Officer Navarro! Sorry I had to choose you in this capacity “but.” Do you think I get so thrilled being the only one anti-beaming on this planet literally until my ears are smoking? AND I smell my hair burning? AND I have been exhausting even further in the task on top of that, which has me screaming in the woods until you can feel the sap going whop-whop-whop inside of all trees, which is to sort out screwed up acid nonsense of those years back from true visions made available after activating up to 85% brain capacity in late February 1985.
Then at 4:14 PM on March 12 I moved behind zinc-zirconium-not-to-be-revealed-compounds protecting me in this hill, and God have mercy but the struggle is just exchanged for the next one, which is exhausting me further as I say, to separate the true from the false. Now at last I can make the spectacular announcement (please broadcast over police frequency in designated code remember always) ten days and two hours ago on July 29, 1990, I boxed in black mental powers ALL THOUGHTS, VISIONS, MESSAGES, HALLUCINATIONS that I received of any kind at any time before 4:14 March 12 1985 and will hold it in unused percent of brain capacity, where it can never do harm to our fragile loving spirits on this earth again. I would say Halleluah but dear people of the planet the tears are falling down like rain, that struggle I am sorry to say is just a minor one compared to the energy-drain unless I can network up with others of high brain capacity. Sometimes I wish I was dead. Is this hill preventing anything and everything from getting out, just like its compounds protect me from the beams? Therefore please in addition to aforementioned broadcast send out in designated code on police frequency the following message: ALL OF INCREASED CAPACITY NETWORK UP THE TERRIBLE STRUGGLE BEGINS ON JANUARY 15, 1991 BUT GOD IS WITH US. Repeat daily.
P.S. Fear not, it’s all for the best.
AUG 8 IN THE PM
PS: Now I am as mad as shit kicking in Hell, buddy boy. Not at you, but I forgot what’s going on! Networking is for the purpose of anti-beaming radar domes. But I forgot to stress you must get an injunction to stop the beams at the source so that those of us with 75% brain capacity or higher (I changed the number due to the enormous danger of the situation bearing down on planet earth like an enormous asteroid, planet-size…). Could be as many as 2000 of those. If we are free from anti-beam duties and terrible energy-drain we can heal the sick, teach others to activate up to high capacity—all within ten seconds of shut-off on those radars. Please read the Bible.
Sincerely.
P.S. Something important, a woman of surprising disguise was sent to mentally attempt intercourse with me, alieas or alien name Miran, code unknown, origin unknown, on a date not to be revealed. Real name Yvonne. May still be in area. Current alieas or alien name unknown. In my loneliness result of protection from radar, preventing me from connecting mentally, zinc-zirconium compounds and others not to be revealed basically a blessing and a curse, I don’t know. But I’m getting vibes that she’s still in area. Still practicing witchcraft.
AUG 9
I believe there is now a situation I can’t straighten out. I am attempting to work on it mentally but it’s torture, I think the suffering and exhaustion may be letting in some laser rays or things I can’t deal with, only lie down and let them cut me up in AGONY, TOTAL AGONY. This torment has got me about ready to JOIN THE ARMY. My brother came down behind this hill. He was implanted long ago, it’s not his fault. But he speaks in code. Please as your HIGHEST PRIORITY interview with recording device and decode by reverse playback over police frequency at designated code. Bible does not work to decode this one, but don’t let that stop you from reading the Bible and prayers on your lips. WHAT CAN I SAY. Too bad, you were chosen? I know, I know. Just all will be well and fear not, that is all.
PS I have mentally boxed in a black box all messages, thoughts, hallucinations from before March 12, 1985. But the information that my brother was implanted (Nelson Fairchild, Jr.) comes from both eras of from before said date and also SINCE then. So don’t be confused.
Sincerely, W. Fairchild
AUG 10 IN THE PM
Dear Sir
What is really fooling them is completely organic surroundings around here. They figure the beams have to penetrate. They forgot two things: zinc, zirconium compounds, and certain compounds, mainly trace elements not to be revealed, not even to you. (not your fault, it’s all mental, you’re not activated up yet) Then there is the question of floorboards in my house, which started out organic but absorbed beams in Pt. Arena (alieas, alien) bowly alley, reversing molecular structure to nonOrganic radarium. This keeps anything from getting up from under. I don’t care if they tap in mentally on you and get that one, there’s nothing they can do really.
