II.  War:  fighting with your brother-self is suicide

34.  Jack first alludes to suicide

Rev and Jo would hide the Wrigley envelope away usually at this point. Because Jack, after such relatively lighthearted air-headedness, as the pundits said of it, or ‘heavenly nonsense’, as Jo called it, now plunged straight downhill into pain and suffering and confusion. “And,” as she said, “all that pain would have been unnecessary if he had just gone to church.”

They would stop reading because the rest of the Wrigley envelope constituted a full frontal assault upon one of conservative Protestant Christianity’s most exemplary bulwarks, Wrigley College.

And worse yet: the Lorenzos could never let themselves forget that the remaining pages of the Wrigley envelope were the ones where threats of violence had first come out into the open on both sides, Jack’s and Mortimer’s. Or, more accurately, Jack began to imagine Mortimer capable of violence, if and when the latter returned, and as a result, after mulling it over, Jack thought it best to commence alluding to his own capability of violence. Saber-rattling, in other words, it amounted to. But suicidal saber-rattling (needles to say), as Rev was the first to grasp. Though, he never really wanted to think very much at depth why the two opposite sides of his ‘crackbrained’ son were at arms over Wrigley College.

Pundits, a few of them, would understand to a limited extent, later, that the conflict arose from the fundamental differences between Mortimer and Jack over such things as the way Mortimer had let Wrigley College and so many other soul-squelching forces take mj over and suppress his real spirit, i.e. Jack, which meant mj’s own real self, his real heart, which had been dying for all those years to truly express itself.

Naturally there were excerpts from Mortimer's journals in the envelope to prove the point. Naturally they were full, as usual, of Mortimer's depressed navel-contemplating and ruminating over nothing. Rev's comment to Jo on the matter seemed astute enough, that: “Maybe ‘your Jack’ needs to come to terms with these dad-blamed journals of Mortimer's, but dagnabbit, that doesn’t mean the whole world has to,” as Jack implied they did in the very next paragraph. By which Rev meant not that he was concerned about the ‘whole world’ literally, but that he himself rather, Rev. Lorenzo, for one, at least, ought to have been excused from having to ‘learn how Jack was coming to terms with Mortimer’s journals’. Especially since, as every other extremist-Protestant Christian who ever would hear about the Wrigley envelope would understand perfectly, Rev was more embarrassed than not by Jack’s often disrespectful exposé of hitherto good-Christian-boy Mortimer’s very depressing journals and four years at wonderful Christian Wrigley College.

Jack’s paragraph summarizing his reaction to Mortimer’s journals began as a fairly coherent and surprisingly kind ‘apology’, as theologians might have called it, i.e., as a ‘defense of Mortimer’s thinking’ in his journals. But it ended up floating off higher and higher into grandiose space, without providing any explanation why in the world it wanted to go so high up in space, just like so much schizophrenic hot air in a balloon floating out of control. Or, as some more poetic pundit interpreters suggested later, ‘like so much inane Harlequin bombast’. Or, if you please, simply, as the ‘psycho pundits’ and even a few ‘psych pundits’ would insist: ‘like a case of bipolar mania, pure and simple’:

I shall leave my old diary intact with all its youthful foibles, Rev, relatively secure from my barbs, and ask that you forgive it as I have tried to. For it is merely the starting point for you and me. It's the hard data. It is not beautiful, but it is FACT. It is raw computer data, and there are no print-outs yet. The action following it is unrecorded in journals or government reports as yet. Its ugliness inspires us to subdue it by admitting to it. It is a confrontation, an impingement on the conscience, a budding threat to our specific nervous density, but in that, it is hope...  It is I, myself, as I am becoming, with my brothers...

