Trixie walked through the living room to the front door of the Red House, which was open, looked through the screen door out to the porch and was not the least bit happy with what she saw. George was leaned back in a chair, his feet propped up on a stool, talking to her. “What the …? What’s she doing here? I thought you told me she…”

George interrupted what he knew from experience was about to turn into nonstop abuse. “Hon, you got to lay chilly. We just talking. Nothin’ more to it than that.”

“Sure, right. Every time I turn around, she’s just ‘happens’ to drop by and the two of you are ‘just talking.’”

“Do you have any peanuts?” the visitor asked, ignoring Trixie. “I’m starving.”

George offered her a few from a bowl. Organic, raw, unsalted.

Trixie screamed, “What are you doing?”

“Being polite to a guest. Wouldn’t hurt for you to do the same.”

“When hell freezes over!”

A Steller’s jay swooped in and landed on the toe of George’s boot. “Me too me too me too me too me too!”

George tossed it a peanut and he flew off with it while the visitor screeched, “Mine! My peanuts!”. Then Trixie started screaming again and George just sighed.

Quinn walked up the path from the tipi, stood at the bottom of the three wooden steps that led up to the Red House porch. He looked at the cat yowling that the top of her lungs through the screen door at the squirrel sitting on the porch railing. “Your peaceable kingdom.”

“Never did learn to keep my women in line.”

“You ready?”

“’Fraid I jumped the gun a little this morning, boss. Started without you.”

Quinn smiled. “A man in a hurry to mellow out. Some other time we’ll have to dissect the irony in that.”

“Dissect away. While you cogitating, step inside and let’s get you caught up.”

The mushrooms were growing in a shallow flat box. A philanthropist grower in San Francisco gave the boxes away free to whomever wanted them, on two conditions: that the recipient grow more (printed and illustrated instructions came with the box) to give away; and that they never be sold or even bartered away.

This particular box, or rather its ancestor by many removes, had started life in Sausalito, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, aboard a houseboat berthed next door to the one Alan Watts had once lived in. Thence it had travelled north, hugging the coast along Highways 1 and then 101, putting in at a house in Fort Bragg where it was cloned.

The northward dispersion continued during the next two years, through a Zen center near Mt. Shasta, a dorm room in Ashland, the Wolf Creek Tavern, an organic farm on the north fork of the Umpqua River, a commune outside Cottage Grove and finally to the basement apartment in the home of the parents of the young man who booked most of the bands that appeared at the Pythian Ballroom, where one of Quinn’s many part time jobs was as post-concert janitor. From there clones had gone to the Red House and to the Eddie Haskell Bunker.

Quinn took two Ritz crackers and created a tiny mushroom sandwich which he swallowed. “Drive down, or be driven?” he asked George as he licked the crumbs off of his lips.

“You got plenty of time to get us downtown before that shit kick in and you stop being chauffeur material. Problem is when it’s time to slide home and we still seein’ the sights.”

Quinn smiled. “Then we’ll make the whole day an authentic 60’s experience and just crash on someone’s floor tonight. The authentic old school way to end a trip.”

They parked at the Elk statue and strolled north through the park blocks. The streets were still wet from the morning rain, the grass wetter still, and the leaves dripped on their heads. But there was a patch of the western sky above Council Crest that was almost blue and the clouds stacked up overhead had the sort of puffy lighter grayness that said “Probably not this afternoon.” As George looked back over his shoulder, the Elk winked at him.

They passed a magical hour at Wink’s Hardware just beyond the park blocks, trolling the dimly lit aisles of wooden bins full of knick knacks and gee gaws. George decided that he should start a small zoo of unusual animals, so he collected a bag full of all sorts of small parts, wondering how they would all eventually fit together and what the creatures would be called.

Quinn thought that Sheila would like to be given a collection of brass washers of various sizes, an idea he kept up even when the clerk told him that unfortunately they weren’t set up to do gift wrapping. Quinn stuffed all the washers in his pocket, George forgot his bag of odd animal parts on the counter and they walked up toward Multnomah stadium.

There was no game that day so they sat in the empty stands and called a game themselves – Quinn doing the play-by-play and George the color commentary. When the score got to be 36 – 0 in favor of the Mavericks, they abandoned team loyalty, left before the game was over and walked into Washington Park and up the steep hill to the ridge overlooking the Japanese gardens. Below them huge carp cruised through the ponds like stately orange blimps through a clear pond-reflected sky.