PS. The Bible is mistranslated but all you have to do is touch it. It’s still there, gets decoded even on the way to your head. God’s power. Ultimately we are safe. Just HANG IN THERE BUDDY. You’re all I’ve got, your mission the fate of planet. But don’t get nervous.
P.S. If it gets bad go inside Pt. Arena (alieas, alien) movie theater. That has been absorbing rays a long time. Molecular structure of organic materials reversed to make radarium. Bring others, espec. women and children, if DIAMOND GRIDS or anything like lasers appear in the sky.
PS. Advise you to pick out survivors in advance of January 15, 1991, as per coded messages coming fast and furious. For some its just in one ear and out the other, but for you, pick who you want and shelter in Pt. Arena (alieas, alien) movie theater. I forgot to tell you that if DIAMOND GRIDS or laserlike things appear in the sky it’s probably too bad. Your fried. So be alert and get in there 1/14/91. How do you like this weather we’re having? Very nice. All peace is available in this eternal present.
Sincerely, W. Fairchild
PS.—This is being read by satellite and analyzed at the Pentagon by CIA, FBI, exc. I don’t code it because they just put it in their decoders anyway. If we remain simple and true they cannot help but defeat themselves. UNSCRUPULOUS, SATANIC, INSANE, EVIL. There’s no fighting that. Remain simple and true. Fear not. Resist not evil. All will be well. Infinite love. God says so. STOP THE RADAR. God says so.
W. Fairchild
AUG 11—
Dear Sir
Up till now I have been too tired anti-beaming to explain about implants. It’s hard to explain. How did they get even the idea of a third lifeform? How did they discover processes for structural disintegration-reintegration? Was it through study of RADARIUM post-WWII? A lot of radarium turned up then. But in fact I cannot use my powers to see behind this hill protecting me by GOD’S STAR-BURSTING GRACE into their dastardly minds to tell you. Anyway—
Anyway they continue in pentagon, CIA, FBI, exc. (some presidents know, most don’t, and others get assassinated) to continue to pose nuclear threat as a ruse. Had you fooled, huh?
Third lifeform SPERMS destroy and reintegrate inside the womb (don’t worry, this doesn’t happen every day, it costs 17–19 trillion U/S money for each attempt, which is successful one in a million. That’s why my brother may be one of the only ones and may explain why I’m involved. Or were we just chosen? Like you?) (Again I can’t see.) When the implant population reaches critical mass, LOOK OUT. But look at me. Do I look worried? Sometimes I’m not sure if I should be taped, reverse-played over police frequency at designated code. Oh God in Heaven I hope and pray please NO! But if you suspect me at all then you must do so in the name of all that is holy and spiritual and standing between our human hearts and the complete total DESTRUCTION OF THE UNIVERSE. Take the left turn where there used to be a picture of a boat. The sign still says HILD and the rest is broke off. 2mi down dirt rd. to cabin with RADARIUM floors. Peace and tranquillity all your blessed days.
AUG 11 (CONT. LATER LATER
All will be well. The goodness that you feel is not God’s goodness, it is actually God. So you are feeling God right now. Thanking you for your broadcasts, which I cannot pick up mentally living now since 1985 (March 12, 4:14 PM) under protection of subteranean compounds in this hill, mostly zinc, zirc
onium-compounds, and others mostly trace elements (not to be revealed). I have been resting mentally. Peace in the valley. Spirits, deer, hilarious rodents with a small capacity but telepathic and humorous, squirrels, woodchucks, chimpmunks, all warming in the sun. What a pitiful sharp joke it is because my very protection cuts me off in loneliness. But it must be that the networking has begun, the miracle is at hand, I just wish I could lead the way. But it’s my fate, IMPRISONED, MISUNDERSTOOD, FORGOTTEN, half the time I’m screaming until the trees fall over and some other times I cry until the TEARS MAKE MUD AROUND MY FEET. Now possibly soon from happiness, lonely happiness but happiness. Thank you for your broadcasts, Officer Navarro! I am sorry I chose you but now you know. All was always going to be well.
