.

The upside of this socializing process is that we probably won’t get fired for asserting our superiority over the boss or our senior colleagues. The downside, however, is threefold and considerable:

We don’t truly know who we are any more, because a part of us has become invisible to us.

(2) Our moral character has been tampered with on the deepest level, because we are not able to be truly honest about who we are.

The arrogant portion now invisible to us is not truly missing; it still exists but in secret, and it will continue to operate and wreak havoc upon the blind and defenseless person we have become.

The downside of the delusion of modesty can be serious enough to assume the destructive proportions of a cancer of the character: There are things you can hide from a boss that you cannot hide in a close relationship. Your spouse is bound to see through you sooner or later--and probably sooner if the divorce rate is any indication. She will see what he cannot see. She will see the kind of pride that needs to puff itself up by putting her down. She will not only see, she will feel the ‘love’ that conspires to defeat her. She will see the traits of character that say, in more or less civilized fashion: "I am better than you!" She might see snobbery and condescension, competitiveness, smugness, envy and contempt; she might see all of these traits in a person who, in turn, views himself as a paragon of politeness and congeniality.

In our modern world, the delusion of modesty is the most dangerous and destructive thing civilization’s good intentions can impose upon us. In camouflaging our pride collectively, it creates the secret, hidden world of pride--a world of such enormous moment and gravity as to constitute a full-scale, parallel world. This nether world has a covert but overriding influence upon the events of our everyday, mundane world--the world we thoughtlessly take for granted as representing our only reality. This world of pride is appropriately inhabited by egotistical monsters, which are all the more formidable because they are invisible to the hosts they inhabit. It is a paradoxical world--timelessly modern and ancient too--where fearsome monsters lurk much like the medieval dragons of yore.

I am speaking figuratively now, of course, and yet, unlike fire-breathing dragons, pride is real, is very much a monster, and its negative influence touches each and every one of us.

It is at our peril that we hide our pride, and yet civilization has not only taught us to do this--it has taught us to do it with such skill and artifice that we have almost succeeded in denying its very existence.

The delusion of modesty is able to be maintained by even the grossest, maniacal ego--but it is all the easier for regular, decent people to maintain, because their relatively minuscule pride is necessarily a lot more subtle, elusive and easy to hide. This makes the world of self-delusion even murkier for regular decent people and a very hospitable environment for monsters to live and lurk in.

But despite the many advantages that murkiness bestows upon them, you might nevertheless capture one of these lurking monsters if you are persistent and patient. But it is imperative for you to first be able to see it, otherwise you will never even be able to get your hands on one, never come to grips with one, never even get started, and thus you will never succeed.

If you are very lucky you might even slay one. This is a task so arduous that it can only be accomplished with the greatest of difficulty . . . but it remains possible--ours, after all, is the selfsame world in which St. George was able to slay the fiendish form of his pride made manifest.

It is in just such a dragon-slaying landscape that our protagonist finds himself, but he, Paul, felt overwhelmed and hopelessly ill equipped to carry out the daunting task that lay before him. His delusion of modesty was an especially discordant one. This resulted, in part, from the nervous timidity of his sensitive nature; but Paul had also been dispossessed, and this made him more of a misfit than most.

In a general manner of speaking, this story about Paul and Patina had already begun at the point when Lucifer was cast out of heaven as punishment for having fallen in love with himself; but, in a very particular sense, it begins in March 1971.

CHAPTER ONE: THE BIRD OF PARADISE IS A PROUD PEACOCK.

Paul was in search of his father to ask him yet another question about Latin. Because it was eight o’clock on a Wednesday evening, he reckoned he should first look in the living room. But poking his head through the doorway, he felt the slightest twinge of disappointment to see--not his father, but his eighteen-year-old sister, Karen.

She was seated on a sofa and perusing a family photo album. Her legs were crossed. Her right knee was resting upon her left, and she was nervously jiggling her right foot, which was suspended in the air.

The odd expression on her face had the intensity of a caricature, the excessive nature of which introduced a comical element, which bordered on the absurd and it piqued Paul’s curiosity. There was definitely something going on here and he simply had to know what it was.

He entered the room creeping slowly and quietly toward her, almost as if he was sneaking up on her.

"What’s up?" he asked, taking a seat beside her.

"Darn it all to hell!" she said, with an indignation that seemed heavily admixed with resignation. "We lost this beautiful house. It was a villa, a mansion, and we lost it; but does that mean we have now descended to the level of lower-class riff raff?"

