Talking Heads

by John Domini

Oh, my old moles. There were secrets to be gleaned here, dark secrets. But if you jump to conclusions—well, don’t. The darkest secret here turned out to be Madame Z’s. My own. A dark spell, cast by the dirty dead.

  I knew the guy, my guerrilleros. I mean, for starters

  … I knew this fossil. He was none other than our Pseudo, our week’s worth of contempt: the tourist.

  Though of course Popkin needed to go over Kit’s own testimony, the attorney was even more interested in any “neutral documents.” He wanted to see corroboration.

  “Do you have anything to back up your story?” Popkin asked, in plain English. “A memo? Even a business card?”

  Kit thought of the contractors list Rick DeMirris had put together, still on his desk at the office. He thought of the card from Croftall’s aide. Between those two however there was another thought knocking, some connection to Bette.

  *

  The record store, that’s what I needed. [close to mike, intimate] A store in the middle of a square. A vivid full-window display, just across from the T stop. [intimate, switching to present tense]

  It’s a display of a single LP: THIS JUST IN. Copy after copy of a single album checkers the window, glossy 12x12 covers strung up corner to corner, an inch or so behind the glass. [gesture to clarify] A grid.

  The LP isn’t particularly bright—a deep red, except the title—but the day is. Winter sun blasts the display, the metal and glass Boston surfaces. [example: hold award to light] A sheen of cold lies over the square. And at the center of this square, this freezing turnaround under a distant sun, there’s the repeated red cover of the LP reflected in the back of its broad storefront window, reflected too in the facing windows, in the sheen of the sign for the T stop, in the windows of passing cars and trolleys, even in the glasses and visors of bundled riders and pedestrians. [w/ award under light, flash at faces nearby]

  The tourist. I’d know that jacket anywhere. And even with brown rotten-apple skin, even with hair like strands of bomb wreckage—even so, there could be no mistaking that wolf’s jaw, that fadeaway forehead.

  Pseudo Bowie, check. Right down to his Bean waffle stompers. All our man lacked was his sidekick, the mysterioso “Garrison.” The ghost guard never showed. Never; our tourist had put one haunt to rest at least. And I mean, we were sitting in the middle of a haunted harbor.

  See, this time, my mad bombers—this time maybe I was the ghost. Madame Z, maybe. See, I didn’t just know who the guy was, I also knew where he was. I knew where he’d gone when he died. I mean, in his pockets he had Pompeii, and all of a sudden I could read Latin. I found myself going into every last little reason he had for being there.

  Every shadow of a motive.

  Without end it multiplies, this cover. This blank bright sheet pasted over cardboard. It multiplies and soon there’s no telling which is LP, which is the city, its carriers or passersby. A grid without end [flash award in new face w/each rep]: Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77. Talking Heads: 77.

  [pause, lower award]

  So I had my vision. I saw my new medium.

  Where do we go when we die? Well, how about the MTA? So help me. Our Scandie had a pass—hey, there’s a clue—though the name on it was a woman’s. “Elizabeth,” that’s all. Last names had been erased, some kind of selective erosion, over centuries of shuffle time. See, that’s what we’re talking about here, shuffle time. Our loser of the moment (dilettante ’77) was also a tourist of the future (I mean, this is a station under excavation) and the past (I mean, his pocket was Pompeii). Shuffle time and deal again.

  Kit would have expected the downtown holding cell to shake him up more. Would’ve expected some bass-heavy resonance: Your turn, tourist. But from the mucky dig site to the cell, then from the police station’s T stop to his office stairwell, Kit’s surroundings faded into sameness, into nothing. Only once was he jarred out of himself. Only as he walked towards the station’s T stop, as he paused outside a record store. The display in the window rocked him somehow. The checkerboard glare of a hot new LP.

  Talking Heads: 77. That was my vision.

  [CUT TO HERE—resume HERE, if trustees want—ADJUST as needed]

  I rejected the old layout & pasteup. [hold up whatever printed matter available: menu?] I rejected the old grid, a grid built of words words words; every last one of them a vacillating Hamlet. [CHECK TRUSTEES; explain reference?] Every word’s a ham actor, emoting wildly first through one meaning and then another—then through a third, a fourth, a fifth. But that’s not our media [gesture, take in crowd]. That’s not the news, these days. That’s not news, it’s anarchy.

