What was McCord up to? Was he going to shift into Blondi’s (Jack Daniels’ wife’s) brain? Or was there more that he could do with Eva to relieve suffering in our futures? I asked him about it when I told him where I’d been, and he said that he’d had two shifts—one with Eva and one with Blondi. According to McCord, Eva was on the verge of a nervous breakdown because when Hitler took Pervitin he said things that made her feel like they would be together—in complete and total love—forever, but, once his synapses were worn out, he’d undo everything he did by getting mean. Ah, the curse of coming down! And it was even worse, at times, because when he took his oxycodone he often thought that Eva should put out.
The funny thing about Eva was that she had different voices speaking to her, too. One of them was always ranting about how Eva didn’t love him, basically, and McCord defined that one to be the Latin poet Catullus—and, because McCord defined it that way, the real Catullus—who was just as interested in the future as the rest of us, was gradually addressed at Eva’s and McCord’s location. Apparently all that anger that Catullus expressed in his poetry was getting channeled toward Hitler—the figurehead of a boatload of people; Hitler, naturally, didn’t spend any time trying to process his emotions (and the thoughts that came with them); instead he turned them out with drugs, emotions and thoughts, then, that went to the next closest place—Eva.
McCord had the hypothesis that somebody in Catullus’s future that was connected to their future, like Shakespeare, he imagined, also got inundated with Catullus’s thoughts, and Catullus, who died young, died when this person took the time to process—and disseminate, all the vitriol that Catullus was throwing their way. But Catullus was alive and well in Eva’s brain, from time to time, when he left messages, for her, or whoever stood out, at that address, in the future. But how did all that relate to Blondi—which, coincidentally, was the name of Hitler’s dog! I’m not sure how that happened, but, apparently, Hitler was rather fond of the animal, so much so that when the war was lost and it came time to dish out the cyanide pills, he gave one to Blondi to make sure that it worked!
So what was going on in the mind of President Jack Daniels’ wife? Apparently she liked sex more than she liked kissing—which was ironic, because you generally think of the two things going together—and, in fact, they usually do. But when Jack Daniels’ puckered his lips—or, God forbid, opened his mouth wide enough for his tongue to come out, there was always a moment’s delay as Blondi sought the courage to reciprocate. “You have to wonder,” McCord said, “Is Blondi a lesbian, or is she simply grossed out by her husband? And, if that’s the case, then there must be a shred of decency left in her.” But I reminded McCord, then, that evil is all about isolation—everybody turns away from everybody—so, just because Blondi was grossed out by her husband, she was probably more worried about what real people would think if she expressed a semblance of love.