"Good grief! What’s this all about? Why the gloomy subject matter?"

"Well, it’s these two boys at school. They keep calling me a westie. They seem to think it’s funny. I don’t say anything to encourage them, I try not to react to them in any way at all, but they keep calling me that anyway."

"I’ve heard that sort of talk about westies too," said Paul, sympathetically, "but it’s just petty snobbery and there’s no substance to it. Not everyone living in western Sydney is riff raff--many sections of the west are well to do. The north, south and east sections of the city are not entirely free of riff raff either, nor are they all upper crust or even well to do.

People who say things like that have a desperate need to feel superior, but they are just lower middle class like us, and they know it, so they can only pretend to be superior by clinging to their one spurious claim to fame: that they don’t come from the west. Don’t let them worry you. You have nothing to be ashamed of: You were chosen to go to a school for intellectually gifted children when you were only ten."

"Yes, but Dad wouldn’t let me go. He thought commuting halfway across Sydney would be dangerous for a ten-year-old girl."

"But you earned a scholarship to N.S.W.U.--and your grades: you have all high distinctions. You shouldn’t let those creeps worry you, especially when there is absolutely no substance to what they say." Paul paused thoughtfully for a moment.

"Of course, if you think long enough on any given subject you might find both pros and cons to every different point of view. The truth has so many facets that there is at least a grain of it in the opinion of almost any kind of idiot.

There is, in fact, a criminal underclass in western Sydney, but you find them in other parts of Sydney too . . . although, admittedly, there are more of them in the west--I think that’s because the land is cheaper there, so low-income people are funneled in that direction. It’s only logical that the government should build more welfare housing where it can save money on the cost of land.

But you can’t generalize: not everyone living in welfare housing is riff raff. I think the real riff raff are petty criminals, and these only constitute a small minority of any community . . . and yet some places are worse than others. There are some parts of the west where the neighborhoods are just as rough as guts.

I know that for a fact because we used to live in a place like that: Tattoo Town. You are probably too young to remember much about that, but we lived there until Dad could save enough money to move us to where we are now--and I can tell you this is pretty darn good by comparison."

"Yes indeed! I remember that place," she said.

"Tattoo Town was a tough town; that’s how some would describe it: "Tough". But I really don’t understand why the people had to be so tough. I think there was a general tendency toward abusive and even violent behavior, but this was especially true of the teenage boys--and this seemed to always put you at risk of being beaten up.

Many had tattoos, which I think were meant to advertise just how tough they were and that they could take care of themselves. They had to be tough because other people were generally so tough and abusive, and that’s probably why they developed a thick skin and became callous and abusive themselves.

Some might beat you up, threaten you, or challenge you to a fight if you said anything to them at all-- but especially something they might interpret as an insult--and sometimes they would threaten you if you just looked sideways at them.

They were also very much in the habit of using the ‘F’ word to express verbal abuse."

"Yes, I noticed that myself," said Karen, squeezing a quick comment in edgeways.

"It seemed they were abusive in general, and so they were into all forms of abuse. And it seemed they were forever telling scurrilous jokes about women’s sexual anatomy. Those jokes were abusive too--everything seemed to revolve around abuse.

I don’t know why but there was just so much hostility there. It was like a constant undercurrent of everyday life. It was even expressed in the form of cruelty to animals. I remember Ian the ferret, who lived just a couple of doors up from us. One day he found a turtle, and was trying to cut it out of its shell with a razor blade."

"What a mentality!" said Karen, in a tone of horrified outrage and disgust. "Boy, but I’ve really got you going on this subject, haven’t I." she added, beholding him with a penetrating stare.

Paul’s long-winded discourse was in no way cut short by her interjection; he continued without skipping a beat.

"It was a rusty blade and, like Ian himself, it was none too sharp, so he wasn’t able to do too much damage. I had a shilling in my pocket and offered to buy the turtle. He was happy enough to sell it to me. He gave me the turtle, took the money and went running to the corner store to spend that shilling just as fast as was humanly possible."

"I remember him," said Karen. "Living just two doors down, he was actually a near neighbor, but he scared me so much, I avoided him like the plague."

"I heard a few things about him not long ago. Apparently he’s been leading an eventful, recidivist’s life." Said Paul.

"In high school, they might have voted him the boy most likely to recidivate." Said Karen, who began to giggle and then broke into an all out belly laugh.

