(All together now, all you masochists out there, specially those of you don’t have a partner tonight, alone with those fantasies that don’t look like they’ll ever come true—want you just to join in here with your brothers and sisters, let each other know you’re alive and sincere, try to break through the silences, try to reach through and connect….)

Aw, the sodium lights-aren’t, so bright in Berlin,

I go to the bars dear, but nobody’s in!

Oh, I’d much rather bee

In a Greek trage-dee,

Than be a VICTIM IN A VACUUM to-nite!

Days passed, much like one another to Pökler. Identical morning plunges into a routine dreary as winter now. He learned to keep an outward calm, at least. Learned to feel the gathering, the moving toward war that is unique to weapons programs. At first it simulates depression or non-specific anxiety. There may be esophagal spasms and unrecoverable dreams. You find you are writing notes to yourself, first thing in the morning: calm, reasoned assurances to the screaming mental case inside—1. It is a combination. 1.1 It is a scalar quantity. 1.2. Its negative aspects are distributed isotropically. 2. It is not a conspiracy. 2.1 It is not a vector. 2.11 It is not aimed at anybody. 2.12 It is not aimed at me … u.s.w. The coffee begins to taste more and more metallic. Each deadline is now a crisis, each is more intense than the last. Behind this job-like-any-other-job seems to lie something void, something terminal, something growing closer, each day, to manifestation…. (“The new planet Pluto,” she had whispered long ago, lying in the smelly dark, her long Asta Nielsen upper lip gibbous that night as the moon that ruled her, “Pluto is in my sign now, held tight in its claws. It moves slowly, so slowly and so far away… but it will burst out. It is the grim phoenix which creates its own holocaust… deliberate resurrection. Staged. Under control. No grace, no interventions by God. Some are calling it the planet of National Socialism, Brunhübner and that crowd, all trying to suck up to Hitler now. They don’t know they are telling the literal truth…. Are you awake? Franz…. “)