The French Sewer

      Hilter's mother, feeling unusually fit one morning, put on her clogs and pedal pushers and went for an outing. Pedaling her little canvas-canopied car all the way to Sapodilla Park, she planned to attend the dedication of a newly-built Oswaldian temple. An additional part of the scheduled festivities was a musical performance by the Chatterjee Brothers, featuring vocals by the flum soloist, Amanda Futch Sinatra.
      Also in attendance was one of the week's presidential candidates, Red Cane, noted Pisstown vivisectionist. An honor guard of plume-hatted Oswaldians drew up to see Mr. Cane lay the cornerstone of their new temple. They watched him smooth the first applications of mortar with a silver trowel.
      Later, during a Chatterjee take-five, Hilter's mother signed up for a guided tour of the new temple. Round, as almost all Oswaldian temples were, it consisted of a simple circular walkway around Oswald Man's catafalque. One always had to keep moving, never looking too long at the calcified corpse that swam alluringly in a pool of light falling from the domed, glass roof.
      An Oswaldian choir stood near the catafalque, reciting Oswald's legendary Last List again and again, in hypnotically monotonous voices: "Typing ... crystal for watch ... job ... bank account ... mail ... job ... haircut ... library ... plug for radio ... haircut...."
      Amid this distraction, Hilter's mother felt something underfoot, felt it crush beneath her clog. She slipped and fell to the floor. Feeling a sharp pain in the hip, she looked up for help, but saw what no settler ever hoped to see, an angry officer rushing toward her.
      "You're going to be cited for this!"
      She turned over her clog and looked at the heel, to which was stuck the flattened, slimy remains of a slug. "For this?"
      "Exactly, you sag-breasted old cow. You've stepped on one of the temple slugs.... Do you have a Waiver?"
      "I do." She took it from her handbag and gave it to the officer.
      "What do you take me for, a goon? This is ancient, issued during the Ratt administration. Now, completely bogus. Moreover, it's a punishable offense just to have an out-of-date Waiver in your possession."
      "So sorry. So hard to keep up. Must we get a new one every time a new president takes office. We'll be spending the rest of our lives standing in lines."
      "Your name, please, you insolent, ugly old whore."
      "Agnes Hilter."
      The officer took a step backward. "The Agnes Hilter, inventor of edible money?
      "Yes. That's me."
      "All the more reason to punish you, puffgut. My own father choked to death eating your currency. Thousands of us did."
      "My sincerest regrets, but I can't be held responsible for that, can I?"
      "And just why not? If you were struck by an arrow, which would you blame, the archer or the arrow?"
      "The archer, of course.
      "Exactment! So if you think for a moment you're getting away with this abomination, think again. What, pray tell, makes your life more lofty than that poor mollusk you've snuffed like a guttering candle?"
      "It was unavoidable. Accidents happen ... in the course of events."
      Others on the tour, mostly settlers, had gathered around to watch the altercation in silence, as if it were a little show, a dramatte.
      The officer, consulting a list of new and revised ordinances, said, "Here we are ... 'inattentive walking in a temple.' You'll do a year at Valdosta."

      On boarding the Noctule for the two-day trip to Valdosta, Ola felt wretched almost at once. Something in the air was so disagreeable it made her spit up even though her stomach was empty. In the prisoners' dormitory the odor was worse than anywhere else, more severe than in the French Sewer, where the olefactories adjusted in time. Here, there was no adjustment. The nostrils were in constant rebellion, the stomach always cramped.
      "Rats, what's that stink?" asked the bald, surgically deformed woman in the next bunk.
      "Cadaverine," was Ola's reply.
      A horse's eye, unblinking, looked at Ola from the woman's forehead.
      "Arful, ain't it? That smell." Her gaze was depthless, lending it incorrectly the impression of wisdom. The original eyes had been removed, the sockets sewn shut. "Makes you feel dead every time you breathe."
      "Totally negativo," Ola said.
      "They got 'em a whole load 'o necronauts on board. Got 'em stored in the cargo bay right below where we're s'posed to sleep. Now, if that don't make me madder than a dog-bit bog rat.
