Having read over a dozen notebooks filled with Tracey Flagler’s most intimate thoughts, I failed to fathom why such a vibrant and attractive young woman, who enjoyed sex immensely and whose sole aim in life was to experience and give joy, failed to attract a loving mate, and a small fortune besides, by virtue of the vibrations she had so diligently transmitted to that end. And in the end she took her own life, leaving me to find her remains, posed on her bloodstained, Sealy Posturepedic mattress in such a manner that I believed her delicious corpus was some sort of lesson that I was supposed to transmit to the world at large in the form of this living novel.

Tracey was possessed by the postmodern success culture: her enthusiasm was nearly unremitting: She read every issue of Oprah’s magazine and watched the Oprah Winfrey show regularly and she read the transcripts of the shows she had missed in order to attune herself with celebrated success; she reiterated her positive affirmations to the point of psychopathological perseveration; she opened up psychic channels and received the advice of Abraham-Hicks, Immanuel, Seth and the like; every day she practiced sending out psychic pulses defined by the forceful but gentle repetition of the word love – love, love, love, love, love, love, love….

Alas, her faithful practice over several years was to little or no avail; in fact she had been rudely treated from time to time, or, even worse, completely ignored, yet, she continued to admire celebrities and did her best to love herself and others. Of course there were a few angry entries expressing her frustration over the fact she had not found a “vibrational match,” that people “just don’t get it, don’t receive the vibrations.” “I am feeling freaking frigging angry that people don’t know that good feels good.”

The psychic entities Tracey projected and served as medium for eventually “pissed” her off with their false prophesying. On rare occasions she railed against them out of sheer exasperation: “I hate you Abraham, I hate you Immanuel, I hate you Seth. Oh, how I hate all of you!” But for the most part she did not seem to have a mean bone in her body; the little one she did have turned the anger against the rest, and she killed herself instead of assassinating one or more of celebrities and psychic entities she catered to; the former in posh restaurants as a waitress, and the latter as a psychic medium. Why did the positive vibrations and the pop psychology of success espoused by movie stars and endorsed and advertised by her high priestess, the fabulously wealthy, former underdog, Oprah Winfrey, fail her? How did she fall out of sync? Why did her good vibes go awry? Why did her pursuit of happiness fall so pathetically short? After all, all the poor girl wanted was to have was fun and joy – money was merely the means. Good grief, what’s wrong with that?

“I don’t know why,” she wrote in her last notebook, “but I have been feeling depressed for the last few days though everything has been going well. I have told myself over and over how much I appreciate my life, but now I feel really let down. I couldn’t even stand the sight of Oprah on TV this afternoon – she looked as ugly as an ogre. I feel nauseated and confused. I have this weird taste, like sulfur, like I have matches in my mouth, and I feel like fried chicken. What’s wrong with me? I feel terrified, I want to SCREAM and run away, but I can’t get up and run, I can only write this, to try to stay in control. Abraham, did you lie to me? Where are you now? Why don’t you answer me?  I can’t hear you inside my head. I heard noise, a whishing sound, a lot of static, and now I hear pounding and feel like a big hammer is banging me on my head. I am panicking, but I don’t know where to go! Something is interfering with my vibrations. Oh, Abraham! What is this? What is happening to me? I think I’m going crazy! I don’t know what I’m going to do!”

I showed Tracey’s frantic scrawl to Martin Berdinger at Landoro & Lawk, the staid DWNTWN Miami accounting firm where I had uncannily obtained a position a few days after I discovered Tracey’s body. The cabal that presides over Magic City caused downtown Miami to be officially dubbed ‘DWNTWN’, no doubt in consonance with the Cuban Hebrew clique of the highest rank. I had placed a 50 word job-wanted ad on the Internet over an assumed name. I was called in for a one-hour interview, and I apparently landed the very position I’d sent out vibes for while on the bus as it crossed the Mac Arthur Causeway, from South Beach to DWNTWN – perhaps I shall find the million dollars for good causes in the very near future.. Quite a few bus riders read sacred texts or self-help maxim books, pray or chant mantras as the bus sails into Miami over the causeway. I, for one, am not religious or superstitious, so I switch on the diamond crystal, two-way radio the Dalai Lama psychically implanted in my third eye during his 2004 Hurricane Season visit to South Florida.

