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    Gene, on the other hand, rose to the occasion by pulling one of the most boneheaded stunts I have ever beheld.

Everbody was being entirely too cheerful about the whole thing. Very psycho. I mean, I'm thinking, we're probably going to die pretty soon (in fact there was a whole little section of weirdos in the crowd echoing my exact sentiments—the frst people I'd seen who seemed to have any sort of grip on reality—but Aurora moved us by them distainfully), yet most everyone had this kind of carnival vibe going on.

    Fun, fun, fun! I couldn't believe for a second that all of them were buying it—I'd seen the line trying to get into Ozma's Gate—but here they were, gazing up to the palace, looking for Ozma to come out and make everything all better. Even considering all the magic and good will, these people had some serious issues going on.

    We walked by this group of impossible walking cutlery, about six feet tall. I mean, what kind of people cause other people like this to come into being? What kind of warped sadist would doom another sentient being to life as a giant fork? Whimsical? Bullshit. It's cruel. I mean, maybe the giant butter knife didn't know any better, but I thought whatever wizard or witch had done that to it oughta be seriously considering some therapy. Really.

    And Aurora's there in her skeleton suit, making lame devil horns behind my head, trying to make me laugh at a time like that. I was really starting to wonder about her, too.

    Then there were the China people. Little miniature models of humans, all made of what looked to be glazed porcelain. Aurie and Ralph just shuffed by them without a second glance, but I had to linger and stare. My mind could not wrap around the reality of them. Impossible that they could exist, could move, but here I was, watch ing it happen. They shifted as they moved, some kind of liquid movement, like the individual molecules of their substance was sliding, rearranging as arms and legs reconfgured in a parody of walking. Graceful as all hell, but still—impossible.

    Even after days of this shit, I still couldn't get used to impossible.

    Just then Mikio pushed his way throught the crowd, smiling, just as jolly as everybody else. I was starting to suspect maybe Ozma or Glinda had put some sort of whammy on everybody, some sort of astral Valium, or something in the water. Then I decided that couldn't be it; I sure didn't feel very jolly, and neither did that bunch of tall, droopy guys who were all moaning and groaning.

    Neither did Ralph. As always, his expression was guarded, but you could tell he wasn't overly optimistic about our prospects. He defnitely was seeing things going on that he'd never seen before, and that got me even more freaked out, because I fgured he'd seen just about everything.

    Mikio was rattling on about some kind of dream he had last night, just as if everything were just peachy, as if butchering hordes of barbarians weren't about to descend upon the city.

    And then—and then the gong gonged again. And things started to get really stupid.

    This woman came out onto Glinda's balcony—she was tall and thin, wearing a maid's outft (green of course), and she started ceremonially sweeping out the place where Ozma was going to speak.

    After the applause died down (applause! for what?) she went back inside and everybody went back to general cheerfulness.

    We continued to push though to the palace gate, and I caught an eyeful of the guard contingent. They were robots. No, that's not right—they were mechanical men.

    They were something out of a past that never happened—a place where robotics was perfected in the 19th century. There were several of them, all different—ornate, flagreed Babbage-men. One of them, Tik-Tok, a squat, copper-colored R2D2 with a mustache, rattled and clicked up to us and welcomed us.

    In a moment we were through the gate, and walking down a huge corridor, our muffed footsteps swooshing over a deep emerald carpet. Soon enough we were outside again, in a smaller courtyard with high walls, just under the window where Ozma would

give her address.

    So, I'm minding my own business, strolling up into the V.I.P. lounge, or whatever the hell that courtyard was, and the same lion I'd seen before, yes, That Lion, comes up out of nowhere and starts rubbing against my hip.

    "Uh—hello..." I said, not wishing to offend.

    "Helloooo," the Lion purred back, "pet meee..."

    "Okay," I said. You know, at this point, I was pretty much up for anything. Figuring that he probably wasn't wired much differently than my cats back in L.A., I started petting his mane, and said, "By the way, my name's Gene."

