by Roy Scranton
Lucky me, she thought, crossing the parking lot back to the Valiant, I don’t have to face the moral quandaries of selling out—I got authenticity coming out my fucking ears. I already miss my cockroachy apartment and stolen mail. Let the Acela class sleep guilty in their white sheets, chum, I’m a proud and hardy working girl, rootstock of the nation, white, free, and twenty-one. She laughed. All this rude life, isn’t this what you got away from? How come there’s so much space out here, and why hasn’t somebody filled it up yet?
Allentown, Shoemakersville, Hershey, Harrisburg.
Traffic droned on the Lincoln Highway. She leaned against the gold-reflecting green fender of the Valiant, feeling it heavy and metal and real against the abstract gray hotel and liquid road lights and looming geometry of the Alleghenies. She lit a Parliament and checked her phone, which, as per their contract, had been turned off all day long. Trash, trash, her boss wanted her to do some last-minute copyediting, three of her friends were going to see that new movie about the trans Nigerian refugee caught in Hurricane Wendy. The third act was supposed to be heartbreaking. She wondered if her Finnish subletter had arrived. She wondered how was Steve the Cat. She thought about texting Cathy to check, then let it go. She opened Facebook, then closed it. She thought about checking Instagram but didn’t. She stuck her phone in her back pocket and watched the highway.
They got passed earlier by an open-carry motorcycle club, the Appalachian Vinlanders, a dozen low-rolling hogs growling by bearing lean, bearded men armed with AR-15s, shotguns, and pistols. Each leather jacket’s back proclaimed the club’s name in Gothic script, curling over an image of the Twin Towers rising out of flames above never forget and 1488. Two of the men wore swastikas. Where were they going? What was this place? Scalp a fucker, what you think? They were silent for a moment watching the armed men pass—one turned and looked at them as he rolled alongside, flashed an “okay” hand sign with three fingers extended—then fell again to bickering, this time about whether “alt-right,” “neo-Nazi,” “white nationalist,” or “white supremacist” was the appropriate term, or if they could say anything at all, since they didn’t know who these specific guys were. “Maybe the swastikas are ironic,” Jim said, stupidly contrarian.
All the snap and chatter, back pain, vigilantes—you must be low to find this worth 5K, or rather to find 5K worth this. Two more pages, two more pages. Trust the process, one word follows another, consciousness rushes in to fill the frame, narrative emerges, we can’t help it. A and B but C then D. Or is it back to A? How can I be so tired just sitting in a car all day?
Five minutes from the battlefield. Beautifully appointed guest rooms focused on the business and leisure traveler. Each guest room features a refrigerator, microwave, coffee maker, hair dryer. A well-equipped work space includes two telephones, with two lines, complimentary Wi-Fi, ergonomic chair, large work desk, and adjustable lighting. Our fifty-five-inch HD televisions feature satellite selection.
More than anything suddenly out of the dark she wanted her coffee cup, her dirty table, Steve, and the new Nnedi Okorafor novel. Her cigarette smoke, the parking lot, half recalling the fragmented melody of something by Spoon—she thought she saw a ghost, but it was Remy drifting between the shrubberies. Maybe he is a ghost, she thought. Some kind of relief, then.
Remy was slim, slim hipped, hipster intellectual, and withdrawn. He’d undone his Bantu knots and wore his hair now in small dreads, she believed they were called brotherlocks, giving his head the likeness of a spiky ball stuck on the end of a long, wobbly stick. There was, she thought, something Eurotrash in his posture, something slack and hunched at the shoulders, an air of dignified defeat, perhaps, a postwar affect of monadic integrity sustained at no little cost amid the ruins of a betrayed civilization; she imagined he could have been a French Algerian Marxist poet, or maybe an Afro-Corsican post-structuralist philosopher. His face was yet more complicated, somewhere between DJ and mantis, with cheekbones dramatic and fragile as a lost hard drive, beautiful and damned, eyes the blue of dying glaciers. He never blinked, or at least she’d never seen him blink.
She heard him jingling keys as he walked up and watched a smile tremble along the edge of his mouth and disappear. That seemed right, that he should almost feel something, that his life should be composed of half states, like the cat in the box with the atoms and shit. He spent so much time behind the camera he didn’t really seem to have a shape, existence-wise. Was he a full person, or just an assemblage? What did he really do for Jim? Was he gay or ace or weird or what? In it for the money? What kind of fucking name was Remy, anyway?
She remembered getting a transfer at a bus station one time somewhere in Europe with some boy. Neither of them spoke the language and there were many buses and they didn’t know which was theirs and there were people going every which direction and it felt like they could get lost there, forever, like if they separated, the crowd would absorb them each into an alternating montage of dark streets and bands of beggars huddled around trash fires until finally they’d meet again, decades later, passing in the street without recognizing each other through their accumulated suffering and filth. She couldn’t remember if they’d caught their bus or missed it. She couldn’t even remember if the bus station had really happened or if it had been a dream she’d had or something she’d read or something she’d seen on a screen. Remy had something to do with it, though, she was sure, confident as a new ring tone.
