She fell asleep with moby dick spread across her face like the fins of white whale, but somehow, he had finally figured out how to get on the Internet and started searching Basel, the city of his father. She called it “the Fatherland” as a joke and because all Germans sounded like Nazis to her and it pissed him off to no end, which was fun to watch. You could predict his response:
“The Swiss were the only neutral country… you want to blame someone, blame the fucking French, they capitulated like drunk whores…. The Swiss actually saved some Jews….They couldn’t save all of them.”
“Stole their money.”
“What is money compared to life? These survivors don’t get it….This is numbered accounts….. the birth of it.. is.. what? thirty six?… They don’t know the number, they don’t get the money… No Tickey, no shirty. You’re Korean….That’s just business. They set up the numbered accounts to keep the fucking Nazis from freezing the assets… don’t you get it? The Nazis were the law. They legally stole the money… it was legal… the Swiss did the Jews a favor with the numbered accounts….then now they get blamed for it….Typical…”
And she would begin to goose step around the kitchen and Make a fake mustache with her finger and say like John Cleese in FawltyTowers, “Vhatever you do, don’t Mention ze Var! I zink I mentioned it vonce, but I got away wis it.”
And then he would realize that she was playing him for a laugh and so he would laugh, but that night he followed a link and somehow stumbled onto an online version of My Problem Child. He started reading after the cheese rich wine washed kirsh ending dinner and read it the whole way through the cold night as she quietly snored and the room glowed from the LCD screen. The text was like a door opening in a stone wall. She got up to piss the Gewurtzterminer at five in the morning as he was hitting the end and he said, “Let’s go to Basel. We’ve been planning to stop there.”
“No,” She said. “We were planning to go to Paris and the train….ALL trains stop in Basel.”
“Listen,” he said. ” The first train is at five. If we go now, we can see the sun rise on the rhine. My grandfather was a baker. I want to show you where he had the bakery…”
“What time is it?”
“Late for a baker I can tell you… they’re up at three. We can go to the cemetary.”
“How romantic,” she said.
” We’ll find my father’s stone in the cemetary.. the one he carved for my grandmother…. and I want to find the bridge.”
“What bridge?”
“The LSD bridge… where Hoffman rode the bicycle in 1938 before the war… the worlds first acid trip.”
“What?”
“He accidently turned a bread fungus into LSD… or isolated LSD… same thing that made the Salem Witches go crazy… Ergot.”
“My God,’ she said.
“No Ergot…. sounds more like OUR GOD… Ergot EEEEERRRRGHOOOOT!,” he started to spell it for her. “E…R…G…”
You’re tellng me some Swiss guy invented acid?”
“Well he was working for Sandoz… they owned the patent.”
“Somebody patented LSD…”
“Not somebody. Sandoz. Major Pharmeceutical…”
“I know who they are… They were one of my clients at the add agency… You’re telling me they invented acid?”
“Sold it mostly to the C.I.A… and I guess a few universities…like Harvard and some shrinks… or maybe the C.I.A. gave it to the universities…it depends who is telling the story… M.K. Ultra was the program….assholes thought it would make a good weapon and it turned into a peace movement on them… Talk about irony?”
“What a fucking weird country… I thought it was all just chocolate and cheese…”
“That and knives and guns and drugs… and watches..and money….(beat) Fucking weird country….Pretty though.”
“Sure…Pretty,” she said
And they got dressed and gathered a few books and a camera and went to catch the earliest train to Basel for the sun and the Rhein and the good Basel brot straight from some bakery not his family’s and probably corporate owned by now, but still better than anything in America.
Death is not information
Stone that I am
He came into my quiet
And I will be still for him
“Mask for Janus”: W.S. Merwin