    "I knowwwww," he said, "of Los Angeles."

    "That's right."

    Just as I thought it couldn't get any weirder, here comes—The Scarecrow.

    He's a scarecrow, just in case you've been locked in a closet for the last hundred years. And he walks. And talks.

    I guess I was starting to lose it. Because while Aurora and Ralph mingled with the growing crowd of people (and others) there in the inner sanctum, I eased off petting Lion, who'd curled up on the ground for a short snooze anyway, and motioned Scarecrow over to a couple of seats that were cut into the solid wall of gemstone. He cheerfully complied with my wishes.

    I sat there, staring at his head. He didn't say anything either, just sat there with his hat in his lap and stared back—I guess he fgured it was part of a game.

    I was looking at the painted grin—looking at the way the paint twitched, just like a human face that's trying to stay incredibly still.

    "So," I asked, "what's the real deal?"

    He stared back at me, still smiling, but the painted-on eyes kind of scrunched down quizzically at me. "The—real deal?"

    I started checking out the way the canvas bag that made up his head was kind of just tucked into his shirt, and I was not convinced. I'd seen a lot of stuff that couldn't possibly be, but this just really offended my sense of reality. This had to be a guy in a scarecrow suit, and I was going to put an end to the charade then and there. The cheerful people of Oz would thank me for it later.

    So in one quick movement, I reached out both hands, grabbed his canvas head and pulled. I could see Aurora glance over, like in slow-motion, her expression changing from a jovial mask to a look of mild horror, her mouth expanding into an "O."

    And I then I was sitting there with a canvas head full of straw on my lap. Still smiling. "Why'd you do that?" it said, painted lips moving into a neutral straight line.

    Aurora grabbed the head, and started stuffng it back into its place on the rest of the Scarecrow, alternately apologizing profusely and glaring at me, asking if I was out of my mind.

    I looked over and saw Ralph giving me a thumbs up, laughing his ass off. Quite a few other people were yucking it up as well.

    I apologised to the Scarecrow, and he graciously accepted.

    "For some reason, this sort of thing happens to me frequently," he said, tucking in some stray tufts of straw. "I take no offense at other people's curiosity. In fact, I fnd it a rather admirable trait, one that I myself exercise with great frequency."

    Aurora had no time to bitch me out, because Ozma chose that exact moment to come out onto her balcony and say some of the stupidest stuff I have ever heard. I couldn't believe it.

    But what else is new?

Ozma stepped out onto the balcony, and the whole crowd caught its breath. All except for the Flutterbudgets, who cried out, "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"

    "SHUT UP!!!" came the sound of several thousand voices. (I admit it. I was among them. In fact, I said it really loud.)

    Ozma laughed and held up her hands. She seemed genuinely relaxed in the face of the cloud, and she had this astounding glow: abetted by the sun, and the emeralds that surrounded her, but mostly seeming to emanate from within.

    "No," she said, and her voice was remarkably clear. Not loud, not forceful, but intimate. As if she were speaking to each of us individually, from roughly a foot away.

    "No," she continued. "We are all not going to die. In fact, most of us are going to be just fne. These events—disturbing as they may be—are much better than you might think.

    "And though several of us will die today—yes, I'm afraid that's true..."

    And a terrible sorrow passed through the crowd, in waves I could literally feel.

    ."..today, above all, will be a Festival of Fun! And I hope you all will join me in making this the most fun we have ever had while confronting total fear!"

    I wasn't sure how to react to this. I looked at Gene, whose eyes were huge.

    "What?" said Gene. I didn't know how to answer.

    "This is way fucked up," was all Ralph had to say.

    So I was not alone in being thoroughly stunned when the crowd

began to applaud this, wildly. I looked all about the courtyard, from thither to yon, and saw 98% more smiles and clapping hands than anything else. Short of the moaning Flutterbudgets—who thank god I could not see—support for this feel-good policy seemed pretty damn close to unanimous.