35.  Jack feels compelled to comprehend his four years at Wrigley

And then the rest of the ‘darn’ envelope, after a thrown-in pile of neurotic, Christian-saint journal passages Mortimer had written while at Wrigley College, constituted a study of that college itself. A subject forced upon him, Jack justified, again non-rationally: how? and why? Because, the next 'fort' going up the Mackenzie, coincidentally, had that same name: 'Wrigley'. So by Jackian ‘logic’ he was compelled at this point, as he insisted, to remember the school Mortimer had forced him to attend, only to then keep him locked up and suppressed the whole time. True: Mortimer had criticized Wrigley a little in his notebooks while still there. But he had been too brainwashed back then to really see its biggest drawbacks as well as Jack could see them now. The way the school had constantly bombarded its students with neo-Calvinist, Kingdom-of-Christ-on-Earth propaganda, effectively beating back down most independent thinking long before such thinking might ever raise its inventive and snarling head and get thought.

Take the Wrigley College Concert Band program, for example, which had fallen out, folded in quarters, from inside one of Mortimer’s notebooks. That program, Jack complained in one of his letters to his parents, did not just say the Concert Band had come to play music in the hosts’ wonderful town, thank you. It did not simply name the pieces about to be played during the concert as any ordinary band program would have done. It had to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by these four pages of paper that thousands of concert-goers would see and study: to fulfill its compulsive mission by presenting a huge sell job on Wrigley and conservative American Protestant Christianity. The school’s administrators, in other words, constantly seemed to forget that the school’s purpose was ‘liberal arts education’. All students were already Christians, and pretty devout ones at that. Yet Wrigley’s administrators seemed to think that they had to be campaigning for Christ incessantly. Who could guess the weird reason? Perhaps lest the school waste precious dollars contributed by some bigwig ‘Evangelical’ Chicago business-man alumnus, or lest it shirk its hyper-neo-Calvinist duty to always look lively so as to reflect and advertise Christ’s wonderful kingdom on earth, populated and run, as it was, by that kingdom’s wonderful hyper-Evangelical nerds, them-glorious-American-selves.

Who could guess why it was so tiresomely hyper-Christian? The fact remained that no matter what you did at Wrigley, or when, there was always pressure to think a certain way. The sell job was everywhere and constant, with the result that, for someone with an imagination as lively as mj lorenzo's, a heart as sensitive, and a character core as under-developed, still, at this precious college-age point in his life, such an incessant sell job, day in and day out, year in and year out, smothered personal growth. You felt like you might if some school teacher told you all day long what you were allowed to feel next. If she said, "Now children, you're all going to have a lot of fun doing..." this...; or that. And Wrigley students were hardly children, of course. They were 18 to 22, most of them far more mature emotionally than Mortimer. Yet no form of leadership at Wrigley ever said, as they should have, for healthy human growth purposes: “Now, we’re all going to try to live imitating Christ’s example for this whole week. And next week, all week long, we’ll discuss how it made us feel, good or bad.” Instead, every last student was expected to feel and believe the company line, night and day, or else shut up.

Thus Jack wrote to Rev:

And so, from the fungating wrinkled mementoes that I have buried with myself in this decaying wasteland here, I send you first this one:...

The  Program  of  the  Wrigley  College

Concert  Band

…on the inside of which I am respectfully listed as a Second Horn, hailing from Florence, New Jersey. On the back of the program we find the following:

….'And He hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God' (Psalm 40:3). This has been the song of Wrigleyans for over a hundred years. Today it echoes from the hearts of students in morning chapel, along campus walks, and wherever the Christian testimony of Wrigley sons and daughters is heard. We are delighted that the music of The Concert Band can be shared with you, and we trust your heart will be warmed by the presence of our students.

(Signed:)

'Prexy'

President of Wrigley College

Reading that paragraph in the program after so many years now, caused in Jack, he wrote: ‘an uneasy feeling hard to define’. But what could have caused it precisely? After all, he, Jack, had been quietly present the whole time Mortimer had chosen to go to Wrigley, wanting to become a better Christian and person. So he, Jack, should have expected such a thing at such a school in the early sixties, right? Or else he should have spoken up and objected to going there. Okay then: what was the beef?