"Yes, and he wasn’t the only one around there to follow that path. I had two particular friends, as a matter of fact. They were fifteen and I was thirteen when a--" Paul paused briefly and then continued. "--when a particular incident occurred. You would have been eight at the time. You don’t remember the Steptoe brothers do you--Sid and Mike?"

"Yes, I remember them, one was blonde and one was dark; they didn’t look at all like brothers."

"No, they were step brothers . . . anyway, we went to a remote place in the bush one day, the three of us--" Paul hesitated once more then continued to speak, but tentatively and haltingly. "--They ended up killing a little, stray dog . . . they drowned it just for fun."

All of a sudden, Paul found himself so deep in distracted thought that it had actually caused him to stop talking. He was barely even aware of his surroundings, let alone of what he was going to say next, but his attention was sharply re focussed in response to the vehemence in Karen’s next words.

"Why would a nice guy like you even associate with people of such a low ilk!" she said. The look on her face indicated puzzled disbelief and even disappointment, and Paul thought her tone of voice contained more than a trace of disapproval.

He felt reprimanded (as was his wont) and a disquieting sense of embarrassment and guilt suddenly imposed itself upon him. It was as if he had just stumbled into something unexpectedly, something he hadn’t seen coming, something unpleasant. It was as if he had crashed unwittingly and headlong into a trap, and, right in front of him, confronting him, staring him unflinchingly in the face, was Karen’s question.

It was simple enough as questions go, and salient to the point that it begged an answer. Why indeed had he associated with such people?

He had asked himself that same question on several if not numerous occasions in the past. And he had come to the considered conclusion that these were actually his preferred type of friends during a particular period in his life, which lasted about two to three years and ended when he and his family moved away from Tattoo Town.

There was a clear pattern to this choice: His friends of that era were petty criminals who were about two years older than himself--those were the two simple characteristics they all had in common. He had noticed that tendency before to be sure; moreover, he was also aware that it was he, himself, who had been the one to initiate those friendships.

He remembered how he went to the Steptoe house to befriend the brothers--this was not long after the Steptoe family had moved into the neighborhood. Mike Steptoe had punched Paul hard in the stomach, and yet this didn’t serve as a deterrent to Paul, who persevered and was soon after accepted by them.

Paul was now once more confronted with the consequences of his bad choice of friends. Tattoo Town was not a good neighborhood to be sure, but he was actually the one who had made matters ten times worse than they ever needed to be. Though only a small percentage of the people in his old neighborhood were truly crude and mean spirited, simply all of his so-called friends were of that same pusillanimous persuasion.

The probability of their all being like that simply by chance was beyond the realms of credibility. Indeed, he was the one who had virtually funneled the whole neighborhood through a filter in order to find these people, these people of lowest possible ilk. Paul felt a disturbing, nagging dissonance and a sense of blame, a sense of his being complicit.

He felt responsible, and yet, his guilt, after all, was merely guilt by association. It would be unfair to try him for that. No court in the land would find him guilty. No matter how serious the crime, it was not his crime, so why should he be blamed.

The memory of ten years ago was indelible, heartrending and gruesome: The poor little mutt had followed them, presumably in the hope of gaining their friendship and companionship.

But on reaching a creek at a location isolated enough to be free of witnesses, the Steptoe boys started throwing the dog into the creek. At fifteen years of age they were not exactly boys but young men, of full adult height if not weight. They had left school and they both already had two tattoos on each arm.

The dog would swim back to shore each time they threw it in, and one or the other of them would pick it up in their arms and throw it back in. It didn’t seem all that bad at first, but the two of them kept this up for the longest time, until the dog became exhausted.

In being picked up and held virtually to their bosom like a baby, the dog was in a position not only to bite but even bite them in the face. It probably only weighed about eight to ten pounds, and yet it was nevertheless capable, physically at least, of inflicting a nasty bite.

But it didn’t do that, it didn’t even bark, it didn’t bark at all but suffered in silence as they threw it in again and again. When it was totally exhausted and at the point of drowning, they started to hit it with long heavy sticks and push it under. These sticks had been cut from saplings, stripped of branches, and left in the vicinity by persons unknown some time before.

The dog died without a whimper of disapproval. It had nothing to lose by biting them but it seemed too scared to do that--or perhaps it wasn’t in its nature to be aggressive. It seemed the perfect passive victim, because it was unwilling to even displease or disappoint its murderers, but virtually cooperated with them instead and to the last.

Paul begged them to stop, but they were not pleased with his attempted interference. They were intent on having their fun and getting their kicks, and they warned him to shut up or they would do the same to him.

