by Roy Scranton
The half-empty bed, now huge and bodiless, still bore pockets of her scent, night-tortures uncovered in confusion and pique. The half-empty mirror on the wardrobe door no longer held her face, though it was her old black party dress he saw himself reflected standing in, fitting it awkwardly, the bust deflated but straining around his rib cage, material bunching at the hips (though not much, what with Carol’s frankly somewhat androgynous figure), his lean, hairy runner’s legs descending from the hem like hijacked limbs. Above the low neckline his shoulders erupted obscene, and his face gave the image its final lie, not improved by the lipstick and rouge he wore. Five o’ clock stubble on a firm chin, craggy cheekbones, thick Adam’s apple, his short, shaggy haircut. Still, his cock stirred as he stared.
He sat on the edge of the bed and lay back on their Icelandic eiderdown duvet, reached for the remote, and turned on the screen mounted over the dresser. He felt the inclination to be flying, not quite a wish, barely more than a velleity, but still a trace, settling into a first-class seat and feeling the ground fall away as the plane lifted, suddenly weightless, suddenly free, hours of blissfully empty time opening up, wispy white horizons, movies, sudoku, nothing, while at the journey’s end the promise of unknown faces, a new city with all the same shops and restaurants, maybe you’d discover something important about yourself. Maybe you’d meet someone. He remembered his fingers up Becca Hunter and she was him, they were the same, his fingers inside himself, on a plane.
On the screen, Turkish F-16s bombed Saudi-backed Kurdish militants and fires raged across the Canadian taiga. He took another drink of scotch, dropped the remote, and reached behind him under his pillow for the revolver. The smooth, pitted walnut grip was cool and heavy in his hand: the Colt felt more like a chunk of rock than a machine, more like a club than a pistol. He swung it over his chest and opened the cylinder, counting: six copper-jacketed slugs fat as bees, big as fingers, waiting to go somewhere fast and bang. Then he rolled the cylinder closed and raised the weapon above his head.
It had cost him $94,785 cash at auction. It had belonged, apparently, to one William Van Wyck Reily, a young lieutenant in Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. At the Little Bighorn, where Custer’s riders fell and the dusty plain drank deep of their blood, an Arapaho named Waterman cut Lieutenant Reily down, hacked off his fingers, and took his government-issued Colt. Later a Sioux named Two Moons took the weapon from Waterman. Later still, it wound up in the hands of the famous South Dakota collector Wendell Grangaard. Some suspected the weapon had been part of a cache of mementos buried with Two Moons, which had been stolen in 1960 when Two Moons’s vault had been broken into. Others alleged the revolver was a fake. The weapon’s provenance had been verified by Colt historian John Kopec, and the thing felt real, but Jim wasn’t sure. Did it hum “Garryowen”? If so, he couldn’t hear it. He’d spent almost as much trying to verify the weapon’s history as he had on the weapon itself, but at the end of the day, all he had was a story.
He lowered the seven-and-a-half-inch-long barrel to his face, running the blued steel along his cheek. He licked the hole where the bullet came out, tasting metal and oil, the faint trace of cordite. Then he hitched Carol’s dress up his thighs to his hips and rubbed the weapon against the taut satin of the panties he wore, a shiny purple G-string edged in lace. His cock strained against the fabric, calling out to the weapon in sympathy, aching for unification. He jammed the pistol grip between his thighs and rubbed it against his perineum.
It was time. He put his scotch on the nightstand and reached in the top drawer for the lube, then knelt on the bed so he could see himself sideways in the mirror over the dresser: the smear of red across his face, dress up over his hips, ass high in the air, face flushed. He slathered the Colt’s barrel in lube, then slid the tip back between his cheeks, pushing the G-string aside. The metal was cool and firm against his sphincter. He breathed slow. Deep. He watched in the mirror as the barrel slid into him, long blue-black inches. The cold metal pressed against his skin, inside, outside, and his other hand went to his crotch. He imagined it was Suzie inside him, Suzie please, Suzie behind him and in him, Suzie fuck me, Suzie revolver, Suzie metal flesh, Suzie Two Moons Suzie Custer Suzie Trump, Suzie America, Suzie fucking Remy a great black wave.