  Shuffle time and deal again. It’s a subtle business, when you get a look at it. Shuffle time captures the thousand thousand faint shadings and shifts in how any one of us might look, seized in the moment. Seized in transit amid past/present/ future, with names fudged and expressions frozen. With all our shadings and shifts—subtle—that’s how these bones speak. That’s what they put me through.

  Oh, my weird os. If only this were a historical novel. If only I’d just reached into his pocket and pulled out a diary, a calendar, a last, long letter to the beloved. Every hero’s got his letter, right? But no sooner did I get into his pocket (no smirking, please) than … no smirking. No joke. I got my hand in his pocket, on his fossil papers, and with that I saw the heads. Heads drifting past, talking heads. Heads in trolley car windows, drifting past. I mean, the song on the soundtrack should be “Charlie on the MTA”—yeah, toss in the ‘50s, too: Hootenanny!—because with my hand in the tourist’s pocket, all of a sudden I was with him in shuffle time, in the musty G-forces of a trolley between stations. Soundtrack: He may ride forever ‘neath the streets of Boston (a lame song, totally). And drifting past the other way, in other cars, are the heads.

  These days, we have the talking head. [example: up-right at mike] The talking head. In it resides the truth as we’ve always wanted it—confined to a single simple square of the grid at a time. In it the entire complicated world is reduced to sheer surface—to coat and tie and hair style. And this head implies, of course, the TV docudrama, my thing. [flash award] Docudrama extends the rule of image-based media, affirming that the news is news. The talking head knows no limit.

  [ADDRESS TO TRUSTEES] Soon it will provide the very shape of thought. The talking head. Only those who conform to it, to its simple and shapely truth, will have a place in its implacable new grid.

  [address to others] I once thought I could see the world in my smudged little weekly, in its scatterbrained layout & pasteup, [shake head] But now I see Sea Level level [smile]. I see it for what it was—the world of the past. The world of the dead.

  [upright at mike] For the future, look to the man in the grid. [ TO TRUSTEES] Look to him, listen. Do as he says.

  [goodbyes, thanks]

  They’re drifting, yes. Shuffle time moves more slowly than our own-maybe to accommodate the extra layering? I could make out details on every passing face. I could hear the heads talking.

  And the rest of me? My tuffgrrl biker boots, my ltaliapunk haircut? I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t say where I was—certainly no cellar I’d ever seen. And I wasn’t too sure what Cue and Ayy were doing there either.

  The record store, that was something. That took him out of his regrets. Otherwise, though, Kit moved through an unchanging drab enclosure all the way downtown and then back to his offices. He remained in the MBTA construction site, the cold sea-smelling hole where he’d met Leo. That had been his mistake, after all, going to the site. The same mistake he’d made at Monsod, the breakdown he needed to understand. The rest of his zigs and zags around the old city were nothing but a shuttling between different versions of the basic nightmare. The dig, the cell, the T, the stairs—the same.

  *

  Cue: Talking heads. Even you’ve got talking heads.

  Ayy: (moves his mouth, but it’s a head in a passing car that speaks—a young Hispanic black, kinda Castro) Talki
ng about, I could work for your paper here.

  Cue: Yeah yeah yeah. Quite a trick. But talking heads? We’re the ones supposed to have the heads. We’re the punks.

  Ayy: (speaks for a woman this time, a blonde with aristocratic brow and lips—Farrah Fawcett my goodness) I need some time alone, Kit.

  Cue: O-kay. These are your motives, I get it. These are the people who motivate you. They’re reason you’re heading—wherever you’re heading.

  Ayy: (his own voice for once) Or, then again, maybe this just proves I’m a believer. At the end of the line, I come back to …

  Cue: Hey, I’m the one who does the explaining. I’m the one who’s hip.

  Ayy: (Castro again) Man, all I know is, my Mama’s in a bad way.

  Cue: Yeah yeah. All I know is, the Talking Heads are the ‘70s counterculture. They’re the emblem. The definitive imitation.