      An officer entered the dormitory with a wooden clacker, then paced up and down the aisles making an ear-splitting racket. "Breakfast is being served in the refectory. Form lines and make for there immediately ... unless you want your starch to harden before you eat it."
      In the refectory, Ola spotted Agnes Hilter sitting with a grotesquely swollen, three-eyed man she didn't know. "Mrs. Hilter," she said. "So good to see you."
      The three-eyed man introduced himself in a friendly and cordial manner. "Hello, ladies. I'm Fredo, Fredo Muller."
      "Please, dear," said Mrs. Hilter, "sit with us. Who's your friend?"
      "I'm Lola, from Oaken Homer," said the horse-eyed woman. "I love that eye-thing you've got going there, Fredo."
      "Oh, yes. Isn't it wonderful. Triple-sightedness. A delight to have. I'm completely satisfied. And, say, yours isn't anything to be ashamed of, either. What is it? Cow?"
      "No, horse. It sees things in a pretty simple way, you know, but it's a lot of fun. Makes me feel rambunctious sometimes. All I want to do is run around a pasture and whinny."
      Ola asked Lola what crime she was going to Valdosta for.
      "Eatin' stuffed mud duck on Mummy Day. Hell, if'n you cain't read, how're you s'posed to know the laws?"
      "And you, Mrs. Hilter? What sort of horrible crime did you commit?"
      "Stepped on a temple slug and nearly broke my sacrum."
      Lola said, "I got me three months in the French Sewer for passing gas in a temple."
      "Awful. Just awful." Fredo asked Ola about her crimes.
      "Killing a German ... in the French sewer. What about you, Fredo?"
      "Sexing in public. This is my third trip. The other two were escaping from a turpentine camp, and keeping bog rats in my home. Frankly, I'd rather be at Valdosta than any place I can think of."
      "So I've heard," said Mrs. Hilter.
      "Everyone has a small cabin in the woods. Lovely streams, mountain vistas. All necessities supplied. The skies are always clear, the weather always clement."
      "All true," said Fredo. "Everyone has a job to do. A self-sustaining little community of souls.... Just pray they don't assign you necronaut-cleansing duty. You have to wash them, rub them with mummy oil, tell them stories, teach them the realities of 'living' with no frame of reference. Worse, you have to listen to them complain eternally about the frosty discomforts of death."
      "They say," Ola said, "that fuel is plentiful in the afterworld, but distances are great. I read that in The Age of Oswald."
      "Now, If I could read, there's a book I would," said Lola, blinking a copious tear from the horse's eye.
      The food cart rolled by as prisoners ladeled starch into their bowls, topping that with a few sticks of high bologna. When the cart went too fast, some prisoners got no helping at all. When it slowed down, greedy eaters took two or three times the normal serving. Why the officer insisted on this unfair, random pace, was the subject of much under-the-breath discussion at the tables.
      "I do hope I get some," Ola said. "I'm starving."
      "I'm sick of starch and bologna," Fredo sighed, after serving himself only a half bowl and waiting for the flum to pedal out of earshot. "They've got no imagination when it comes to food. When Michael Ratt died, I thought there would be policy changes, improvements."
      The officer in charge of the refectory was making rounds, fingering a billy bat and toting a shoulder bag full of two-inch-long cockleburrs, looking hard for any offense to punish.
      "Officer! Officer! Over here!" It was a prisoner sitting near Fredo. "This man was complaining about the food. I heard him. He said, 'I'm sick of all this starch and bologna.' He said you have no imagination when it comes to the culinary arts. What does he want, stuffed mud duck at every meal? I think he should be punished. Right here and now."
      The officer wasted no time in getting to Fredo, climbing over tables, running up and down the aisles between tables. "What's the trouble here?"
      "No trouble," Ola said.
      The tattle-tale piped up again. "That one. Complaining about the starch and bologna. What nerve."
      The officer reached into a pouch and withdrew a cocklebur. "Stand up, you ingrate."