Slowly he remembered. Mortimer had been in sole charge of mj since long before Wrigley. Mortimer had always been a good Christian boy. He had chosen Wrigley, never consulting Jack, whose existence as one half of mj, half at the very least, had never been recognized. Jack had been suppressed so successfully, he had not even known how to speak up back then. But soon, once at Wrigley, ‘liberal arts education’ had liberalized Mortimer’s thinking, ironically, even Mortimer’s, despite the school’s attempts at mind-controlling him. And the school had never asked Mortimer, either before or after, if they could use his love affair with music, his devoted French horn playing, to advertise their tiresome Christian regime, with which they pursued and bothered him more and more.

For even Mortimer wanted no more from Wrigley than (1) simply to be able to study and know and understand everything he possibly could under God’s wonderful sun; (2) to enjoy the best possible time imaginable with the roommate he was so lucky to be living with; and after that, (3) to be left in peace to grow up as he quietly chose, maturing into the man that he would become, doing it in the way that suited him best without all their noisome meddling and in-the-face advertising.

That Bible verse from Psalms helped him grasp it all better now: 'And He hath put a new song in my mouth'. That was it! Wrigley College had tried to put a song in his mouth that he had not wanted to sing, necessarily, every minute of every day, if at all. He was young and had hardly made up his mind what he wanted to believe about God and the world and himself, maybe. He was imaginative, maybe, and was still studying the matter, you could say. No one had a right to ram a song down his throat, or put words in his mouth, or expect him to act like a devout born-again neo-Calvinist slogan-shouting Christian, claiming that their song was ‘echoing from his heart’. When maybe he was not sure what was echoing in his heart yet, or whether he had a heart even, or whether he was a real Christian even.

Yet: the school never let up. They bombarded the students with this kind of extremist Christian zealot propaganda day and night, week after week, year in and year out, until you wanted to scream, strip, run across campus and jump in the fountain naked. And Mortimer, who had sweetly managed to perpetuate his tyranny over mj lorenzo just as endlessly as any Latin American dictator perpetuated his tyranny, year after year after year, had allowed this kind of abuse to continue. He had never spoken up. Maybe he had been too depressed to see what was happening. Okay. But maybe too, his depression had been caused by an institution putting a totalitarian song in his mouth that was not necessarily his. The fact was: Jack, now, and speaking for himself, was not some green innocent peasant who needed or wanted to be told constantly what to think, feel and do. He was born of a different mould and marched to a different drummer, Truth. And he had not decided just exactly what Truth was, quite yet. It was too soon to say. But he doubted Truth was to be found wholesale in someone else's belief system, especially one that tended toward totalitarianism. That would hardly work for him anyway. He had to find his Truth himself, if they would only let him.

Thus Jack wrote to Rev, shocking him and Jo with a tirade – from their own church-raised son, mind you – railing against what everyone said was one of the finest, brainiest, nicest, sincerest, good-Christian colleges in the whole super-fine U.S. American country. Why, even his uncle, an evangelist BIG on 50’s coast-to-coast prime-time Sunday night television had gone to Wrigley. And a beloved aunt of Jack’s had graduated in church organ music from Wrigley. And, most of all, the greatest evangelist in American history, Billy Graham, had gone there, so it had to be as perfect as a college could get, because Rev and Jo adored their hero, Billy. Yet, their son wrote:

Such poisonous propaganda has been breathed by Wrigley planners somewhere on every piece of stationery, on the notebooks of students happily homebound on planes, on the rear windows of family automobiles, on athletic sweatshirts inside yellow buses, on Wrigley Band instruments passed along train platforms from California to Maine, from Saskatoon to Maracaibo, in a massive religious advertising campaign –

For Christ and His Green and Blue Kingdom Come

– second in scale only to a Billy Graham evangelistic crusade: in the poor ruined name of poor Jesus' buried love and God's buried praise, young minds have been embroiled in a brand of thinking and a poison 'faith' which infects the conditioned air they breathe inside Wrigley's Prexy Chapel, daily trailing them outside the door  '...along campus walks, and wherever the Christian testimony of Wrigley sons and daughters is heard', pursuing every last ‘son’ and ‘daughter’ until defeated; for this is an intrusive, soul-smothering ‘faith’ which penetrates each vulnerable young person’s being until it suffocates it.

