by Roy Scranton
“Behold: muscles taut under fame’s blazing corona, women throwing themselves at my feet, masses of grown men chanting my name till their throats grow hoarse and can chant no more, sleeping children dreaming of my face. I was a hero! A champion! A Trojan!”
He watched her watching him as he chanted under the green sodium glow, her ironic glasses, her smooth, straight hair. She slouched a little, and he’d begun to cherish the way the curve of her shoulder fell against the curves of her breasts, breasts he found himself wanting to palpate. It wasn’t in the plan, exactly, but it wasn’t not in the plan either, and whatever had passed between her and Remy was equally up for grabs. She had a way with her sharp green eyes of both daring and laughing at once, as if part of the challenge was taking the idea of daring itself seriously, which only made the dare more serious.
He spread his arms and went on shouting: “America! The pulsing flesh of your dreams, the sacred orange skin of the world in my hand like a spear, a sword, an intercontinental ballistic missile. I am a man among men, immortal youth, and this my monument: To America! To High School! To Hoosiers!”
Stay focused on the burn along the black line into nothing, wheels on fire, a Bible and a gun. Fuck her if you want, Jim, but remember she’s only a servant of the dust god, like you no more than a piece of the puzzle and the death dream we’re dreaming together.
“You like my monologue?” he asked.
“Is that what that was?”
“You know,” he said, “you’d be kinda hot if it weren’t for your fucked-up face.”
She nodded. “High praise coming from a cross-eyed fink too dumb to take off his sunglasses at night.”
“The hell’s a fink? That even a word?”
“Read a book.”
“I would, but being cross-eyed makes it hard. Really: what’d you think?”
“I think you showed good judgment outsourcing the writing.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you say something, then?”
“I’m a writer, Gene. That means I write shit down and think about it. I edit out some noise, put in other noise. I don’t do improv.”
“Yeah, well, there was plenty of noise in your pages today.”
“No problem, boss man. You want something different?”
“I want you to tell me what you think.”
The buzzing lamps, the crickets’ sawing chirp, the velvet embrace of the hot, wet air. She scuffed her Cons on the parking-lot blacktop. “I think you’re full of shit, Gene. Which, in and of itself, is not bad or even unusual. Art’s mostly bullshit, but the best stuff, right, the crème de la bullshit, is so highly refined and audacious and dense that nobody cares whether it’s bullshit or not. The good stuff is pretense transcending its artifice to become a new fact in the world: nature created by human hands. Now I’ve seen your footage, I grok your aesthetics, and it’s clear that you can make bullshit as serene and haunting as anything. But does it transcend? That I don’t know. The problem, I think, is that your images are weighed down by all these dumb ideas. The problem is that your pseudo-philosophical culture-theory Deleuzian bullshit sounds, looks, and smells like bullshit. I don’t even think you believe it. You’re not an intellectual, and I’m not convinced that you really think intellectually about basketball or Gettysburg or anything. I think you’re mostly a dick with a camera.”
He smiled a sad, complicated smile, feeling wounded and turned on. He walked over to the tripod by the Valiant where the camera was running and stood there for long minutes staring at the Fieldhouse. Suzie smoked a Parliament. The moon, a white parenthesis, left the sky an open empty censored sentence over six acres of parking lot bounded down one edge by a wide, nondescript brick building and its monumental sign bearing the school’s sigil, a strangely abstract Greek helmet, the name of the building, and the exhortation go trojans! make america great again!
Jim disconnected the camera from its mount. He put the tripod in the car and pointed the camera at the Fieldhouse. “You know, out of the ten largest high-school gyms in America, nine of them are in Indiana. What does that say to you?”
“Hoosiers like basketball?”
“You have some condition that makes you state the obvious?” he snapped.
“I think of it as a gift,” she said. “Look, I don’t know what you want, Gene. What should I say? This means something? It’s a thin substitute for killing Indians or Japs or Muslims? You want me to say something about the poor, overcivilized American sap who doesn’t have any way to act out his primal urges except through the voyeurism of the sports field, where he watches boy whores destroy themselves in racialized gladiatorial psychodrama, and it’s money and advertising and patriotism and spectacle and what are you supposed to do, you schlep, you sad motherfucker? Is that any less fucking obvious? We all know what’s going on, Gene. Everybody already knows the score.” She flicked her butt off into the parking lot. “Is that sort of what you had in mind?”
