24 Watcher's eye

Lynxville, Wisconsin. Autumn of 1983. We had to protect the Unnamable Nativity from being seen on the bluff, in the end, 26 dead boaters.

Twiddling dials, pulling out of Prairie Du Chien. Ted Bundy giving interviews, suggestions on what a killer might do to a victim. We met?

Shunted back to 1971, fresh from Attica, Culhane a consultant on an Al Pacino flick, me free to find out why he mind fucks me. Ingo Swann.

Ever since Stanford. Culhane kept rattling on about an NSA listening station near the Doomsday Hotel. He became part of my experiment.

He'd feed me beryllium toast, burnt and jellied, I'd nod like a happy and fatefull dog. Time dilated then expanded, I fell through myself.

At least once that I know of, I dropped dead at my desk and I could see me dead and them above, they made me climb into my corpse to 1972.

I was angered at not learning the exact date of my death, unless it was another fantasy (un)life. Culhane: Make a date...at the Watergate.

Some nights, when I stood on the 2nd floor balcony of Joy Motel, I thought of the desert, each had infinity recessing backgrounds, watched.

Trinity 1945 and the dry air rolling dense a deepsea wave pushing matchstick figures back like the hand of God. Atomic groundburst fist.

In the shelter, Kindred the Kid, age 9, eyes shining brightly, mouth agape as the mushroom cloud flexed its muscles, declaring its arrival.

Birth of the Atomic Age a deathbringer, a scientist named Johnson Dack the designated watcher, observing the blast from outside the shelter.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, everyone said in post accident interviews, even as men in white coats wrapped Dack's body in tin foil.

In case he was radioactive, the foil would reflect the harmful rays and hold them inside what remained of his body, semi-vaporized, toast.

Loading him into an ambulance as Kindred slipped behind a row of black Buicks and watched, his father obliviously accepting congratulations.

Then the two government men moving in, snakes on a mouse, ruthlessly incapacitating the ambulance driver, putting Dack into a white truck.

Kindred creeping close enough to see them go at the body with pincers, knives, screwdrivers, pliers, fingers, teeth, eyes gleaming, alight.

They removed his right eye and held it aloft, murmuring incantations about the image burned into the retina, a billowing smoky gray shroom.

The sudden flurry of excitement as they realized that the shroom was shaped like the Virgin Mary, the glass jar, hands on service revolvers.

Kindred the Kid hiding under a Buick as the G-Men got into their vehicle and sat, engine idling, waiting for... what? For Kindred the Elder.

Kindred's father calling his son to hit the road to LA, interviews beckoning, a famous scientist triumphant. Rolling out, followed by G-Men.

And two hours later, after the ambush, after Kindred the Kid had dealt death with the shotgun to rescue his father, after all of that, then.

Kindred the Kid with the radio up, Sinatra, sailing west into a burnt orange sky, glass jar on the passenger seat, the Watcher's eye inside.

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