36.  prophet, war protestor, pervert, or just plain crazy

Rev and Jo were horrified, poor things. Most good caring parents would have been. How far was ‘their Jack’ going to go with this? Where would it lead? He was too far away to monitor. And neither parent had come from a liberal, let alone revolutionary, family. They were just ‘not used to it’. And his mounting rage over one of God’s most blessed institutions on the planet was not the only thing upsetting them. Many things were pushing their alarm bells at once. For one thing, the emotional tone of his writing was climbing and climbing. He sounded angrier and angrier. And worse: there were more and more allusions to violence. In fact, he was starting to think of violence as a way of solving problems.

At first they thought he sounded all too much ‘like an Old Testament prophet’, as Rev put it. But certainly he was not that. Anyone speaking in such a tone against God’s own most beloved institutions galled the Lorenzos. And hearing their own son do it felt worse.

But then Jo pointed out that he was sounding increasingly ‘like the radical anti-war and civil rights people’ of the past decade, ‘those unhappy people’, as she put it, who had ‘torn the country apart’ protesting and complaining without letup and violently, those ‘rabble-rousing…’ – as Rev added – ‘…street-marching kinds’.

But: they barely noticed, at first, that Jack was also, in the same breath, talking about love:

As I sit here now, my brass horn strapped to my shoulder waiting to be used to announce some epiphanous revelation, or summon up some strength from the surrounding taiga; like Siegfried along the Rhine, like Doctor Zhivago approaching the Urals, I am off in search of... something, I know not what. I know that somewhere lurking in the deception of the green innocence about me there is that which constitutes for me the hard FACT; that there is something which will make me far more real to myself than I have ever been until now; and that this something, be it love, or some experience of the truth about myself in a real setting, will help me make better time in dealing with the poison-breathed dragon which is presently Wrigley, and help me straighten my shoulders and calm my limbs, the better to eventually receive an almost inevitable stab in the back from my brother.

What was it he wanted to say? Jo wondered out loud to Rev. Why, after so many carefully chosen words, was the paragraph so bewilderingly unclear?

When his parishioners came into the office hemming and hawing, Rev observed, it was usually because they were afraid to say something straight out.

And that got Rev thinking along a track he never could quite escape thereafter. For Jack was talking about ‘love’; and ‘my brother’; in one breath.

Though, so had William Penn been doing, as the pundits would say later, when Penn had founded Philadelphia, the ‘City of Brotherly Love’. Yet no one had accused him of being homosexual, as Rev was accusing his own son, silently, inside his condemning neo-Puritan-Calvinist head.

Where is that other Wrigley son as I pause here? recognizing my mind is exploded all over the map by the wreck; knowing as I do that some form of fratricide must startle me into my self so I may know who I am; so I may forget the mountaintop and remember myself and start again on a new trip. Fratricide: but I need him here to remind me that, even if I subdue the dragon which is Wrigley, and go on to something better, perhaps love; yet, he will still be waiting for me behind some bend in the river when I least expect him, perhaps when I consider myself most in love, and when I am thinking that I have finally arrived.

What the heck was Jack upset about, exactly? He talked about ten things at once, so it was hard to tell. The early Remaking pundits would be able to make little of it either at first, once they finally attempted to sink their teeth into it. Though later, they would manage to see it as referring to vague inchoate worry about Mortimer. Yet still, for a long time they would remain uncertain exactly in what way Jack feared Mortimer at this point in the year.

But as for Rev and Jo: for right now, the thought that overwhelmed all other possible contents, the one they heard more than any other, was that Jack expected to be ‘stabbed in the back’ by his own ‘brother’, Mortimer, meaning, by his own very self, by his own right hand.

“How could he do such a thing? His arm won’t reach,” said Jo, provoking Rev to jeering.