Martin Berdinger was professor of tax law at Florida International University for a decade before he joined Landoro & Lawk, a firm famed for its decorum. The Professor, as he is affectionately called, is a wizard of sorts, sober-minded and levelheaded as can be when it comes to interpreting the Internal Revenue Code, a thoroughly underlined, dog-eared paperback copy of which he carries with him everywhere, perusing it while listening to Baroque adagios on his headphones; despite the staidness of the Firm, he certainly is not lacking in the imagination department. Small in stature, he was a towering question mark to his students, constantly asking the hard questions, and demanding the right answers of them, or else. He whetted the appetite of the rebellious-minded among them by suggesting that individuals as citizens of the several states have certain inalienable rights as against the federal taxing authority, a scheme he referred to as “blessed federalism.” The Professor failed those students who did not dispute the Code; indeed, he approved of the ancient Jewish practice of whipping students who did not question the Torah. His inquisitive students soon learned that the federal government is supreme in its uniform imposition of the federal income tax laws on the citizens according to their graduated economic ranks; about the only inalienable right the taxpayer has is to comply voluntarily with the Code, regardless of what state she resides in. Other than complying with whatever is mandatory, citizens as well as states do have the right to do what is not expressly prohibited short of tort or breach of contract, and the legislature does its best to eliminate free-floating confusion in that regard by proliferating laws to fill the void; eventually nothing shall be allowed that is not pre-ordained; at least nothing untoward, i.e. nothing “unproductive” shall be permitted instead of the nihilist’s everything. Still the citizen will feel that she has a free will, just as the brain-implant subject in Jose Delgado’s experiment insisted that he was voluntarily turning his head to the left and right when his brain was remotely stimulated by the implanted stimoceiver: “I am looking for my slippers,” he said. Moreover, since her behavior is determined, as if it were designed to obtain an end, she shall appear to be behaving rationally, just as Huxley’s decapitated frog exhibited rational behavior.

The danger of becoming automatons, if not zombies programmed to “think” they are conscious, did not discourage the disaffected youth among the Professor’s classes, for by the time they discovered the truth about centralized federalism within the answers to the questions the Professor had posed, they were, under his clever guidance, persuaded that the System was even more blessed than he had originally put it. He had, in effect, subtly enrolled them in the Master Tax Game, a system of mass behavioral manipulation through a process of conflict resolution that brings individuals and their groups into vertiginous harmony under the omniscient eye at the vertex of the political-economic pyramid scheme.

The Professor’s most advanced students attended his biweekly séances, where brainwave-entrainment methods and subliminal suggestive-accelerative learning techniques were employed to regularly commit the principles and rules and most complex aspects of the Master Tax Game, including the latest tax angles, to memory for instant recall and appropriate application where needed. A few students used the technique to memorize the entire Code on their own, and to recall pertinent sections on demand using these techniques, but the Professor eschewed absolute rote memorization of Code and Regulation content, not to mention mere Opinions and Letters, fearing that it would turn tax practitioners into complete half-wits.

Professor Berdinger’s favorite pastimes are calculus and writing. His most recent tomes, Degrees of Judicial Certainty, and Calculating the Chance of Being Audited, are available at Amazon.com. He is naturally conservative. Pluralism he tolerates provided every governing authority embraces certain goods that are in some part common to the universal standard; namely, the Good. Disharmony or dissonance he abhors. The human being is naturally evil, he owns, for wherever some idea of good can be found, its opposite lurks nearby, rooted, as it were, in human nature. Therefore the Professor does not expect a political regimen to cure discontented individuals of their ills. Still, the Master Tax Game, at least as he conceives it, serves to tame the wild man within, who would quite naturally run amok without it, somewhere beyond good and evil like the horned god of absolute freedom, and brings him into calm concord with the good that evil tends to avoid or even evade if necessary.

FIU defrocked Professor Berdinger after he betrayed the Company with the Internet publication of a contumacious tome entitled ‘The Herald Death Tower.’ He referred to the tower that stands in the water near the Miami Herald building, which is positioned between the mainland ends of the Mac Arthur Causeway and Venetian Drive. The tower, he said, is known by Company operatives at the Herald’s Hispanic sister-paper as El Torre de Muerte. Its objective, he claimed, was nothing less than inducing the outraged hysteria of the populace of Cuba through the remote transmission of extremely low frequency (ELF) waves, which Cubans would experience as sledgehammers, wielded by Fidel Castro, smashing into their skulls. The chaos during the final, revolutionary broadcast would of course result in the overthrow of the Castro regime – rectifying helmets would supposedly be donned by insurgent leaders to protect them from the final pounding.