“Nasty bitch,” he muttered, coming.
Then, feeling guilty, he pushed himself off the bed, took a drink of scotch, and wiped the weapon clean. He slid out of his wet panties and washed himself, put away the revolver, and turned up the TV. He went out through the French doors into the living room. There was a great empty square on the wall where Carol’s favorite painting had hung, an abstract thing in olive drab, hot salmon, and matte silver, the traces of which still played across his vision. It had been a good investment, ten years ago now, an early Keltie Ferris, and was almost as vivid in his memory as it had been in person. Like melted YouTube, sharply geometrical but spryly out of focus, a close encounter at the edge of visibility.
She let him keep his cowboy art, of course, the Tim Cox, Jack Sorenson, and Michael Swearngin, the imitation Remington. He’d had to fight for the Kehinde Wiley and Douglas Bourgeois, but they were his, his precious, his glowing black bodies shining out of wildly extravagant textures. In exchange, she took the Radcliffe Bailey and the Fahamu Pecou. He counted that a win, aesthetically and financially, yet it gave him little pleasure.
The maid had come in earlier and cleaned up all the molding takeout containers, the empty bottles, the dirty clothes, and he was struck anew as always with pleasure at the spacious emptiness of their apartment. His apartment, in point of fact, but he was willing to negotiate on that, too. Still. He looked out the window across the river at New Jersey, the lights on and off in the dark, America beginning there, a vast black continent sprawling to the ends of the earth, while the Hudson’s water emptied into rising seas.
“And then we learned that becoming free from history was the same thing as destroying it,” he said to himself, testing the words on the air, watching his reflection in the window.
He wondered if he had any coke left, then remembered he hadn’t. Thought about taking an Adderall. Thought about going to bed. Took a drink of scotch.
He turned and shuffled down the hall to his studio, where he was greeted by the elaborate light show of his many blinking machines, processors and routers, external drives, his bank of flat black screens. He slumped into the captain’s chair, tugging the dress down between his ass and the seat leather, and wiggled his mouse, bringing everything to life with a chitter and a hum. He opened up Final Cut Pro and Gmail and Twitter, scanning for new inputs: James, Please add me to your LinkedIn network; Limp Dickk, I have something for you!!!; Artforum; e-flux; Audible.com. Also real email from his lawyer, the curator at the Kitchen he’d emailed his latest Vimeo to three weeks ago, his mom, and Suzie. He would take them in order, breathing slow, his spent member slimy against his thighs. His lawyer was updating him on the divorce, Carol’s most recent demands, the point in its life cycle the process had achieved, pupa, chrysalis, mutate, advising on “strategy” and “game plan” to handle this step, and the next, and the next. Rebuff, redirect, deflect, threaten nuclear, negotiate. Arctic sea ice collapse. UNHCR rep calls global refugee problem an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Can China read your thoughts?
The curator turned him down, saying he liked the material, but the proposed project didn’t currently meet their needs. This was the four-channel slo-mo pickup game he’d filmed, paying the lean black teens one hundred dollars each to let him set up his cameras around their game, plus the handheld, forty minutes of hard play strung out to four hours of slow dribbling and tossing, intercut with found black-and-white footage of birds flying over the city, overlaid with a mix of hard/soft ambient techno, somewhere between seapunk and witch house, fading in and out of recordings of Obama’s speeches about Guantánamo played backward, the orange of the ball turned up so high it almost glowed, Cage My Soul, always one channel
through the chain-link fence. Cultural imperialism, torture, race, rhizomatic distribution of the sensible, blah blah blah. Remy did some great shit on the handheld for that. These fucking shithead Eurotrash curators, they didn’t want anything unless it was already famous or came from Yale, and they especially didn’t want anything about actual people, real stuff, nothing about sports or fucking or work. They wanted war and dancing and Svalbard and media critique and the same old fucking vapid bullshit. But the real problem, he knew, was that he was a white man filming black men, which meant he was stealing, which was too close to the actual truth of the economic structures of the country to replicate within the ideological fantasy space they all agreed to call “art.”