All was always going to be well.
Sincerely. W. Fairchild
I nevitable” and “dreaded”…“Bloodshrinking”…What other words describe our visits with our mothers and fathers? How I look forward to visiting their graves.
Each Monday Barron’s financial weekly came in at the Anchor Bay store. I usually delayed till Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday, but in the months since he’d taken to his bed I had never completely avoided picking it up for my father and paying him this horrible regular visit.
I drove over directly from the store that afternoon, Tuesday, September 4, a week after I’d left Winona’s and six days after Winona’s return—the day Carl Van Ness would show us all what he was made of. We’ll see if our eyes are open. Maybe I believed his note. Maybe I was looking for an alibi for murder. But few folks hereabouts would imagine Nelson Fairchild, Sr., as an alibi for anything.
I’d come from an unhappy interview with Clarence—vaguely unhappy, not violently. Yes, he’d come back to town and found me and I’d told him about Harry Lally’s henchmen. He didn’t thump me—in fact he raised my spirits, but not before making it clear that he hadn’t cultivated the marijuana just to ransom me from my fate, which he called “the just punishment of a fuck-up.” I had a little bit of hope, just a feeling, that he wouldn’t abandon me to those killers. He wanted time to ponder this mess, but he didn’t know how to say, “Let me think.” He was a doer, not a thinker.
Oh well, the day had been a long one, that was all—Melissa resonating strangely, then giving me the horrible news that my pursuers were back on the scene, and after that I’m afraid I told her too much. Also possibly we had Carl Van Ness bumping up on the horizon, and because I thought he might already be in town I’d gone to Winona’s ranch while she was out and—done something; a little thing I’d probably later regret. Could thirty minutes with Father make the day any longer?
The old man lived north of Gualala, on an acre looking out at the Pacific from the highway’s west side. Two stories, three bedrooms, a two-car garage and a workshop, like the home of almost every other sixty-two-year-old person in Mendocino County.
The door from the garage stood open, so I knocked while stepping through it into the kitchen, and Donna Winslow asked me if I would like some tea.
“Thank you, no,” I said, “but what about a glass of wine?”
I generally found Donna here in the wifely regions, with her stretch pants and long-sleeved yellow dish gloves and her failure to connect, in certain important ways, with her surroundings. Willful failure. Cheaper by a long shot than tranquilizers. But it made her seem a little scary, even if her face was pale and kind. Eva Braun might have turned out like that. “We’ve got some open,” she said of the wine, “is that okay?”
“Open’s fine. Poured is better.”
Father had refused to let her move in before the stroke and after that had probably just failed to prevent her. I thought it was fine that she lived here. Particularly I admired her ability to survive without cheap conversation. She never bothered me with that stuff.
I stood there sipping red table wine from a too-small glass while she climbed the stairs to tell him the elder son had turned up with his Barron’s. I don’t just bring it here each week; I also read it to him. It is the strangest thing I do.
I heard Donna’s voice from above. But not his. Maybe he’d snuffed it, and I’d be spared.
His partner, Willis Winslow, had suffered a run of strokes and been laid up for months when my father started sleeping with his wife. The story they tell now is that Father hefted Donna across his shoulders and carried her upstairs to the master bedroom one night right out from under Willis Winslow’s helpless gaze, and had her every night after that while Winslow wasted away in a downstairs room, listening.
Now Father lies in bed as Willis Winslow once did, attended by the same woman. She’s too old, I would imagine, to be cuckolding him. But I hope she is.
And the same woman he carried up the stairs is coming down now alone.
“He’s kind of dozing, Nelson.”
“Should I disappear?”
“No, he said to come on up. Then he drifted off.”
“I’ll come back later.”
“You could go up and just give him the paper, maybe.”
“Okay,” I said forlornly.
“You want a refill?”
“I’ll take the bottle.”