And why, she asked, did Jack talk about ‘love’ as abstract, and in the future? “Doesn’t he remember his parents love him NOW, always have, and always will?”

And who did he think he might be in love with anyway, they asked each other. Nobody was around!

Hear my testimony! This is my song and horn solo! I was slowly brainwashed though I fought tooth and nail. I was debilitated until my frightened mind gladly grasped the simple systematic theological straw that was finally offered as proof of God's love, 'Christ'. I came to this from nothingness, and it became all to me. Gradually I ingested it in the shape of decals, blue-green sweatshirts, slogans, and band programs, and then could not locate the heart of my 'faith'. I acquiesced to becoming a ‘Wrigley son’. I adopted an impressive program and could not find myself in it, then created the journals to seek myself out.

Mortimer, did you do this to me and with malice, or did I do it to myself? Have you hidden yourself within me? Or are you outside me, trying to be my ‘shield’?

How can I eliminate you before you execute your insidious hideous plan against me in full, and I succumb?

It took very little indeed to tumble over sideways an unstable and explosive Jack. One little memento from college or a little passage from a notebook of Mortimer’s and he was steaming.

Rev and Jo could not relate to Jack’s feeling violated by a church group. He had grown up in the church. He had loved every minute. The church people in Florence had loved him, and still did. And he loved them. To this day they would have done anything for him, especially a certain few of those church people.

Unless, of course, they heard about all his ranting and raving like this.

So the Lorenzos kept the envelopes to themselves at first, hidden in the bottom of a deep wooden kitchen drawer in the old Florence Methodist parsonage at 209 Broad Street under Betty Crocker recipe books and Jo’s forgotten crocheting, and they avoided talking to anyone in the whole world about the awful situation of the beautiful boy everyone loved. And this at a time when the two of them needed help most, since their son was contemplating violence more and more:

Why am I having such a difficult time distilling out from this green print and muck the pure idea of who I am or who I ought to be? Am I a Wrigley son, or am I he who has been already replaced or shielded by an apparent Wrigley son and then submerged and strangled; am I already dead, or only in the process of being killed; or am I all of this all at once and thus myself in part about to eliminate a certain part of myself that I do not quite admire? And should I not prefer, then, to make peace with this declaiming flaming dragon and abide with him? Or is it impossible and impractical and overnice and compromising?

I tend to believe that my Christianity has run amok.

I go on in search of the FACTS, Rev, and the real Christ, who, I suppose, am simply somehow I.    

Jack.

P.S. Where's Mortimer?

Jack threw in only one more notebook entry of Mortimer's in the Wrigley envelope after this, surprisingly. And it was not typical, for it made Mortimer look, for once, like the sane and sensible one of the two. Jack was so beside himself with rage about Wrigley, he never commented on it, leaving it to others to descry why he had included it. And indeed, all first readers of The Remaking found it one of the easiest paragraphs of the Wrigley envelope to understand:

The passions of the young will be extreme and vacillating. A child may have faith; an adult is too set to need it, not concerned about faith or despair, such important matters by now suppressed into habits, but youth... has known childish faith and still does, but comprehends the pain of living, and feels it... deeply, because he has not known pain before and is not inured – and flounders suspended between heaven and hell, bewildered. It is simple for him to say 'yes' to despair. An adult will think several times before he says either, or may not think at all. Youth totters and crashes; age plods. Youth is wide-eyed and dialectic; age is static and blind. Who said that the old man is wise? He is steeped in a tradition built by his own experience. Ask him to change his way? Expect him to waver? He may wait three days to announce a decision, but he suspected from the start what it would be. He is neither skeptical nor sure. But youth... is un-knowing, undecided; then all-knowing, certain beyond dispute....