  Ayy: (Farrah Fawcett) History appears to me now as this awesome light getting brighter and brighter behind our backs.

  Cue: Imitation is the sincerest form of anarchy. We take The Man’s worst secret and we wear it on an earring.

  Ayy: (himself, with a wicked skull’s grin) You keep saying “we.” I don’t see anybody else but you and me.

  Cue: Yeah but, yeah but—you can’t be one of us. You’re the tourist.

  Ayy: (guess who) Psy-cho-analyze. Seems sometimes like that’s all you white boys know.

  Cue: O-kay. You’re saying it’s not so important, I get it. It’s not so important to suss out what’s hip and what’s ’60s—or worse …

  Ayy: (guess) Most of it’s sheer silliness, to be sure, utter silliness.

  Cue: You’re saying, come the millennium, who’s going to care? The difference between your Bob Dylan and my Elvis Costello—come the millennium, zip. No difference.

  Ayy: (still the bony clicksong) For starters. The punk becomes the success, over and over. For starters. But these days we can do a lot worse than that.

  Cue: (checks the passing trolley windows, sees only own reflection)

  Nor did his building’s hallways offer better. The colorless walls might as well have been plywood and corrugated steel, and most of the equipment on the site had been abandoned. The woman’s counseling setup across the corridor from Sea Level had gotten so short on cash that half the time they had no one in the office. And Kit heard nothing behind his own door.

  Ayy: These days we do a lot worse. These days we chuck the whole distinction, counterculture to culture. Outside to inside, Q to A—zip. No difference.

  Cue: But, but that means no alternative. No alternative press.

  Ayy: Or it means everything’s alternative. (I don’t even want to think about his laugh)

  Cue: But, but there’s still an authority. In fact the talking head provides media with a terrible authority, more than ever. Big Brother is watching.

  Ayy: Not from where I sit. (waves a skeletal hand at the glassed-over faces surrounding us) Not in shuffle time. Here the future looms as an endless living nexus of passageways lined with information, a worldwide web of passageways that carry us in every direction at once, with every head constantly peering in on every other.

  Cue: (massages forearm) And the passageways include the past, I get it. Oedipus faces off with his riddles forever.

  Ayy: It’s nothing but alternative, the personal all over the media. In these passageways, every least motive is made visible, every last filthy urge.

  Cue: Oeddie whups the Sphinx, and in the same hot minute, gets whupped by the shepherd.

  Ayy: It’s all in there, yes. No distance between Sphinx and shepherd. No hero, no whole truth. Only every last little shame or blemish, exposed and magnified, a dizzying highway of reflections of reflections .

  Cue: Man, oh man, what am I doing here?

  Ayy: (Castro again, out of nowhere) I said it gets crazy, didn’t I?

  Cue: Don’t ask me. Don’t ask the asker.

  Ayy: (the blonde now, natch) You must have noticed. You must have seen all the new—

  Cue: (massaging, struggling to pull that hand from his pocket) Z, my name is Zia, I’m going to live in Xanadu.

  *

  When he discovered his wife in his office, for a moment Kit thought he’d gone truly crazy at last. Invisible layout & pasteup had given way to actual hallucination.

  No. Bette sat at Zia’s desk.

  His wife, in her undertaker’s coat. His wife, not so much lips and hair this time as eyes, orchid-blue. She’d looked up at Kit’s entrance, she took him in wide-eyed. Then she dropped her head—lips working, face reddening—over the garish pastels of Zia’s cards. It was a smaller head than Kit remembered, no longer the vast supernatural emblem he’d confronted on the Cottage beach. No longer so unapproachable, because now Kit approached, striding around Corinna’s empty desk. Corinna was gone, Louie-Louie too: the brother Kit had been coming to see since he’d gotten out of bed that morning. But this was no more than a blip in his awareness as he swung through the openings in the office partitions, moving towards his wife. Towards her T-square of neck and shoulders, her face lifting his way again. They went right into it, a full-mouthed kiss.

  “Oh honestly,” Bette said, when they broke.

  Kit was sinking onto one knee, dizzy, awkward. People weren’t built to embrace when one was standing and the other was in a swivel chair.

  “Silliness,” she said.