      "This is my third trip, officer. My third sentence. Mind you, all the charges were spurious. I was never guilty once. Surely, taking that into consideration, you can see your way to overlook a moment of carping."
      "Please, officer," Ola pleaded, "spare him this. Not in front of all these prisoners."
      Her intreaty was ignored. "Stand up, Mr. Complainer!"
      "Oh, boy," said the delighted tattle-tale. "This'll be good."
      "Take down those pants. Take down those drawers."
      Fredo was in tears. "Not the cocklebur, please."
      "Bend over, you. Spread the cheeks."
      Doing so, looking all the while at the huge cocklebur, he was almost in a faint. "Damnation," he muttered. "If I only had a waiver.
      The officer calmed, breaking into a smile. "A waiver? You want a waiver? I have whole pocket full."
      "You'll give me a waiver?"
      "Sell is the word. Sell."
      "How much?"
      "One zil-guida should get you one."
      "Jumping Jesus, that's beyond me. I don't have the means."
      "Good enough, then." The officer placed the tip of the cocklebur against Fredo's anus and began pushing it with his billy bat. "I don't want to hear any whining, either."
      "Wait! Wait!" It was Mrs. Hilter's urgent voice. "I'll pay. I'll pay."
      Fredo gladly hitched up his trousers. "Thank you, kind lady. Thank you."
      "It's nothing," said Hilter. "What's a zil to a rich woman like me? You could be my son."
      "Consider yourself a lucky man." The officer handed Fredo a waiver, then took the zil from Hilter and ate it. "Now, sit down and eat your starch, you obsequious lout, you. And no more complaining.... Did I mention, by the way, that a waiver is good for one offense only?"
      "No, actually."
      "And I'll always be watching you. Don't ever rest easy, my good man."
      Fredo sat down and lapped at his starch like a hungry dog.
      Ola, emboldened by a strain of mettle that ran through the Harp line like a stream through a valley, spoke out. "Sir? May I ask a question ... why must you heap these indignities upon us on every occasion?"
      The officer allowed a few moments of contemplation before giving an answer. "Why not?"

      The next evening, prisoners were allowed a generous period for toileting. They were told to undress in front of their bunks, that their clothes would be laundered while they toileted, and were marched into the public room. Before entering, each was given a handful of pre-edible paper for wiping and a small cake of caustic soda soap. A single bucket of depilatory had to be shared by dozens of prisoners.
      "Remember two things, please," said the officer-in-charge as prisoners went about their business. "One--every single hair must be removed. You will be inspected very closely. You come to Valdosta the same way come to life--without raiment, without preconception, without worms, and without hair. And let me remind you again, of what the new president has been saying till he's blue in the face--fight worms for a worm free world. So when your stool is in the pan, check it for movement, for tiny, almost unnoticeable encapsulations, for anything suspicious. If you see something, call me over for a look." The officer then went from prisoner to prisoner, poking through stool with a wooden stick, sometimes raising the pan for a long, thoughtful, diagnostic sniff.
      Fredo and Mrs. Hilter, squatting side by side over their pans, conversed as best they could between grunts, gasps, strainings and sighs of relief.
      "My dear son, it's so nice to see you, even under these dreary circumstances," she said.
      "Excuse me, Mrs. Hilter, but my thought is, my impression is, my feeling is, I'm not your son."
      "Oh, my. Now that I look, I see you're not. I suppose its eyeworms.
      "Could be," said Fredo. "They say they'll overtake a person's vision very quietly, on cat's feet." He lifted one buttock a little and gave a push. Hearing the flop of his stool in the pan, he wiped, then knelt to examine it. He saw, to his dismay, a small, white worm, hair-thin, wound in a knot and struggling to untie itself. "Oh, damnit," he said. "I've got them.... Officer? Over here!"
      "Just a moment. Just a moment. Can't you see I've got my hands full?"
      "Sorry, sir."
      When it came time for Fredo's inspection, the officer plucked the worm away from the stool with the end of the stick, then held it up for all to see. "Attention, everyone! Attention! Look at this. This is the species you should all be looking for--tubularia Mobii--the memory worm. It has two sides, as you can see, but only one surface."