III.  Peace again

37.  reconciling hyperpolarized polar opposites will bring peace

Finally, it was inevitable too that Jack’s new interest in maps – for he had obviously moved on, by now, a few pages further into his "M" volume, from 'Magnets' to 'Maps' – would eventually afford him at least several ‘useful misinterpretations’ (as the pundits joked later). And one such useful misinterpretation had grabbed his attention already:

Forms of Maps

Projections.  Any showing on a flat surface of the globe's network of parallels and meridians is called a projection. It is not possible to draw a flat map of the earth without some kind of squeezing, stretching, or tearing. It is like trying to flatten out half of a rubber ball. It will either wrinkle or crack. If only a very small area is shown on a map, the error is not important. But when large areas of the surface of the earth are put into flat maps the areas nearer the poles will be greatly distorted. Flat maps are always somewhat distorted.

Mercator Projection...  The Mercator projection greatly distorts areas in the high latitudes.

If my projection is Mercator it misrepresents the size of Northern Canada (‘Canada and other northern areas are much too large’, as the encyclopedia says) and forces me to think that I am going much further than I am. On the other hand,

...the Mercator projection was designed to help a navigator follow his course. It is a very valuable map for this purpose today... But since the scale increases as the poles are approached, the distance from the 80th parallels to the poles is infinite. Therefore the poles cannot be shown at all.

Actually, Rev, the National Geographic map I’m using is an "Albers conical Equal-Area Projection, Standard Parallels 58°50' and 50°10'."¹

Since the mouth of the Mackenzie is at 69° N latitude, Wrigley NWT is at 63°, and Chicago and Wrigley College, USA, are at 42.5°; then the projection of my trip in my mind must be most deranged about these northern- and southernmost extremes; and only the parallels including upcoming Fort Smith, Fort Chipewyan and Hungabee, can be in good perspective and, at least as project, hold hope.

“There’s good news for once,” quipped Rev sarcastically, right off the bat upon first reading this, “he knows he’s ‘deranged’ when it comes to Wrigley.” For Rev understood perfectly, for once, exactly what the ‘tricky hidden meaning’ was. It was that Jack was using a map to read his own mind and divine his future, not as a map was meant to be used, to read the earth’s physical and political surface. “And,” added Rev, always trying to win back some of Jo’s attention that seemed to have wandered off and gotten lost behind some deluded son, “he found a bright spot in his world, finally.”

“A bright spot?” she asked, pampering him.

“Things might settle down in Alberta, if he makes it alive,” said Rev, also sarcastically, and for the same reason; for his own son was in the Arctic north where it was colder every day and he was wandering around naked yet thought he had the world by the tail.

And she responded: “Maybe there’s hope and peace for his tired mind in Alberta, then,” but she did not believe it for a second. You could see it on her face, as Rev told her.

The fact was, however, as the pundits would point out later, that Jack had actually done the right thing, as impossible as it seemed. He had done the best thing possible that a sick person could do, who needed to heal. He had used a National Geographic map of Western Canada showing everything from the Arctic to Wrigley, Illinois, not rationally, but intuitively, to anticipate the fact that ‘Fort Smith, Fort Chipewyan and Hungabee’, since all three lay in the very center of that map, within the Canadian province of Alberta, were going to benefit mj lorenzo most of all when he finally got to those places. And the pundits realized later, of course, with the help of hindsight, that Jack’s advance intuition of where to finally find peace, as usual, had been right; and ‘very helpful’ to mj’s ‘cure’.

Statements of Jack’s like these would sound crazy to the ‘early Remaking pundits’, too, at first. But then, with time, it would dawn on them that Jack’s intuitive skill always got him to the right place, no matter how ‘crazy’ the method he used to get himself there. That was why some of them would end up writing entire treatises on this particular discovery of theirs too.

Jack’s ‘method’ looked ‘mad’-ly irrational to the Western mind, at first, inevitably, they always admitted. It had to be a ‘freaky’ experience to see someone using a map of Western Canada to read his own future, and it had to have made the Lorenzos very uncomfortable.

There was hardly a psych nurse in the medically-Westernized world who would NOT have thought Jack at first glance plumb crazy for reading his future from a map. Almost any hospital nurse coming across him would have gone home and told her family about it at the dinner table, then laughed all night with them about the patient at the hospital who read his future in maps.