  But they kissed again, more comfortably. It didn’t feel so much like sex—though there was some of that, hump against ripple even with their coats on—as like relief. For several seconds, Kit tumbled again within the balloon fabric of their marriage, at once nowhere certain and right at home. When the embrace broke off a second time he began telling her so, saying how glad he was she’d come, how much he needed her, how much …

  “Kit,” Bette put in, “who was that young man who was here?”

  Still on one knee, Kit shifted out of her lap. Even if he’d known how to hide his hurt, he wouldn’t have bothered.

  “Oh, Kitty Chris.” That sounded better. “Isn’t my being here enough? Being here and kissing you and kissing you?”

  “No way,” Kit said. “It’s not nearly enough.”

  She smiled but kept him at arm’s length. Kit, despite the fog of his happiness, could see she was road-weary. Had she been back to Providence? Bette was saying she needed to understand. She needed him too, all right yes—but she didn’t understand. Kit’s testimony hadn’t mentioned anything about a Louie-Louie Rebes.

  His testimony, check. Kit massaged his breastbone; the beehive within was dripping and humming at once. “He’s the brother, Bette. You can probably figure it out.”

  “You hired him, Kit? You, you’re giving him work, you think that might help?”

  He nodded.

  “You hired him, well. And where did you expect to find the money for that?”

  So here it came, three days’ worth of hard feelings. Didn’t Bette see his mud stains from the construction site? Couldn’t she tell she wasn’t the only one who was road-weary? And the first thing she wants to talk to him about is money. Kit got his hands busy, undoing his noisy coat. He stood and hoisted a chair over Zia’s halfwall.

  “Kit, I’m sorry,” his wife was saying.

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “You saw my—letter. You saw what I’ve been through.”

  “And you saw mine.”

  “Kit, I did chase them out. Your new man and Corinna, I chased them out, you see. So that you and I, well.”

  They settled into facing chairs, their hands hanging over their knees, not quite touching.

  “Kit, I knew you’d be here and I came here.”

  “And I waited till you came. I gave you the space.”

  “Oh, honestly.” Bette heaved a full-bore Aristocratic Sigh, lots of shoulder action. “You know Kit, loving you, well. It’s almost better but not quite. Almost, but not quite.”

  “Almost better?” Kit wasn’t about to fall back into their stag
e business.

  “Almost as good as, well. As good as the sort of new woman one sees in the magazines. I’m almost ‘liberated,’ don’t you know.” She’d gone lilting through that sentence, but the next was toneless, serious. “Almost unencumbered by history.”

  She’d lowered her face, and seemed to study the glowing Catholic cards on Zia’s desktop.

  “Sometimes I understand,” Bette said. “Sometimes I realize that my husband isn’t history. He isn’t that bust on the cornice.”

  “I’m not smart enough to be history, Betts. I make a lot of mistakes.”

  “Yes, yes. I suppose these past two weeks prove that.”

  Patience, husband.

  “Well. Kit, you see, mistakes and all, well. How could I hope to compete with you? Honestly. How could I ever match you, mistakes and all?”

  “Aw, Betts.” Kit took hold of her dangling hands. “You don’t believe that.”

  “Kit, how? How could I hope to come up to you? Could I outsmart you? Could I out-muscle you?”

  “Come on, you’re the best. I’m the one who’s—”

  “Honestly.” She wouldn’t let herself be drawn into an embrace. “Could I out-write you or out-work you? Could I out-integrity you? Could I? Really?”

  “Bette, your integrity, it’s amazing. It’s in every word you say, total integrity. And what’s amazing is, at the same time, you’re playing.”

  “Certainly I could never out-dream you, Kit. Precious few people in this world dream so big as you.”

  Kit fought an impulse to rise and pace. Insisting he was no hero, he mentioned again the past two weeks.

  “These past two weeks, my husband, you’ve been a bigger hero than ever. A tragic hero, the best kind. One day Hamlet, the next Oedipus. And I could never hope to compete, Kit.” Her voice broke, a startling echo under the high ceilings. “I could never hope to come up to you. The only thing I could do was to keep you in love with me.”

  Still she resisted an embrace, letting him hold no more than one hand. With the other she finger-combed her winter-roughened haystack.