"Have you seen Dad?" he asked, in an effort to escape the tyranny of his dark pondering thoughts by changing the subject.

"I think he’s in the backyard," said Karen.

Paul now resolved to bring his interrupted quest to completion, and, with less than a minute of sustained effort, was able to traverse the distance between living room and backyard, where he found his father watering the garden.

"Dad, what does 'deus ex machina' mean?"

"Well, literally, it means: ‘a god from a machine’ . . . does that settle the matter for you or do you need more information?" The latter was something he was almost invariably willing and able to supply.

"No. That's fine, Dad! That's all I need to know." Paul turned and began to walk away.

"What a pity you didn't learn Latin in school," said his father in a tone of sadness and regret. "That bloody school! You didn't learn anything until after you left that school. It was nothing more than a breeding ground for infectious learning disorders."

With those last words said, and a nod of his head, and without saying anything by way of reply, Paul walked away and headed back to his room. It was just then that a voice entered his consciousness. It was a voice from the past:

"You're a parasite, son! Why you're nothing but a bludger! You are a bludger off the community!"

Despite their disparaging content, the words made him feel strangely like a celebrity guest on the TV show, This is Your Life, who would be asked to listen to, and try to recognize, the voice of a mystery guest standing behind a screen.

"Who said that?" thought Paul. "Who was that?"

"Why you're just a parasite, son! You are just a bludger off the community!" said the voice in reiteration.

"Ah, yes, I remember now. That was old Harry Westergard, my high school headmaster. It was the day I went up to his office to see him, to ask for money. He was indignant to the point of outrage. He went as red in the face as molten lava, and then he almost exploded like a goddamn volcano.

But asking for money wasn't really so bad . . . well, not as bad as it might sound on the face of it."

Paul had run the shooting gallery at the school fete and had provided the air rifles and the pellets. He had simply asked to be compensated for the expense he had incurred in purchasing one packet of five hundred pellets, which was about one dollar.

But old Harry wanted to know the price Paul had charged per shot and the total amount of money raised. The latter was about twenty dollars. He felt the pellets should have been donated in any case, along with the use of the rifles and Paul's time. If the school had to pay, it would pay not a penny more than was absolutely necessary. After Harry's calculations were complete, his rage reached a crescendo:

"Forty-five cents is all you're entitled to, you bludger! Why you're nothing but a parasite! You're just a bludger, son; a bludger off the community!"

Harry went almost off his brain. It wasn't a very dignified way to behave, and it contrasted markedly with the exaggerated air of dignity he was normally inclined to display.

Old Harry was a stately dresser. He would dress just as formal, prim and proper as the Chancellor of the Exchequer . . . or maybe the ambassador to Great Britain or the holy Emperor of Japan.

Paul could not understand how Harry could be so pompous and take himself so seriously as to dress like that--and why so angry? Paul was quite accustomed to having teachers speak to him as if he was a dog, but Harry's anger seemed out of all proportion even by those standards.

Having flunked the seventh grade, Paul was promoted to the eighth on probation: he would be allowed to stay in the eighth only if he passed the first-term exams. He failed those too, and convincingly, but was not demoted; the school failed to carry out its threat.

The half-yearly exams saw Paul come second-last in every single subject. Now, paradoxically, a result like that is actually most difficult to achieve. It isn't simply a matter of sitting back and taking it real easy. No indeed! To be placed second-last in every single subject takes skill and precision, to be sure, but it takes a lot more. It takes luck and plenty of it, and, for that reason, it was something he couldn't maintain:

The eighth-grade yearly exams saw Paul come first in math and either last, second-last or third-last in all his other subjects.

In retrospect, Paul thought it quite possible old Harry was never worried so much about the price of pellets, but was actually responding to the taunt implied by his fluctuating grades.

Paul had gotten into an adversarial relationship with old Harry almost right from the start and things never did get any better between them.

"What a pompous old bastard he was." thought Paul. "The only teacher more egotistical than Westergard was the headmaster we had in primary school. He had all the affected mannerisms of an artsy-fartsy movie director--the type who wear a coat over their shoulders without putting their arms into the sleeves, who wear a scarf, sun glasses, and smoke cigarettes through a long cigarette holder. He would display fits of 'artistic' temperament toward children as young as eight.

But, in a strange democratic twist of thinking, he would treat the kids as his equals--but only for the purpose of competing with them. He would pretend they were his equals in both age and knowledge, and then he would gain inordinate pleasure and satisfaction from demonstrating his superiority over them. What a phony bastard he was!