The so-called Torre de Muerte is allegedly being used in conjunction with a virtual mirror, an enormously long antenna in the ionosphere established by beaming microwaves from an array of antennas strategically dispersed on the Earth’s surface. The Professor alleged that the Herald’s Death Tower produces a secondary electromagnetic pool of radio waves around the tower, inducing all sorts of adverse emotional and physical effects in the vicinity, which, incidentally, has the highest rate of mental illness in the country, and is, according to a noted politician, so backwards that it is the only Third World city within the United States. Instead of shutting down the anti-Castro tower project, a decision was made to use the secondary electromagnetic field to make guinea pigs out of certain, suitably predisposed members of the population around the tower. A study of the Venetian Isles conducted by the Professor’s students tallied all sorts of bizarre if not drunken and dope-crazed behavior, from mooning tourists as they sailed by aboard a sham pirate ship on the waterway, to assassinating joint-smoking celebrities. Incidentally, the Venetian Isles has the highest rate of dropped calls in the nation; the telecommunication companies know why, alleged the Professor, but mum is the word. Among the symptoms reported: exhaustion; pounding migraine headaches; accelerated heart beat; panic; vertigo; anger; depression; denial; auditory and optical hallucinations; the taste of sulfur; and generally feeling like a fried chicken.

Now it was the taste-of-sulfur and fried-chicken symptoms that raised my eyebrows when I read the Professor’s paper after joining sedate Landoro & Lawk, where, to avoid diminishing the firm’s reputation for sober-minded staidness with his scandalous past, the elf-like Professor keeps a very low profile in a huge comfortable chair, billing the partners a meager $150 per hour for his advice, which is amply supported by legal citations and Talmudic-like notes, some of them running into a dozens of pages. He insists that the law is “crystal clear” if read like a pyramid, taking every clause below in context of the headings above. He is always as certain as a neoconservative of the right thing to do in a particular case: “What must be done or not done in this situation is crystal clear,” he says. There is no better person for an honest person to turn to for harmonious tax advice.

And perhaps the same might be truly said for sulfur and fried chicken, I surmised after I read the Professor’s exposé on the Herald Death Tower, for a wise man or wizard, as Aristotle pointed out, is wise about many things in general, although he might not know how to make bread and butter. My dear friend Helene, by the way, had tasted sulfur and felt like fried chicken, and she became deeply depressed and subject to panic attacks while living on the Venetian Isles. After being the subject of one of the worst runs of bad luck I have ever seen short of catastrophic death, including totaling a lawyer’s car, she moved back to South Beach, where her health and her luck is slowly improving after she nearly died from a common cold and was conned into working for nothing for a mortgage foreclosure wheeler dealer. And most recently the late Tracey Flagler, my erstwhile next door neighbor, had mentioned sulfur and fried chicken and the like in her complaints before she killed herself.

“It’s crystal clear to me,” said the Professor after reading Tracey’s panicky note, “from the phenomena she describes here, especially the sulfur-fried-chicken effect, that your neighbor was affected by secondary transmissions from the Herald Death Tower.”

“But why wasn’t I affected?”

“You very well may be affected, but you simply don’t know it yet. Everyone around here is affected in one way or another.”

“Why don’t they move away?”

“People who are not afraid of hurricanes and the fact that South Florida will soon be under water as Mr. Gore prophesied could care less about radio-wave poisoning. Mind you that some people are more sensitive to the transmissions than others. It appears from this note that your neighbor was pre-attuned and was a medium for Abraham.”

“You know Abraham? He seems to be an imaginary friend of the New Age people.”

“Abraham is a fictitious entity broadcast by the Company.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What do you mean by pre-attuned?”

“Was a micro-implant found in your neighbor – what was her name?”

“Tracey. Tracey Flagler.”

“She allegedly committed suicide?”

“Yes.”

“Did the autopsy uncover an implant?”

“I don’t know anything about an autopsy.”

“Probably nothing was found – the micro-implants are easy to insert without the subject knowing it, and are very difficult to detect unless you know what you’re looking for.”

“I don’t believe in alien abductions, Professor.”

“They are not alien deductions. Kid, you ain’t in Kansas anymore.”

“Maybe I ought to go back there before I turn in to a sulfur-fried chicken. Maybe everyone ought to get out of Dodge if what you revealed about the tower is true. Isn’t everyone in Miami in danger? Why doesn’t someone blow it up?”

“The tower itself is built to withstand hurricanes, and the generator is housed in a bomb-proof bunker. Anyone approaching the facility without a happy hat would be disabled, and someone wearing a happy hat would be too happy to accomplish the mission unless properly entrained, but then the tower would be of no danger to anyone wearing a happy hat.”

“A happy hat? That’s funny!”

 “Yes, a happy hat. Can you keep something under your hat?”

“Sure.”

“The fact that we hired you and that you and I are discussing your neighbor’s suicide and the death tower is no coincidence. You have been chosen to market the happy hat.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No, I am not kidding. Think of it as the hidden part of your job description. Here, take this card. Call Madame Huong. Use the code name, ‘General Peace’. She will brief you on what you are to do for us.”