She’d done a tremendous job on the house, over which formerly his office had run amok, inroaded generously by his shop. She’d pushed everything back, all the tools and ropes and greasy broken automotive parts and fatly unrolling blueprints and escaped and antique correspondence. His rusty file cabinets had disappeared, all but one, the drawers of which she managed to keep closed and the top of which was free of anything but two white daisies in a vase. In his living room she’d put up flowery curtains that matched the Pacific, also hangings of woven rope from Mexico, and, on the walls of the staircase, which I climbed now, but slower and slower, my ankles in a sense shattered, dragging the devices he’d laid years ago to trap his children—let me never reach the top!—she’d nailed up pictures bright as windows.
Don’t ask me why I’m here. Because of a sickly fascination, I guess, but that’s only one of the many feelings that stab at me now as I find him asleep in his small room at the top of the stairs. There he lies, out of it. And I’m as shocked as ever.
He once threatened to kill a man, a perfectly unsuspecting tourist, when he found this stranger sitting in his accustomed chair in the barroom of the Gualala Hotel. He’s famous for having decked a county commissioner at a meeting of the Point Arena town council; also he assaulted the high school basketball coach right on the street when that fine citizen started dating our mother, and although that contest went against my father—he ended up flat on his ass—the coach quit calling, and Mom never had another date in these parts. All night once, with a shotgun across his knees and a two-gallon jug of gasoline beside him on the floor of his bulldozer, he waited quietly in his equipment lot—this a great many years ago now—to surprise whoever had been thieving from his construction supplies. Father did nothing when the man pulled up under the nearby trees in his pickup truck, he sat like stone while the man peeled away the tool-shed’s padlock with a crowbar, waited until he’d gone inside before climbing down from his perch up in the monstrous vehicle. When the bandit tiptoed out of the shed with his arms full of tools, my father paralyzed him with the touch of the shotgun’s barrel to his throat, and soaked him with the gas, all two gallons of it, pouring it down over his head. “I’ll give you ten seconds’ head start,” he promised the man while producing his Zippo lighter. They both leapt into their pickup trucks, and Nelson Fairchild, Sr., hounded his victim all the way to the outskirts of Ukiah, where the poor burglar took himself, his skin eaten by the gasoline, to the hospital emergency services. Later he sued for thousands. My father would have had to pay him, too, if the man’s lawyers hadn’t bungled it. Father’s never been sneaky when it comes to revenge. He’s rumored to have had people murdered, but I doubt it. I think he’d have done the killing himself, openly, publicly if possible, and then brazened it out in court surrounded by unbeatable attorneys.
Always the same i
mage arises when I think of him—a face quivering on the border between irony and disgust—so I think of him as always the same. Not till recent months had I ever seen him with his eyes closed. But he slept a lot these days. There was no irony now in his face, just a bland, pasty innocence ratified by a cowlick. They’d moved in one of those hospital beds that rise and flatten with a button—they’d made a puppet out of him, even if he controlled, to a degree, his own strings.
I wasn’t about to wake him. Maybe he needed his sleep. Anyway just getting to his room had licked me. I was beat, might as well have swum up here through blood. I poured my glass full and raised the window just a handsbreadth and inhaled. Without the fog to dilute it, the sunshine put everything on a slow bake, but this near the shore the air felt cool and smelled of voyages. Faint thunder drifted up this way, the flailings and snoring of the Pacific. It came through the window and woke my father.
He opened his eyes. He spoke immediately: “Let’s make every little thing illegal, and put all of ourselves in prison.”
“Hey, dig it, why not?”
“I’d like to get the sombitches”—he pushed himself up on his elbows, forgetting his automatic bed—“I’d like to get the sombitches down under my boot for just ten minutes, and then I’d stomp an explanation out of their sorry faces. Just why is it that a motel, a good aesthetic-looking structure designed by any hippie or any faggot, they can choose whoever they want, cannot rest by the edge of the cliff, a badly needed motel? When rooms are up around two hundred dollars a night on this coast? So the sea can remain beautiful, they say. Beautiful with bars across it. Beautiful if you can pay two hundred dollars a night and wait a month for the reservation. Don’t they realize where beauty is? Do you happen to realize where yourself?”