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    (If you can picture those remote 1945 Japanese peasants earnestly trying to hold a drunken Irish wake, complicated by the experimental wordplay of James Joyce, you can picture the relationship between an author, his typewriter, and that reality to whose recreation he’s obliged to apply the southpaw touch, even though he knows only too well the function Arabs and Hindus assign the left hand.)
    I’m not so far gone that I expect technologists to be interested in designing machines for artists—why, if novelists got wooden typewriters, poets would demand that theirs be ice. What is more likely is that technology will bypass artists, that a day is coming when our novels will be written by computers, the same devices that will paint our murals and compose our tunes. If I’m chuckling, it’s because I’m imagining a computer, programmed to produce logical variations on the eighteen possible literary plots, I’m imagining that computer trying to deal with what happened in Leigh-Cheri’s attic. If I’m chuckling, it means that the Remington SL3 had better watch its P ’s p ’s and Q ’s q ’s.

PHASE
II

 

18
    IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON, a good five hours before moonrise, when the flight touched down in Honolulu, but already the mai tais were swaying, the pineapples were jiggling, the mongooses were mating, and coconuts were rolling in ecstasy. The Hawaii sun, in contrast to, say, the Nebraska sun, had obviously fallen under the influence of the moon and was given to deporting itself in a fairly feminine fashion. Not that the Hawaii sun wouldn’t fry your hide off should you show it disrespect, but it had a romantic aura, a decidedly lunar attitude toward amore that the sun of Mexico would consider soft and weak. Despite the tangle of traffic, the din of condominium construction, the smoking sugar refineries, and the strange spectacle of Japanese tourists roaming the hot beaches in business suits and street shoes, Hawaii was, indeed, a travelogue tableau; a living Pap smear for the paradise flu.
    So goofy/erotic was the Hawaiian language that the street signs read like invitations to pagan whoopjam-boreehoos, and “nookie” was on the tip of every sober tongue. Hawaiian was a language that could name a fish “humuhumunukunukuapua’a” and a bird “o-o,” and never mind that the bird was larger than the fish. Humuhumunukunukuapua’a (a typewriter that enjoys that word as much as the Remington SL3 couldn’t be all bad) still played in Hawaiian waters, not fifty yards from the leather soles of Sony executives, but the o-o, that gorgeous honeysucker, was long gone. Hawaiian royalty favored the tail feathers of the o-o for their ceremonial capes. Hawaii’s rulers were mammoth, their capes were very long. It took a lot of tail feathers to make a king a cape. The o-o was plucked into extinction. O O spaghetti-o.
    Although the ecological implications would have appalled her, Leigh-Cheri could fancy herself in o-o. If our pale Princess could have chosen a land to be queen of, Hawaii was it. The instant she stepped off the jetliner, her heart began to pump pure hibiscus juice. If her hands were tied behind her and the world had Hawaii in its wall safe, she would have figured a way to get it out. Hawaii made the mouth of her soul water.
    Alas, Leigh-Cheri hadn’t much opportunity for reverie. Because of frog problems, her plane had landed on Oahu merely minutes before her connecting flight on interisland Aloha Airlines was scheduled to depart for Maui. She and Gulietta had to run, if you could call Gulietta’s scurrying a run, from one end of Honolulu’s airport to the other.
    So intent was their dash that they failed to notice that Bernard Mickey Wrangle was loping along beside them.

19
    THE FLIGHT TO MAUI was as bumpy as a kite’s. As the small plane was tossed about by drafts, several passengers acquired the hue of Hawaiian foliage. Leigh-Cheri, however, had been driven to the airport that morning by Chuck the