“Do your eyes change color?” she asked.
“They do,” he said. “What color are they now?”
“Dying glacier,” she said.
“That sounds pretty.”
“Yeah,” she said, angling off his cool reply. “Earlier they were Ancient Mariner green.”
“I’m getting an aquatic theme. You like swimming?”
She couldn’t help but smile, just a little. “Swimming, drowning. It’s complicated.”
“So I gathered. Jim’s gone to bed.”
She had no idea what this signified.
He gestured lazily toward the Valiant. “Wanna vape some bud?”
She nodded. He unlocked the passenger door, then went around to the driver’s side. They slid in and he turned on the radio. As they vaped, they caught the last few bars of “Don’t Stop Believing,” then station ID “WTPA 93.5 FM, Classic Rock That Really Rocks,” then the chugging hook opening “Radar Love.”
“Thanks,” she said, handing back the vaporizer.
He took a hit and handed it back, then gripped the steering wheel with his long hands. “Pleasure,” he said.
“I’m just, you know, the fucking driving,” she said, slouching into the bench seat, “it’s like I’m tired and cracked out at the same time. I can’t just go to bed when I’m like this. The weed’s perfect. Thanks.”
“Yeah,” he said, still staring at the windshield.
“No, it’s really good. I mean it. Thanks.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What a day, huh? Those bikers?”
“I always find it strange leaving the city. I mean driving away, actually physically crossing the boundary out into the rest of America. I can board a plane and fly somewhere and that feels fine, like I’m still in the same world, but to get in a car and drive out of the metropolitan realm feels like exiting secured space. It feels, I would say, like going back in time.”
“I can see that,” she said, blinking, trying to make him blink along with her. “I grew up out here, not here but here, so it feels personal. What’s weird about it for me maybe is the inside being outside, but different. Uncanny, you know?”
“Unheimlich,” Remy said with a perfect German accent.
“Yeah. Right. My uncanny inside. But mostly I’m just complaining about the filming and putting up with Jim’s bullshit. I don’t know if the money’s worth it, to be honest. What’s his fucking deal?”
Remy tilted his hands sid
e to side in the air like meters wobbling. “Jim is Jim is Jim,” he said. “We’ve been working together for a long time now. He can be difficult, but . . . But, Suzie, may I ask you a question?”
“Shoot,” she said.
“Why are you here?” he asked, his dying-glacier eyes upon her.
She was trying to remember the name of that cat. The one in the box. “You mean existentially? Or, like, right here now?”
“Right here now.”
“I came out for a smoke, cowboy.” She looked into his weird unblinking melting-Arctic eyes that seemed to be filming still, then took another hit off the vape. “What about you?”
He clicked his tongue. “How shall I put it? Jim’s a damaged rich white boy on a slow glide path to self-destruction, and he’s also totally faking it. All of it. His mastery of the vocabulary of contemporary art is dubious at best and often outright laughable. Even after all these years, he still doesn’t know how to act and talk like a professional artist, because he’s not one. He’s an outrider. A barbarian. He wasn’t socialized in the proper programs, Wall Street and American heteropatriarchy seem to have crippled him in unrecoverable ways long before 9/11, and then there was the event—which I’m not going to talk about, because it’s not mine. He’s an aggressive, unbalanced, mildly malignant narcissist and probably what they used to call in polite society an extreme eccentric. Notwithstanding this, there is something—some Miltonic glimmer—something quote, unquote, real there. It’s as if he were a normal, average, regular old American Joe who broke, literally cracked open, and now he’s bleeding truth like Texas oil. There’s something nasty and insane inside Jim because there’s something nasty and insane inside America, and he sees it and owns it in a way that people inside the bubble reject. I want to understand what he sees.”
“Insider outsider art,” Suzie said, watching the headlights from the highway sweep reflected in the hotel windows.
“Something like that. I bring camera technique and a sympathetic sensibility, though we see things quite differently. I like what he does with his editing. He surprises me sometimes, which is a rare and beautiful thing. He surprises me . . . even frightens me a little, and I find working with him aesthetically rewarding. Which is why I’m here.”
“Okay,” Suzie said, “but can I ask you a question about race?”
“If you would like,” Remy said.
“You’re a weirdo,” Suzie said, running her hand through her hair. “But my question is this. You’re black. Don’t you already understand what the fuck’s wrong with America?”
Remy smiled ruefully. “I could see why you might say that. It’s not an unusual view, though I don’t find it particularly persuasive. I’ve lived with racism in the United States all my life, but I’ve lived in France and Germany, too, and seen how those countries are racist as well, if in different ways. I’ll grant you that racism in America is an ugly thing, a kind of institutionalized stupidity, but it’s not unique to this place nor is it the sum total of North American culture. Racism is deeply imbricated in every stratum of American life, but the puzzling, painful truth is that the madness of this country is way more than skin-deep: it’s in the mind and soul. There’s a con man’s apocalypse burning in the heart of the American character, a huckster Götterdämmerung seeded in its changeling birth, acorn to its lynching tree. This is the New World, genocide and utopia and Black Friday, school shootings and the Oculus Rift. Race is part of that, but not the whole thing.”