BUT: such a reaction would have been wrong. For if a person actually had the talent to read the future in a map of Western Canada, and always got it right, then no one could call that person sick on such a basis alone. You could not knock ‘dynamite intuition’, as the pundits called it. Anyone who possessed it and could use it, usually found it invaluable as a tool. And Jack Lorenzo did possess it. And he did use it. For: he was learning how to use it and was enjoying the results. He was using his intuition for healing, above all, starting right with himself.

Jack Lorenzo’s legendary intuition was one of the several principal explanations why mj lorenzo’s Remaking in its original version would seem so remarkable to people in time, and why the pundits would never get tired of poring over it and dwelling upon it endlessly, year in and year out.   

But the Lorenzos, being the very first to encounter all this hyperbole, and seeing no such bright spots in it at the time, were left with no recourse but to pray day and night, out loud and silently, at the dinner table and everywhere else. Because: they were overwhelmed by incomprehensible changes in their son. And they were not exaggerating. No one had ever seen this side of mj lorenzo. The only side anyone had ever really known was Mortimer Lorenzo. Jo had been the only one to catch tiny glimpses of ‘her Jack’ for seconds here and there, down through the years.

Consequently, anyone in the future who could not understand why mj lorenzo’s parents had been so upset at this point, needed only to go back and read the wearisome pages and pages of Mortimer’s sick notebook entries in the original Remaking, and compare that Mortimer with this Jack in Canada. Who would have thought they were the same person?

It was too impossible to grasp or interpret. That was how Rev and Jo put it to each other, trying to get a handle on it. It was too sad to even think about. They wanted to put their son out of their minds, but they could not do it. They hardly could imagine what more to do than pray, short of sharing their worry with the church, of course, which would mean more prayer, and Lord only knew what people might say! If Rev could not raise a son, how could he pastor a flock? So they dismissed that option, month after month. And they kept The Remaking to themselves, since they were praying already aplenty. And Jo prayed that all of those wonderful, handsome and heroic Canadian Mounties on horseback ‘up there’ where Hollywood had filmed Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald limberlost-in-love would soon find their runaway ‘Jack’ before mj lorenzo ‘did himself in’.

And then, having prayed like this almost incessantly for two whole weeks after first receiving the Wrigley envelope, Jo thought of something else she could do finally. She hated to rain on Jack’s parade, like any mother of an adult son would have hated. But she had to call that Mountie in Yellowknife again and inform him of the rising tide of violence, the implied danger of suicide. And the very nice and kind Mountie, the one with whom she had spoken before, easily recognized by his rich ‘baritone’ voice, informed her that: in general, almost no outsiders visited the Northwest Territories. So when they did, they tended to stand out like sore thumbs even if they were ordinary people. But, as he said, ‘regretfully’, or maybe hopefully, ‘no news was good news’, no report had ‘been filed yet’ of a ‘naked, bennie-popping, young U.S. doctor gone AWOL from his hospital, stealing boats and carrying on with sundry disgrace, all up and down the wide Mackenzie’.

And as for those other so very nice people: Boy! They just thought this was all the biggest waste of a hullabaloo in world history, when they heard about it. They hardly even felt sorry for poor Jack Lorenzo, they had to admit. Or for Mortimer. Though Mortimer was more like them than Jack was maybe, and mj lorenzo’s critics might have felt a little sympathy for poor old mj on that account alone. But no. Their only thought and wish was to put the poor dog, mj lorenzo, and his whole agitated and whining husky crew out of their pathetic misery as soon as possible. Gun to the head: perfect. And they just hoped their Merciful God would do so soon. For His Elect were just itching to proceed with their agenda for peace and quiet on the planet.

At last!

¹ A virtually identical map may be found on pages 62-63 of the National Geographic Atlas of the World, Fourth Edition (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1975), which shows everything from Inuvik and Aklavik to northern Wisconsin.