Tom Redden was the number one teacher in high school. He served in World War II as a fighter pilot and was badly wounded. He was not pompous, pretentious or in love with himself. He was straight as a gun barrel, and probably the best teacher I never had.

He only taught the slow learners, and I only had a chance to talk to him on a few occasions. They should have put me in with the slow learners--my grades were appropriately bad enough--but they never did. I couldn’t have been any worse off: my school days, from as far back as I can remember till I dropped out in the ninth grade, were a total disastrous failure and a waste of ten years of my life.

And perhaps a lot of it was my own stupid fault. I have an insane kind of stubborn streak, which can cause me to sabotage my own future by doing stupidly self-defeating things. I could cut off my own nose just to spite my face.

My grades in school were nothing less than a damnable disgrace. I was a disgrace to myself and a disgrace to my entire family. I can hardly believe I was such a poor student, especially when I did surprisingly well at night school, and in spite of holding down a full-time job. I matriculated into the U.S. (University of Sydney) and I have now satisfactorily completed first year.

I’m just about level pegged now with Karen, except that her grades are better and she’s five years younger. But my academic career is nevertheless on the upward swing, and I sure hope it continues that way, because I simply can't afford to have any more problems with it."

The chain of thoughts evoked by the events of this Wednesday evening caused Paul to have a perplexing dream that same night. In the dream his academic career had suddenly skyrocketed to unprecedented and superlative heights. Sitting in his lap were three golden letters of invitation to the finest Ivy League colleges in the USA.

He had his choice of Harvard, Princeton or Yale, and it was just like the fulfillment of a wish--yes, it was exactly like that. He had but to choose one, and that choice was so easy. It was Harvard--of course it was Harvard!

"It's in the bag!" he said to himself, with a confidence bordering on smugness. "I still have to attend an interview, of course, but that will be a mere formality."

The dream was progressing quickly, which is something dreams are easily able to do, being unencumbered as they are by the constraints of reality. As a consequence, Paul was now already on his way to attend that interview and he was walking down unfamiliar, city streets.

It was appropriate the streets should be unfamiliar because he had never been to the United States before. But it was not appropriate they should be city streets--it should have been a sprawling campus of beautiful gardens and lawns. But it wasn't. It was city, and it was central business district, and it was down town rather than up town.

What was even more disturbing was the overall appearance of the neighborhood. It seemed dirty and impoverished to the point of virtually being a slum. It was also night time, which struck Paul as rather strange.

The address he was given brought him to what looked like a two-hundred-year-old derelict building. It was large but narrow and tower-like and it was made of wood, which lent a rickety appearance to it.

Paul went through the front entrance. It was a wide sliding door you might find in a warehouse. Having entered he began to ascend a spiral staircase. There was only one partitioned room and it was situated right at the top of the stairs. The rest of the building was just one big open expanse, which appeared unfinished and seemed incapable of performing any kind of useful function.

Having reached the summit of the stairs, he came to a door with a sign saying 'DEAN'. Paul coughed nervously as he knocked oh so timidly on the door. His knock was so tentative as to be almost inaudible, and yet he was startled by an immediate response from a very loud voice.

"NEXT!" screamed the bellowing voice.

Paul entered to find a dinghy and dirty-looking office almost bereft of furniture, fittings and wall decorations. There was a desk and two chairs but no filing cabinets. A bare light bulb hung from the ceiling. On the desk sat a calendar and an old- fashioned telephone. It was not an extremely old or antique-type of telephone--it was something out of the nineteen-forties or fifties. It didn’t look much bigger than a nineteen-seventies-type telephone, but it was a great deal heavier. Accidentally dropping one of these on your foot could necessitate a visit to the hospital.

"Take a seat!" said a big man who was sitting at the desk and tapping his fingernails in a speedy and very rhythmic fashion on the desktop. His nails were unusually long for a man. They also appeared to be roughly chewed and there was just a hint of their being dirty.

Though the dean was seated, Paul nevertheless felt sure he was over six feet tall. It also seemed he must have put on a fair bit of weight recently because his suit coat had been stretched so much that the seams at the shoulders showed their stitches. The woolen material was also smooth and shiny in places, which made the coat look like it had been slept in on numerous occasions.

"Are you competitive? If not, then why in blazes should we take you? Can you explain that to me? I mean, can you compete against all comers? That's what I'd like to know, so tell me now and make it quick." said the big man, in a petulant tone, and with a garrulous impatience that made it difficult for Paul to get a word in edgewise.