“Even with the bikers, Trump, all that shit?”
“Racism is a symptom of something deeper, more ineradicable. We’ll never be a post-racial society—Obama was probably the high point of race relations in this country—but even if we somehow were, it wouldn’t solve the puzzle.”
Suzie peered at Remy, trying to locate his power source. “Huh. Okay. So are you two a thing?”
He looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean beyond professionally. A thing. You and Jim. I mean is it complicated.”
Remy laughed. “Are you asking if we’re lovers?”
“Something along those lines.”
“Well, Suzie, Jim’s a man’s man and Jim likes women. I’m more flexible in that regard, though I like women as well. I enjoy sex. I’d like to have sex with you. Now it’s true, I can’t deny, there is a certain homosocial, even homoerotic, shading to my relationship with Jim. It’s somewhat as if he’s my big brother. I look up to him in a certain way. I want to be him in a certain way. But there also exists hate and fear and resentment. I nurse secret desires to sabotage his work. Sometimes . . . Well, I suppose it is complicated.”
“Sounds like it. Do you have any actual siblings?”
He shook his head. “Only child.”
“And did you just make a pass at me?”
“In a glancing fashion. It’s early, though, and I’m satisfied to let our undeniable mutual attraction hang in the air, something we can look at and think about, come back to in our off-hours. I find anticipation often increases the pleasure of fulfillment, and I’m in no hurry.”
Suzie handed back the vaporizer. “I think I’m done with the weed for tonight.”
“Pleased to be of service.” He tapped his long fingers on the steering wheel. A Prius pulled up in front of the lobby. “So, Suzie, where are you from not here out here?”
She lit another Parliament and opened the window. Cool air rushed in, pine and ozone. “I’s raised up in a land flat an’ wasted as the fields of Hell,” she said in a vague rural twang, “where zombies roam the strip malls an’ the future ain’t nuthin’ but the past caved in on itself. Ou’chere where Hope was a good girl once but now she’s hooked on fentanyl, Joy choked to death on her own vomit, and Courage beat his baby mama’s skull in with a wrench. It’s a place where dreams are stillborn—when they ain’t been straight aborted—a holy kingdom where givin’ up’s the only thing that makes any damn sense in this here life. Country ruled by King TV and conspiracy radio, where the national dish is gas-station hot dogs and the national anthem ‘We Can’t Stop’ . . . Why’nt you guess?”
“So many choices. Indiana?”
“Close, but not as cold in the winter,” she said, reverting to her normal voice.
“Missouri?”
“Warmer. Let me give you a hint. It’s where the wind comes sweeping down the plains.”
“Ohhhhhh . . .”
“Mm-hmm.”
“. . . klahoma!”
“Very good,” she said. “You win the prize.”
“Excellent,” he said. “Gas-station hot dog?”
“You want a hot dog?” she teased.
He grinned. “I do believe Jim was planning on going through Oklahoma City.”
“It was on his mental-disequilibrium map, if I remember correctly.”
“Where in Oklahoma?”
“Altus.”
“I don’t know Altus.”
“Who ever really knows Altus? Anagram for ‘a slut.’ Altus Air Base, Ninety-Seventh Air Mobility Wing. I’m an air-force brat, so, technically, I’m from lots of places, but we wound up in Oklahoma, and that’s where I left. We settled there when I was in junior high. My dad was a first sergeant, which is a pretty big deal in the air force. He’s what they call a loadmaster, meaning he knew how to put stuff on airplanes, cargo and pallets and trucks and even tanks. Very organized, very by the book, and his whole life revolved around training and military discipline and technical precision. So you see where this is going: he was a controlling patriarchal dick, and I grew up a trashy punk-rock rebel. I also happened to be great at standardized tests, a straight-A student, and National Merit Scholar, so that was my escape hatch. We fought a lot my senior year over where I’d go to college, but I wore them down and eventually they agreed to let me go to NYU. Never looked back. It feels so long ago now, it’s hard to make sense of who I wa
s then, how young I was. I can’t believe how fucking hopeful everything seemed. Like all I needed to do was get to New York and I’d emerge reborn, a whole new consciousness, in a radically new world. Everything was supposed to be different.”
“Is it not?”
“Yeah, but through a mirror, darkly. That fall was 9/11. The spring of 2002 I started modeling, then dropped out of school, and now I’m here.”
“You go back to Oklahoma much?”
“After the attacks, my dad wanted me to transfer to University of Oklahoma so I’d be closer, or at least go somewhere southerly, Rice maybe or Wash U, but I put my foot down. When I told him I was staying in New York no matter what, he said. ‘That dog don’t hunt.’ He just kept repeating it. ‘That dog don’t hunt, Suzanne. That dog don’t hunt.’ He was terrified I’d get raped and murdered by jihadis, so he told me they weren’t paying for any more school if I stayed. That’s the last time we talked, and I got no plans to see them now. Jimbo wants to drive through Oklahoma, that’s peachy keen, but there will be no happy reunions for the Calder family.”
