The Castle


"Just close your eyes, sir, please," I said. I was a little nervous, hypnotizing the greatest warrior in time and space.
"Fart blossom?" He looked beseechingly at Rove, but the fat man just farted and shook his head.
"We've got to find a way out of this mother of all wars," he said. "Just go back and get the princess."
I shifted uncomfortably. "What Princess?" I asked, trying to sound like it was an innocuous question, like "Do you have a history of digestive trouble?" He grinned and shot one of those silent, deadly vipers that can knock a cat out off a window ledge. "Just get the princess on the phone, Svenghali."

"Why do I need to close my eyes to see the Princess?" the President asked. He was getting whiny. Two secret service agents shrugged and looked at me like, "Hey, you're the doctor."

"Well, Mr. President," I began, " ... to get back to the past you have to get back into your body, first, and the immediate senses are touch and hearing ... and smell, of course, but that sense is rather over stimulated at the moment. So you hear the sound of my voice, and you feel my thumbs pressing into the triggers of the mid trapezius, commonly known as Merkel points. That's right, you just quit fighting against gravity and imagine you're feeling that steel rod in your spine turn into a real, live snake. That's right, you can shake it once or twice. As the song says, ain't nobody's business what you do."

Cheney and Rove exchanged a dark look and I quickly added, "Even though, it's your business what anybody else is doing, because you're the decider. Now that your eyes are closed, you can rest and just feel the Merkel points, yes, doesn't that feel good, Chancellor? In the visual sense you always have things in progress, and a line of impending action rising from cause and leading to effect. You can abstract outside yourself, you can strategize ... "

"Karl knows how to make the democrats be the ones to lose the war!" he suddenly enthused, and I had to start the induction over, instructing him to release the facial muscles, feel his chest rise and fall with his breath, and pretend his muscles were melting and flowing away like water ...

"I'll wet the carpet."

Actually it took several attempts before he finally began to show signs of going into trance. "And as you come back to your body you begin to get in touch with your feelings, knowing that other people have the same feelings, and that you can share feelings and feel love with one another ...

"I don't have feelings. What are we? Women?"

"Just close your eyes," Cheney grumbled. The eyelids dropped like falling leaves, drifting down as the eyeballs rolled back and stared up into the cortex. A projector kicked to life behind his sightless eyes, one that runs film through a bright light focused on a screen. The music was a little shaky at first, and so were the titles, but the President was beginning to relax back, away from the screen, back into the recesses of his cellular life, and death.

"Nothing remains," I said. He began to weep, which was okay because the suggestion was that nothing remains of what was structuring his life's story, and that he was now an object in space, and nothing else. "I'm on a mission from God," he said. "Everybody's counting on me. What am I going to tell them if ..."

"It's too awful to contemplate," I said.

That calmed him down, which was okay because the suggestion was to not go there. "Look back into the past," I said. "What do you see?"

"A castle," he said. He didn't say it right away, which was how I knew the trance was taking hold. There was a long pause and I could see him change time, from the outer time to theta waves.

"Can you describe the castle?"

"It's got turrets and a moat, and a drawbridge, and it's up on top of a hill."

"Where is it do you think? Scotland? England? France?"

"Disneyland."

"Yes. Fantasyland. You're going to live in the castle?"

"I'm going to live in the castle." He sounded almost gentle, now, like a child saying his prayers.

"You go ahead into the castle, and while you explore the castle you may hear me talking to Mr. Rove, or Mr. Cheney, or one of the others here, but you will hear this as background sounds, from people who are going about their business in the economy of the castle."

"Shoemakers."

"Yes, and tailors and soldiers and ..."

His face broke into a radiant smile. "Soldiers!"

"Don't go there," Cheney growled.

"Was that my dick?"

"Yes, and your fart blossom, you hear them talking somewhere outside the window of your tower, Mr. President, as you explore the rooms of your castle. Have you found anything really fun?"

"Yes!"

"And what is it?"

"It's the dungeon. There's the stretchy man."

"Yes, the stretchy man. What makes him the stretchy man?"

"Rack."

"Ah, yes. Putting him on the rack."

"I have to win this war."

"How do you win a war against the people of Iraq?"

He paused and cocked his head. "Iraq?"

"That's just a proxy war," Rove said. "We have to look ahead to the final conflict."

"You mean, Armageddon?"

There was a pause and one of the Secret Service agents snickered. Then he was embarrassed and stood tall, composing his face into a no nonsense mask. Rove said, "We're not a bunch of idiots, we're talking the final confrontation with the liberals."

"If we don't fight them in San Francisco we'll have to fight them in Mississippi," Cheney said.

So this was it; the mother of all wars was the war between a tiny percentage of the population which controls most of the wealth, and everybody else; except it's not that bad because, having the money, they can spend it when they need to, dropping it like fire retardant on revolution, or crates of cash on Iraq.

"The Princess!" It was a child's voice coming from the man. Everything froze. Rove gestured with his right hand like he was inviting me through a doorway.

"You've found her," I said. "What does she look like?"

"Ann."

"Princess Anne?"

"Coulter."

"Oh, I see. That's why you like the dungeon."

"George is a bad boy. He needs a spanking."

"Why does he need a spanking?"

"He makes a surge in his troopers."

"Yes, but he makes it for the greater good, doesn't he?"

"He makes the democrats lose the war."

"What would winning the war look like?"

He pursed his lips and looked worried. "My castle," he said. "I'm the decider."

"Yes, you're the decider in your castle, but your castle is in Fantasyland, not in Iraq."

"Shut up," Cheney growled. "Just find out about the Princess. Is she wearing a carnation or a gardenia?"

"It's white."

"Gardenia!" Rove shouted, and an aide rushed to the telephone.

"Put everything on the Gators," he barked. "It's a deep south kind of dream."

Posted: Tue - January 9, 2007 at 03:41 PM