"Well," said Paul, timidly, "I would rather win than lose. I would prefer to be one of life's winners rather than be a loser. I would rather be superior than inferior. As a matter of fact, now that you come to mention it, it is indeed my fondest and most ardent wish to be superior . . . but superior in a nice and friendly kind of way."

"Superior but friendly." said the Dean, in an irritated tone of voice. "That's a bit irregular, isn't it? I mean, it would be a lot easier for me to make you superior to your friends rather than superior and friendly at the same time."

Paul felt a descending sense of disappointment. "That's really not what I had in mind," he replied.

"Well, I could make you arrogantly likeable. How about that?"

Paul shook his head.

"Church-going superior?"

"I'm an agnostic," said Paul, apologetically, "so I regret to say I would find the latter distasteful. I really don't care to be arrogant or superior to my friends either, because it just doesn't seem right to me somehow."

"This really worries you, doesn't it. I don't know why it should. It doesn't worry most other people all that much and it would certainly be much simpler to just make you arrogantly superior but you can have whatever stupid thing you want. It's no skin off my nose. I don't take it as a personal goddamn affront! It doesn't bother me one way or the other."

From his tone of voice, Paul felt the dean was actually very irritated indeed.

"But how can I be both friendly and superior at the same time?" asked Paul, in a pleading tone of head-in-hands desperation.

"It's easy. Very easy if you know what you are doing. It can be just as easy as taking candy from a baby. A Harvard man should already understand this, but I'm in a good mood today so I'll spell it out for you in language even you can understand:

You can be vicariously superior--understand: You can find a lady to love and keep who has beauty, prestige and glamour. This will place you at the top of the heap, but without the need to fight and clamor."

"Wow! What an exquisite idea! And it's easier than taking candy from a baby, you say--not that I've tried that . . . well, not as yet."

The big man's attention was now transferred to his desk calendar. "Today is Thursday, February 25th. I'll make an appointment for you . . . mm March 1st . . . that's just four and a half days from now--you'll meet her in your first class this semester."

"How will I recognize her?" asked Paul, his curiosity aroused to the maximum.

"You can't miss her--she's a strange attractor," said the dean, in such a casual and offhand tone as to imply Paul would naturally understand exactly what that meant.

"Does that mean she has a strange magnetic power over men? Or is she strange? Or does she attract strange men?" asked Paul, who was beginning to rant and rave a little. This was due in part to his becoming distracted by some strange words on a plaque on the wall, which he could see just above the dean's left shoulder.

The inscription was written in very fine print that made it hard to read, but the portent of the words seemed so illogical that even a magnified view was unlikely to make it any more lucid.

Paul strained his eyes and his brain with the hope of making some kind of rational sense out of it. If he could believe his eyes, the top line read: "Lies are true". The second line read: "when red is blue". The third line was almost indecipherable and he could only hazard a guess as to the meaning of anything beyond the first two words, which were: "and litmus."

The dean began drumming his fingernails on the table impatiently. "Strange attractors are hidden patterns of order in disorder!" he said, tersely. "Now close the door . . . on your way out! Your time is up. Thank you very much . . . NEXT!"

Thursday night shopping is a tradition in Australia--or at least in its biggest city, Sydney. Paul’s three younger sisters had gone out shopping with his parents (he also had an older sister and brother, but they were both married and lived elsewhere). Paul was not in a shopping mood--his dream had seen to that--and so he found himself at home alone. He was sitting quietly and contemplating his future, though more in the manner of daydreaming than a really focussed thinking or planning.

What had transpired in his dream of the night before was now buried deep in his subconscious, but, although he was intellectually unaware of all aspects of it, his mood was nevertheless sufficiently up-beat to suggest some of the dream's portent had registered on a deeper level--the level of feelings. This fostered in him the subliminal expectation that something very good was coming his way, and it did so almost on the same level as music: music can make you feel things that words cannot, because music registers in another part of the brain.

Paul had lulled himself into an almost sedated state of reverie when, at about 8:30 p.m. he was startled half out of his skin by the shrill, metallic ringing of the telephone. Being as highly-strung as he was, the sudden noise almost caused him to jump out of his seat. Being the only person at home, he naturally didn't wait for someone else to get the phone but answered it promptly after the second ring.

"Hello," he said.

The man on the other end of the line was speaking in Dutch, and asked: "Can I please speak to Judge Van Zandt?"