“Makes you realize how arbitrary it all is,” Quinn offered.

“How’s that, boss?”

“The concept of up and down. I mean right now we’re looking down at the sky. But if we were to tilt our heads back and look up, dollars to donuts we’d see more sky.” He started to laugh. “Which would be nuts, you know?”

George didn’t answer. The orange blimps floating in the sky below had also started to laugh and he wanted to try to figure out why.

By the time they’d walked down the hill to Henry Thiele’s for lunch it was past one. Phil, who was on his second dose of the day, having greeted the dawn with the first dose, was waiting for them outside, snapping non-stop pictures of people and traffic with a 35mm camera. Quinn said, “You’re gonna run out of film at that rate.” “Film?” said Phil. “This thing uses film?”

They walked together in the front entrance past the elegant August, somewhere in his 80s and looking like a geriatric mannequin out of Bijan’s of Rodeo Drive, past the unwelcoming stare of Margaret Thiele, and were seated at a table by the window and began researching the longest menu in the city of Portland. Ten minutes later, George was leaning against the sink counter in the ladies’ room, trying to enjoy the moment, even though the moment had presented him with a nearly insurmountable problem, and even though he was just about this close to being put in hand cuffs.

The dispatch came to Cookie as a man in the women’s rest room at Henry’s who was refusing to leave. She pictured a drunk stew bum who’d wandered off the alcoholic reservation, or a junkie who’d locked himself behind a stall door in the wrong rest room, shot up and then nodded off.

But George hadn’t refused to leave so much as he had tried patiently to explain to the lady why he mustn’t leave, at least not until he’d finished washing up, which was turning out to be unexpectedly difficult, that difficulty being a great pity, given the possible public health implications.

His intentions on getting up from the table after ordering and heading to the rest room were as ordinary as could be and completely uninformed by the mushrooms. His subsequent actions were nothing but informed by the mushrooms, but the reason it all played out the way it did was down to the direction from which he approached the rest room. From anywhere in the main area, diners would walk past the cashier and down the hall, coming to the men’s room first in the standard configuration of public lavatories everywhere: avoid having a bunch of pervy guys walking past the ladies’ room on their way to men’s room and trying to look inside whenever the door opened. But George got turned around and ended up in the rear dining area from where he then headed down the hall in the ladies’-room-first direction.

Which is when the thought came to him that the room to his left that was clearly marked “Women” would be a terrific place to meet and hang out with women. George wasn’t feeling particularly amorous. His horizons had been broadened over the last couple of hours to include all the delights and wonders in the big and wonderful world with its hardware stores, baseball stadiums, blimp fish and all the rest of it, so that he was without any specific point of focus – be it sex or anything else. And yet George was also never particularly not amorous. The coals might be banked but they glowed away beneath the ash. And so he walked into the room with a sense of optimism unalloyed by agenda. He was simply open to whatever might happen.

A woman was standing at the sink, washing her hands. Nice looking, about George’s age. She turned off the tap, pulled the cloth hand towel around in the dispenser, dried her hands and turned around to find George standing to one side, waiting for his turn. She looked at him as she passed by and said in a voice maybe just a little louder, George thought, than was needed, “Wrong room, bud!”

George smiled and said, “Ain’t no problem. Don’t worry about it.” Not clear why she thought she was in the wrong room, he thought, but she was friendly, and that’s always a good sign. But it took only a glance at the bank of complex handwashing equipment to drive the original purpose of his entry into the Ladies room from George’s mind, just as the promise of delights within the Ladies room had driven from his mind the original purpose of his journey down the hall.

The handwashing equipment was arrayed beneath a huge pane of glass that held within it his own image which itself was backed by an intense white light that hovered motionlessly right at the ceiling. The surface that supported the handwashing equipment was made of a material that contained the most incredible swirls of colored patterns imaginable. All that handwashing equipment had been put there, George realized, because whoever constructed the restaurant must have realized that the public would be eating there. And wherever a single member of the public settles in, settling in with them are trillions of bacteria of countless varieties, vast quantities of which are left behind when the individual leaves to return to their own bacteria-coated homes. George, whose job description included regular intimate physical contact with random members of the unhygienic public, now saw the the task that lay before him was nothing short of leaving the space with his own two hands completely free of other people’s bacteria.