His mom wanted to know if he was okay, she hadn’t heard from him in a while. She was having a fine summer at the house in Languedoc, pleasant enough though very hot, even in the mountains, even this early in the season. His brother had visited with his family. Was there any chance he’d make it out before fall?
Best for last.
He hovered the cursor arrow over the final message, testing his feelings. 360 Video from Nigeria. White Nationalist Intersectionality. Muslim Registry Bill Stuck in Committee. Do your employees think you’re a good leader? Take this test and find out how. He could feel the very edges of hope and rage, the shoreline of an abyss, starry heavens shining in a black pool. All you need is a gun and a girl, a WingStreet Pizza Hut, traditional & bone out. All you need is sex and death and light. Was it still true that art something something something freedom? Or had we crossed the streams?
Well?
She said yes. She had conditions and reservations, but yes. She’d already started working on the script and had solved some of the logistical problems and she would go with him and Remy into the past and write the future. Freedom. Wilderness. MAGA.
He took a big drink of scotch, minimized Chrome, maximized the film he was editing. He worked late into the night, slicing, adjusting, making landscapes shake at precise particular rhythms, and all the while the vision in his mind was of a huge red car rolling fast down black road.
He unfolded the map, spreading the country wide across the table: America, broken by creases Jim tried to flatten with his hand, scribbled over in tiny coded ballpoint marginalia, random numbers, Greek letters, dollar signs, question marks, circles and triangles, routes highlighted in fluorescent coral pink and hazard orange. Suzie drew her rye back from under the flap and retracted her hands, thinking what the fuck—then, seeing her look reflected in the liquid warp of Jim’s silver aviators, composing herself and pulling her face together, breathing, telling herself money in the bank.
“I found a 1971 Plymouth Valiant Scamp for only about fifteen thousand dollars,” Jim said, holding the map down. “It’s this ecstatic lime green. Really great. Bench seats, column shifter, crank windows, AM/FM, three-hundred-eighteen-inch cubic V8 engine, gigantic trunk. You gotta see it. You could cram a Girl Scout troop in that trunk. I also had AC installed, and a swivel mount in the ceiling for a second camera, so we can film constantly in addition to the handheld. We’ll start as soon as I get in the car on Monday. Then I’ll drive out to Brooklyn to pick you two up.”
“Queens, actually,” Suzie said, “but you don’t need to come all the way out to Ridgewood. I’m sure we can take a train in, save an hour or two getting out.”
“It takes how long it takes. I want the whole zoom, the sweep of urban decay, gentrification, and the BQE. I want Robert Moses, razor wire, and burning cars.”
“Yeah, I can’t really promise burning cars.”
“I’ll come get Remy in Crown Heights, then pick you up in Ridgewood, then we’ll cross back over the Williamsburg Bridge to the Holland Tunnel.”
“Why not just take the Verrazano?”
“Look, I want certain shots. I want the Jersey marshes and the terminals and I want the long shot of the south tip of the island. I want to cut that, see, with found footage from the same angle, old stuff, the towers, the absence, the empty sky, get it? Now you see me, now you don’t, then we’re off in the great wide open. My rough plan is to stab into the heart of Trump country, through Allentown and Harrisburg, riding 70 west more or less to St. Louis, then take 44 through Tulsa to Oklahoma City, 40 west to Albuquerque, where we’ll hitch a sharp right north up I-25 through Denver all the way to Crow Agency, Montana, the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Then we come back down, through Salt Lake, Provo, Las Vegas, and finally Los Angeles. Google says it’s about forty-two hundred miles, so if we spend at least five hours a day serious driving, maybe more, we could do, say, three hundred fifty miles a day, which is twelve days in the car, leaving us six for sightseeing and rest. Then we wind up on the beach with Neil Young. I have a friend who has some oceanfront property out near Point Conception, he says he knows a good place to drive a car off a cliff.”
“Which is probably illegal,” Remy said.
“I don’t mean go over with it. Block the gas pedal, light it on fire, slip it into drive, and whoosh. There it goes.”
“Most definitely illegal,” Remy said.
“It’s the closing shot.”
“After I’m on the plane, okay?” Suzie said. “I’m not interested in going to jail for felony littering.”