Only Dutch people would ever use the title of 'Judge' to refer to Paul's father. Paul could understand Dutch but was no longer in the habit of speaking it, and, after a prolonged period of disuse, he could speak the language but haltingly; so he answered in English, knowing that most of the Dutch people he had met could speak English quite well.

"He's not home right now."

"Oh goodness, what a pity." said the stranger, in a nervously agitated tone of voice. "I was hoping to catch him at home. I don't have much time. Could you ask him please to call me if it isn't too much trouble. My number is 27 0847. Could you tell him, please, that I would be most grateful if he could provide me with background information concerning the pogrom."

"Pogrom!" thought Paul. "What the hell! A pogrom is an organized persecution of the Jews, which began in Tsarist Russia, or at least 'pogrom' is a Russian word. But my father couldn't possibly have anything to do with something like that. He's a perfect gentleman. This guy is talking double Dutch. He must be crazy."

In being led unexpectedly into such a strange topic of conversation, Paul was caught off guard. He felt confused, and his confusion was like a nagging irritation which began to grate on his nerves, and the Dutchman's nervously insistent tone of voice only made matters worse. As a consequence, Paul was becoming quite uncharacteristically irritated and even downright angry.

"What do you mean POGROM?" he asked, bluntly. "WHAT POGROM?"

"The pogrom of 1965," said the importuning Dutch voice by way of simple and instantaneous reply. "Would you please ask him if he would be so kind as to call me. It is most important I speak with him tonight."

"This is crazy," thought Paul, "but I'll convey the message anyway. It won't hurt to do that."

"Yes, Okay, sure," he said, thinking it perhaps prudent to humor this mad Dutchman. "He'll probably be home within an hour or two. I'll make sure he gets your message."

The Dutchman thanked him profusely and then hung up the phone.

Paul looked at the telephone number he had written down, looked at it with casual curiosity, and he noticed the prefix was a two-digit one. "That's inner city, central business district--that's the only area in Sydney that still uses them," he thought.

He then glanced at the rest of the number and noticed something so strange it virtually stunned him with all of the bone-shattering force of a pole ax. The telephone number was his date of birth exactly--in the non-American system of day/month/year: 27th of August 1947.

"This is so weird," he thought, with the hair of his neck standing on end in response to a sudden sensation of intense fear and foreboding, "but it must be some kind of joke . . . But who would do this? I hardly know any Dutch people at all, let alone someone who might play a practical joke on me.

Maybe it's just a crazy coincidence--even crazy coincidences have to happen sometimes. But what he was talking about has got to be all wrong in any case because there were no pogroms in 1965.

And it couldn't possibly have anything to do with me at all, for heaven's sake, or anything to do with my father. He was never in Russia. I have never hurt a fly."

Paul was readily inclined and quite able to conjure up worst-case scenarios as pertaining to himself and his life. He was a worrier by nature, and he was becoming increasingly worried now in thinking this matter through.

"Dates mean nothing. That girl at work, Mary, has the same date of birth too but the two of us are different as chalk and cheese. It's like astrology: it's nothing more than the egocentric theory of the solar system. Karen is a Taurus--just like Adolph Hitler--but the two of them are different as night and day.

And, wait a minute, what about all the people born on that same day who were called up to go to Vietnam--that was one of the winning lottery dates."

In pondering these many ins and outs until his family returned, Paul’s brain was almost at the stage of nervous overload. He was clearly in need of help and approached his father with that expectation, approached him immediately upon his return, thinking he would somehow be able to dispel the matter.

"Dad, some crazy Dutchman called and said he wanted to talk to you about the pogrom of 1965--as if there ever was such a thing."

"A journalist, I expect," said the Judge, casually.

"But there weren't any pogroms after the holocaust, surely?"

"Jews were expelled from Egypt in 1956--I don't know if that would be classed as a pogrom, but other minority groups are subject to pogroms too--the word can have a more general meaning.

Pogroms against the ethnic Chinese occur regularly throughout South East Asia. An especially big pogrom took place during a power struggle in Indonesia in 1965 and many thousands of ethnic Chinese were murdered.

This happened following an alleged, aborted Communist coup on September 30th. The evidence establishing this as an actual coup consisted of the murdered bodies of about six or eight army officers.

I find it highly implausible that a communist attempt to seize power would be limited to an effort as enfeebled as this--they would at least have attacked barracks, stolen guns and tanks, blown up buildings. But they did none of that.