    Ozma seemed thrilled but unsurprised by the Ozian response. They were her people, after all, and they loved her all to bits. If she'd suggested that they all cram high explosives up their asses, it's possible that her popularity might have dipped just a smidgen. But one wonders how much. Particularly in light of how scary that fucking cloud was.

    At that moment, Ozma pointed upward—not toward the cloud, but toward the summit of the palace—and in that moment, I became aware of a light I am quite certain I had never seen before. (I had felt it. Yes. And always known it was there. But I had never felt it register on my retina in quite that way.)

Before the U.S. government destroyed his work and left him to die in prison, the great scientist and weirdo Wilhelm Reich used to talk about "orgone energy." It was, essentially, life energy, and he noted that we released an enormous amount of it during the sexual act. So he had these pyramid-like devices called orgone generators, which were designed to harness this astonishingly powerful natural resource.

    The problem, of course, was that the energy was free, once you had the machinery in place. In theory, it could not only power your toaster, but rejuvinate your body and liberate your soul. All you had to do was fuck a lot, with great intensity, inside his ultra-groovy little pyramid thingee.

    But this was America in the 1950's, when both sex and power sported gray fannel suits. And Reich was a raging anarchic libertine: totally anti-corporate, and anti-authoritarian.

    Whether orgone generators ever actually worked or not, the Powers-That-Be were disturbed enough by the prospect to shut him down, burn all his papers, and obliterate his machinery.

    This happened in '56, I believe. By May of '57, he was dead. Just another casualty of the global clampdown, and another black hole bored into our secret history.

    I mention this only because the radiance from above reminded me of nothing so much as orgone energy: a funky Immanance, a power from within, manifesting as an invisible light so strong that the naked eye had no choice but to receive it.

    And it was emanating from the tower at the top of the Palace.

    More specifcally, it was emanating from Glinda.

The next part of Ozma's speech was devoted to Glinda: how she was holed up in the tower now, whipping up some serious magick. How Glinda needed us to trust in her now, and to send her our support. How her magick was strong enough to even the odds, but only if we fell into harmony with her.

    Only if we let our subtle soul-harmonics feed into the groove she was trying to lay down.

    Of course, Ozma didn't put it that way. Her language was a lot less esoteric.

    "And so," she simply said, "this is all I ask. That you look within yourself, and fnd the best way to make today as amazing as you possibly can.

    "I can't possibly know what you might come up with. And I don't even need to. Because I know how you are. But if you will please give a minute to thought, you will sense a direction, and that is good enough for me."

    What followed was a deep, profound—which is to say enormous—silence.

    I must say, it was the biggest silence I have ever heard.

    (Once—in New York, at St. Patrick's Cathedral—I heard the echo of a silence as deep as this. I was alone, in a church that was designed for the effect. But there were thousands of us here, in an openair courtyard; and I am not exaggerating when I say that the subsonic vibe in St. Patrick's was like the ghost of a dwarf by comparison.)

    Even the Flutterbudgets were miraculously mute.

    I closed my eyes, took a very deep breath, tried to make my mind clear as a rippling spring. As the psychic debris came drifting up, I let it catch on the rocks, focused on the fowing water. The words surrender, Dorothy came foating by. I let them pass, tried not to think about her. Her image futtered in my head for a moment, and I wondered where she was.

    Then I saw myself killing, saw blood striking my face, and the image so alarmed me that I wanted to drench myself in the water, cleanse my spirit, wash the blood away. Would Dorothy kill? Would she join me on the front lines? Was she above that sort of thing? Was I debased from going there?

    I watched the bodies of those I'd killed begin to pile up on the rocks, and the sight was sickening. Blood sullied the water, tinted it so red I could no longer see the bottom. The bodies jostled against one another: damming the fow, thinning the tide. I squinched my eyes tighter, fexed the muscles in my head, as if by sheer exertion I could wipe away the blight.