Jim laughed, a bark pushed over the table like a fist. “Okay. So that’s the big picture. Anybody have any requests? Diversions? Ideas? Places you’d like to go along the general route?”
“You want the script to start in the city?” Suzie asked. “By yourself? With us? You want some kinda Arthur Miller monologue get you going?”
Jim bit his tongue thoughtfully, looking creepy. “Good question . . . No. Let’s start on the turnpike. Something inane.”
“That’s how I do.”
Remy got up and moved the camera to take in a cross angle. Suzie felt him go behind her, but she kept her eyes on the maple table, the gray walls, the faux-distressed pictures of Belgium, the map. You’d think she’d be used to cameras, but this felt different, closer to reality TV, maybe, an all-the-time thing. More reality, maybe, or less. She couldn’t tell yet.
“Where possible,” Jim said, leaning over the map, highways shining in his silver lenses, “I’d like to take back roads. Old two-lane highways. The interstate’s great and fast and boring, but I want a little variety. Especially out West. I want red canyons and blasting heat. I want white sand and rocket-blasted straightaways. Old diners. A sign swinging creaking in the wind and forlorn waitresses.”
“Aw, gee, let me check my little book of clichés,” Suzie said, picking up her rye. Remy huffed, somewhere between a chortle and a snort, then came back around and sat down.
“Precisely,” Jim said. “All clichés. It’s all about clichés. It’s all about freedom and democracy and starting over and making a clean break and moving forward and making America great again. It’s all fast cars and hot bitches and massive handguns. It’s speed and death and sex. It’s hitting the road and going west, Tom Joad and Jack Kerouac and the Beach Boys and John Wayne, James Dean, Lewis and fucking Clark. Bonnie and Clyde. Thelma and Louise. Mickey and Mallory. Charlie Starkweather driving through the Badlands of North Dakota. I want to inhabit the cliché so totally we’re not even conscious of it anymore, we’ve gone beyond ironic, we no longer have the distance to judge or sneer or feel like it’s something outside. I want to eat cheeseburgers and run from the cops. I want dark desert highways, cool wind in my hair. I want to live there. I want to be the dream. But this—” He smacked the table. “This is where you and Remy come in. You don’t believe shit. You two fucking hipsters don’t believe in anything. You’re genderqueer post-racial cosmopolitan technocratic millennial ironists, cynical and smart and alienated and the only thing you believe in is abortion, democratic socialism, and Instagram. Whatever dialogue you write, Suzie, it won’t be believing and it won’t be living the dream. So that’s one angle. The other’s Remy
, who’s our floating eyeball. He’s got the double consciousness and the double vision and the cyborg eye, he follows us and the car and the road and he sees what he sees. I’ll set up shots and make certain decisions, but Remy . . . Remy’s the nigger with his finger on the trigger.”
“Jim, you know you can’t say that,” Remy said.
“I’m fucking quoting Snoop Dogg, dawg.”
“Still not okay.”
“Look,” Jim said, losing his patience, “there’s a triangulation. Like this. Here’s me.” He pulled a pen from his pocket and drew a dot, circling and circling until it took on weight, somewhere in Canada. “Here’s you.” He drew another, out Oklahoma way. “And here’s Remy.” He drew a third, Deep South Atlanta, then inked hard lines connecting all three, a giant Illuminati-blue triangle. “This area in the middle, that’s the project. That’s America. Contested space. A DMZ, fought over, emergent, reimagined. See? We’re allies, we’re coconspirators, we’re partners in crime, but we’re also antagonists, competitors, each pulling for our vision of the strict constructionist dream. I mean, I expect us to be contrary because I expect we’ll be sick of each other in an hour. But there’ll also be subterranean currents, a deeper agreement, a unified flow.”
“Or you’ll make one in the editing room,” Suzie said. She still hadn’t signed a contract. She could slam her rye, walk out, and go back to Steve and Ridgewood and her failed novel about Caril Fugate.
Jim leaned back. “Sure. It’s my project, in the end. But for the trip, it’s us. All three, full partners.”
“What’s the fucking point?” Suzie asked. “How is this not some high-art conceptualist retread of tired Tarantino bullshit?”