I believe the number of dead officers was so small because General Suharto was the one who had them murdered. And, being his own men, it was understandable he would want to keep the death toll down to the minimum that might serve to give him a pretext to retaliate--not just against communists, but against all of the potential enemies and rivals, who might prevent him seizing power.

And many thousands of these were murdered too along with the ethnic Chinese; some say tens of thousands, some say hundreds of thousands, some say more than a million.

No one can prove that, because all evidence is suppressed in a dictatorship, so no one can go over there and start digging up the dead bodies--but it’s a question of motive. Suharto stood to gain by being promoted from major general to cleptocrat for life--which was the same position Sukarno had appointed himself to just two years earlier.

Such a promotion represents an increase in salary of not just millions but sheer billions, so it constitutes a motive of astronomical proportions.

The so-called Communist coup gave Suharto the freedom to use any and all means (including mass murder) without even earning the disapproval of the USA, because an enemy of Communism automatically becomes a friend of theirs. And it wouldn’t be right to insult such a good friend by subjecting them to scrutiny.

Developing countries are inclined to be dictatorships and cleptocracies. The reason I say this is not to point the sanctimonious finger of blame at them--the Dutch have done enough dirty deeds of their own, and those deeds get dirtier the further back you go in history.

I’m letting you know this to help explain the precarious position the ethnic Chinese occupy in Indonesia.

They are both a privileged class and a useful middle class; you see, this is a class problem too and not just an ethnic one. They are generally prudent with money; they know what to spend it on and when to save it. They have long-term goals and can live poor for many years while saving for their long-term betterment.

But they are generally not crooks. They might cut a few corners, do a little smuggling at times, but mostly they get ahead by working very hard. They think nothing of working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.

But, they don’t just work hard--they work smart. As a result, they are generally very successful--they only represent 6% of Indonesia’s population but they own 70% of the wealth, and this makes them the target of malicious envy. Without protection, they would be beaten up, robbed and murdered--it has always been like that.

The Sukarno government stole the people blind, stole them past the point of starvation; but, if they complained, they would be shot dead in the street, so malcontents preferred naturally to take the path of least resistance and vent their anger upon an unarmed and defenseless scapegoat."

Paul was becoming increasingly agitated and impatiently eager to say something:

"But we are middle class too and prudent with money--that is exactly what we are! You and mum scrimped and saved for ten years to get us out of Tattoo Town, but you were free to do that without the threat of pogroms."

"Well, there are other differences too, but, yes, of course, Australia is the lucky county; we have never had pogroms here and we probably never will."

"Well, of course," said Paul, who was still in a state of nervous agitation, "that is so obviously true. It would be crazy for me to ever worry about something like that. And I never would have either. Not in a million years! I would probably never even have thought about it except for this crazy telephone call and this phone number, which just freaks me out! Just take a look at this." He hands the piece of paper with the number written on it to his father.

"Good God! But this is remarkable! And yet it isn’t cause to worry: Just before I met your mother, I experienced a whole series of strange coincidences. None were as extreme as this, admittedly, but added together they were quite uncanny. I really believe this might herald a major life event for you. But it doesn’t have to be something bad. It could just as easily be something good."

"Would it have to have something to do with pogroms?" asked Paul, pensively.

"I don’t see how that could even be possible!" said the Judge, whose tone of voice conveyed a sense of disbelief powerful enough to be highly reassuring to Paul. "You really shouldn’t worry so much all the time. It isn’t right for someone as young as you to do that.

I’ve actually been meaning to say something to you about it. I know you are a very serious young man . . . and there is nothing wrong with that, but you must be careful not to focus upon the dark side of everything or you will become overly pessimistic about life in general, and there is really no need for that.

I believe this is a sign that you will soon meet your future wife, and that is surely something to celebrate. Think on the bright side. Expect good things, and life will take on a friendlier aspect for you."

Earlier that day Paul had been luxuriating in a vague yet marvelous mood, a subliminal mood of eager and imminent expectation. But his conscious focus now upon the potentially marvelous things that might soon be coming to him served to heighten that sense of expectation to the point where it electrified him. It electrified him for the rest of that night. But his intense euphoria was short-lived and gave way the following morning to acute pangs of anxiety and foreboding, which took the intellectualized form of an acerbic skepticism:

"Synchronicity, superstition, the zodiac," he thought, "it’s all bullshit! People are not that important! The stars are not placed in the heavens merely to supply us with information about our wretched little Lives. That is the egocentric theory of the solar system, which is even more stupid than Ptolemy’s geocentric theory."