A woman came through the door, looked at George, stepped back out and looked at the sign on the door, looked in the door again, then stayed in the hallway and let the door shut. It was when the door closed against the door frame that George’s predicament began to make itself visible. From the stainless steel plate that had the door handle in its middle, a rain of bacteria fell onto the floor as the door shut against the jam, almost exactly like the dust that comes off of a carpet when you hang it on a clothes line and beat it with stick. Except that the bacteria looked nothing like dust. They formed a multicolored snowstorm and then George suddenly noticed the flamboyant microscopic ecosystem that coated – sometimes thickly and sometimes not – every inch of the wall from the door all the way around to the handwashing equipment, into the stalls and up onto the ceiling. If the yellow brick road through Munchkin land was bordered on both sides by farms with a hundred kinds of fantastic crops ready for harvest, growing in a hundred kinds of weird shapes, in a hundred shades of greens, blues and grays with outbursts of reds and yellows, climbing toward the light, swaying with each breath of moving air, it would look like a brown sepia tone print compared to what George was seeing.

And not just all the bathroom surfaces, but his hands too, were coated in bacteria, the same hands that were about to wrap themselves around a club sandwich and contaminate it just as he would lead the sandwich into his mouth. As he surveyed the details of the Ladies room, he began to realize that he didn’t have a clear exit path. He experienced a flash of panic. Then he thought, no, don’t panic. Keep a can-do attitude. It’s just another problem, and it can be solved.

Start with opening the door, then work your way backwards. OK. You have to open the door. But the door handle is the most bacteria-layered object in the whole place. So grasp it with a paper hand towel. But there aren’t any, just that single cloth towel in the dispenser. OK, no problem, just use a length of toilet paper from one of the stalls instead. Good idea, but the last person to use the toilet probably touched more than just the squares that she ripped off. So if he tried to take some with hands he’d just washed, he’d recontaminate. No, better to pull down a whole length of it right now, enough of it so that the next, untouched, layer was exposed. Smart! Then he wouldn’t need more than two or three of the clean squares to use to grab the door handle.

That maneuver accomplished, he turned to the towel dispenser and saw that it was hopeless. Like the toilet paper dispenser, all he had to do was pull the cloth loop down so that the next, untouched portion of the cloth came into view. But that required grabbing onto the portion of the towel that the friendly young woman had just used. With the toilet paper, he’d used the toe of his shoe to unroll it until the clean layer was hanging down. No way to do that with the cloth towel machine. OK, so maybe he didn’t dry his hands at all. Nothing wrong with a little clean water left on your hands. So he would turn off the water and just bypass the hand drying altogether. But then how to turn off the water? The faucets had round plastic handles for the hot and cold water. He obviously couldn’t touch them with clean hands. They were worse than the door handle – the first thing you did with bacteria-dripping hands was use them to turn on the faucets. Would he be able to bend over far enough to grasp each one between his elbows and twist?

It was at this point that Margaret Thiele came in. “I want you out of my restaurant. I’m calling the police.”

George thought about this. “I don’t figure how that help any. Not trained for this sort of contingency, really. Less they bring some Phisohex. See, now that might actually do the trick. Good suggestion on your part. When you call, you be sure an’ ask them to bring Phisohex. They don’t got any of that, tell ‘em whatever they use for disinfecting will do.” He smiled at her. “Thanks!”

Margaret Thiele opened the door and set a heavy sand-filled ash tray from the hall against it to keep it open. She stationed a young waitress in a starched white uniform outside and went back up front to wait for the police.

The waitress stood at the door and watched the floor for a few minutes. Then she said, “Why are you in there?”

“You mean, why I’m here? Or why I’m still here? Answer to the first one’s simple. Answer to the other one’s got a little more to it.”

The waitress looked uncertain and returned to looking at the floor.

“But less hear about you,” said George. “You come here often?”

When Cookie walked through the front door Margaret rolled her eyes, jerked her head down the hall towards the rest rooms and said, “He’s all yours!”

When Cookie reached the ladies’ room, she stood in the open doorway and saw a tall, lanky blond man standing at the sink with the water running, his hands lathered up with soap, and glancing back and forth between the basin and the hand towel dispenser. It took a moment for her to recognize his face in the mirror. When George looked up and saw Cookie in the mirror he grinned happily at her reflection. “Hey! You bring the disinfectant? Be downright unsanitary in here.”