The Camel & the Eye of the Needle

He whipped around to where the voice had come from. The heavy man and his table were tucked in a crook of shadows. A nearby lamp threw an oblique light on the side of his face. He seemed the apparition of a Civil War dead.

It’s not like he was a prolific bullshitter by nature; plagiarizing just came easy to him. People thought he was good at it. And they would rather pay him to bullshit than expend the mental energy involved in coming up with an answer for themselves.

A Where Are They Now montage of the Dunn-Prince family might go something like this: slow pan across a dappled quadrangle, whitely crusted with frost. Sun breaking onto veined ivy, dreadlocks of it, scaling a red-brick building—where we now approach a gothic half-oval window, the muddled quality of the glass dissolving as our perspective osmotically insinuates itself to the other side, settling on a tall, assertive woman with hair like burnt agave nectar...

You’re in a car. You’re in command. Your hand is on the steering wheel. The fields are blowing before you.

He read about Vermelho’s conquests in the Hindquarters; the esoteric Flying Sand style of the Brothers Du; the seedy underworld of smugglers, gauchos, and vigilantes who haunted the border region of Brazil Self-Governing Principate and the Republic Formerly Known as Argentina;

The last time Kaylee Prince ever saw anyone about a disability or a deficiency was the ninth of November, 2010, inside a taupe, taupe room staged with a surfeit of Mirós, a ticket in her hand. “Is this how this works?”

She was the kind of mother who let you watch R-rated movies at indefensible ages. She was culturally Catholic—though non-proselyte—and protested few of Catholicism’s tenets. She was more of a lunch-line Catholic, Jacquelyn was, picking and choosing which tenets to go with [see Kaylee, a squeaky three years old, chewing a slimy white balloon she found in Mommy’s and Daddy’s bedside wastebasket]. Those that she did choose, she clung to with Vatican zeal. All Angelica’s and John’s friends liked her (Mary Louisa was probably reading at the given time). She was the kind of hip, religiously-adherent and community-respected mother who could sashay with a rosary and crucifix in the a.m. and tear donuts through a cul-de-sac in the penguinine minivan come midnight, to the mouthwatering of eighth-grade John’s friends, riding in the back, hootin’ and hollerin’ about how cool Mrs. P was and not minding at all that she used words like “hip”. She was known to take a charitable position toward the Jews.

“—I’ll be perfectly honest with you, Vicky, I’m not too sure I’m comfortable with what this book is trying to say.”

The Hank Paulson-looking figure kept nodding in the corner and going “Mm. Mm.”

“—And you know how I try to put myself in the mind of the child, as in what would a child think.”

“I see what you’re saying, Rex.”

“—And here I am I’m reading this book, and I’m thinking as I’m reading this—”

“With you, chief. Just jotting some notes on this post-it pad right here.”

“—Right. And I’m being perfectly honest with you. I mean I think we could all agree that I make a conscious effort when I do this. How I try to empathize with the child, how I try to think like a child.”

“And you are very good at that, sir, is the overarching consensus.”

The only computer at the house of 6364 Beersheba Dr. is a prototypal i-Cloud Port, one of the first models to enjoy warm but not yet hegemonic commercial success. It was gifted to Jack Dunn upon the successful completion of an ad campaign that led to what essentially may be called a market takeover. Jack at the time already had an i-Port. His thirty-one-year-old sister-in-law, a newlywed and professed societal nonconformist, who had settled in Florida on the pretense of love, did not.