Verse The Fifty-Fourth

It was thirty minutes before the present, and Katryn Norse was absent-mindedly humming Danzig's Mother and then, not knowing any better, singing We Are 138, thinking he had immortalized it on his own.

Joe was singing the fifty-fourth verse.

"This here is verse nummer vier-und-fünfzig
And it hypnotizes you, makes you think of Danzig
Even if you've never heard of him before
Suddenly you'll be a hummin' Danzig's whore
And it doesn't matter if you're drunk or sober
Oh when I whistle Dixie baby you'll roll over!

You see...
You just ain't allowed to hear what I'm now gonna say
And yet I feel the nee-eed to sing it anyway:
Oh baby I'm just a boy who's come unstuck in time
Tomorrow to childhood, I turn on a dime
Some people say that I'm just crazy or ly'n'
(Sotto voce: Like you. Bitch. And your dumb husband too. You're lucky I like you guys or I'd... I'd... sing nasty things about you. Or something.)
That I know very well I stick in one timeline. Like them. Like you. Like suuu-perglue.

Buuuuut...
I just can't explain the things that I feel
In the end I don't care if it's crazy or real
Maybe it's just a movie with a rickety reel
Maybe it's like a slant rhyme, running off bull
You wouldn't snicker behind my back
If you felt what I felt in that dream parking lot
And if your subconscious mind while hearing these lines
Says "he's not too consistent with reason or rhyme"
That's cuz you didn't hear what I ate and felt
In death's giant dream par-king, lot!"

"Hey Joe, I dozed off there a moment, just when I was getting into it!" Katryn tittered calculatedly. "What are we up to?"

"Oh, I just did the Fifty-Fifth Verse. Here, let me play it again."

Show And Tell

It was twenty years earlier, and the golden age of coin-op video games was only just now fading. Leaning with style on a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet, Joe glared at Cody Standing Bear as Cody gestured for another quarter. "You just suck, Ovation. Another quarter's not going to help."

"Do not call me that, Joe."

"You know why I call you that. Get used to it. Hey... you know how to keep a secret, right?"

"I break secrets. I do not keep them. And I think you do not want to keep one. Share."

"Share. Yes, share. With the right people. At the right time."

"So I have little to tell you. But we can ask the Great Spirit."

Joe scowled disgustedly. "Great. Spirit... great."

"Come to the sweat lodge in two weeks. Many will help. But they cannot help without you."

Joe frowned and accepted.

Joe remembers little of what he experienced in the heat of the steam and haze of the rituals in the ramshackle lodge in those days, but he remembers the important part: "The Great Spirit has watched the makers of the secret-keeping thinking machines in your grandson's time, and says you must make sure your secret can only be understood if the hearer has a thing, knows a thing, and is a thing. The thinking machines will make this easy to arrange in many years. Already they can ask for something you know -- a "passing word," I think they call it. It will be longer until they can demand something you have, and longer yet for something you are. For now, it will be difficult to lock your secrets with these spiritual locks. Work with thought, wisdom, and diligence to hide-reveal your secret."

"I'm gonna have a grandson?! Ooh, am I gonna make babies with Mandie? It's Mandie, right?" Joe shouted, and pumped his fist."

The One Hundred and Fourteenth Verse

All in all, Dillinger Sang had two hundred verses. Like the Masonic Rites, each revealed new mysteries, so the longer the song went on, the more important it was that the listener either be prepared to absorb the secrets it contained, or unable to absorb them at all. Katryn and Barth had already absorbed about five verses consciously in the last weeks and accepted three as fact. They had also heard the song as far as the hundredth verse while laying half-alive in a thin layer of cat hair, day-old vodka, and fresh whiskey. That had been last night. "I'm not usually like this," Katryn had moaned before passing out.

She was serious. (She was almost always serious.) And she was suspicious. And curious. The first three verses had matched her own theories about Geraldo Rivera's relations with Indira Sousa, Dillinger's bastard great-granddaughter -- and Katryn's godmother. So Katryn had been drinking from her own bottle tonight (apple juice, her favorite!), and counting anxiously on her 30 years of acting experience to pull her through. But her act was wearing thin alongside her patience, and to make matters worse, her curiosity was growing. She could feel the hidden secrets in each verse, but could not understand them, and it was infuriating. The thirteen verses that she had newly heard this night were a sort of "Volume Two," that much she could tell. But  nothing else. A hokey mishmash of allusions to My Little Pony, West Side Story, and War and Peace, she guessed. But no sense, little rhyme, and only a bit more rhythm.

The one hundred and fourteenth verse ran:

"Severus Spike tonight, everybody get drunk tonight,
Pull out your banjo like Dillinger's gun
Gandhi's aces beat a one-eyed jack
And the Volga's gonna rock 'em tonight!
But the lady fooling me is the one being fooled, because --"

Found in a Basement

You won't find Ottawa, Ohio on a map. So of course it's not the county seat, or the largest town in Ottawa County. It is the westernmost and the smallest, however, and most people passing through mistake it for an especially large open-air museum when they're in the west end--that's the first five houses--and for a tornado-borne hunk of Xenia on the six houses of the east end. Sprouting off the middle is the only side street, Ottawa Drive, with three forgettable houses, and one basement. That's in the house that's cream instead of white. That's the first reason you might take a closer look; the second is when you discover the meekly-sized scissors-and-magic-marker "Barth Vader" sign glued by the front door.

Ottawa is a good place to get lost, but in Bartholomew Norse's basement you can find many things, even on a good day like this. Today it's Barth's fishy guest Joe Eawest; five sticks of formerly minty fresh chewing gum; a Ms. Pac-man cabinet, functional, but suffering severe burn-in and a limp joystick, a box full of coffee-stained sheets with printouts of Facebook posts on a 1990s dot-matrix printer; a confetti-gilded tinfoil statue of Ganesh; a laptop on the concrete floor running PuTTyTray dialed in to play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup; and a sawhorsed wargaming table set out with Klingon marine, Latvian Napoleonic-era pikeman, and Louisiana cannoneer miniatures mostly ready for playtesting of the latest Game of Joe ruleset. However, since five seconds ago it is in slight disarray after an assault from the behind of a now-impatient Katryn Norse.