“Yeah. Do that some more,” he said.
“Fuck, man. I think there’s something seriously wrong with you.”
He turned the camera toward her. “I know there’s something wrong with me. But that’s not the question. I also know there’s something wrong with America. But that’s not the question, either.” He turned the camera back toward the Fieldhouse. “The question that interests me, Suzie, is are they the same thing.”
“Seriously?” she asked.
“Listen. The Nenets shamans of the Taymyr Peninsula fight disease by doing battle with the spirit of the disease, inside their soul. Some plague comes to your village and you, the village tadibya, deliberately infect yourself so you can struggle with the demon and learn its ways. Learn how to defeat it. You take on the disease to find the cure.”
“And you think you’re a shaman?”
“It’s a metaphor. Fuck Christ. You of all people should not have to be so goddamn literal. They must teach metaphor in your fancy-ass workshops, right? At the New School? It’s like this: There’s something wrong with me, and I’m not sure what it is. There’s something wrong with America, and I’m not sure what that is. There’s something happening, a new warp forming out of the old pattern. You’ve seen it, it’s the dream ballet that haunts your sleep, reality kaleidoscoping around us. Where are we going? In what form will the new pattern crystallize? Is it a death assemblage? Or is it a door through to something else? I don’t know. All I can see is the rush to the void, the blood chaos vortexing into the bottleneck. But maybe if I get out in front . . . scout ahead . . . maybe I can find a way through.”
He hadn’t meant to say so much. It was a risk putting things into words, sharing them with other people. Now he waited, wary, while she processed. He watched her follow him up to a point, then balk at the precipice. Most did.
“Why do you even care about America?” she said, diverting. “It’s not even real. It’s just a name for a government, a label for a surveillance state, a long con. America’s bullshit.”
“Just like art,” he said. “So grandiose and stirring nobody cares it’s bullshit. We must have meaning. We—WE—must exist, held together by collective stress and fantasy. Apple pie. Tea Party. The Wild West. John Wayne. Barack Obama. Anyone can grow up to be president. Private property. The truths we hold to be self-evident.”
“That all white, Christian, property-owning men are created equal,” she said.
“America. The world. Whatever. The point is the vision. We’re not even there yet. This is just act one.”
She relaxed a little, seeing him—really seeing him—for perhaps the first time. “So what’s your vision, Gene?”
He remembered the wreck they’d passed earlier, the smashed Toyota and the toppled truck, human-shaped shapes covered in red-smeared white, the blinking, flashing red and blue lights so festive. The smell of burning flesh and electrical wire co
ming in the window as they rolled slowly past, melting insulation, melting plastic, charred hair. Hot wind rising from the highway.
Rise of the machines, he’d said at the time, half joking. But what he’d been thinking inside was freedom.
“When I close my eyes,” he said, “I see a red desert, black lines, highway to the horizon. I see a point, lines, and space. Pure acceleration. Fire on the mountain. That’s where we start over.”
“So what are we doing in Indiana?” Suzie asked.
“Killing time.”
“Okay, well, I think I’m about done killing time for the night.”
He turned off the camera. “I’ve got a bottle of Maker’s in my room. Why don’t you come up and we can do your pages together?”
She made a face, like disappointment or maybe contempt, he couldn’t quite parse it. Her reaction cheered him, though, because it meant she’d say yes, eventually. Such things were scripted.
“I can do the pages myself, thanks. That’s what you pay me for, boss man.” She started for the Valiant.
“I know you can,” he said, watching her ass sway in her black jeans. “But maybe I can offer some suggestions. The pages today felt off.”
She turned on him. “This isn’t a tango, Gene. I write my words. Not some hive-mind consensus, not the world—me. I pick. My process. Unlike you, I recognize a difference between my mind and reality, and while I draw from reality to do my making, what I turn out is mine, my own thing. It’s not all the same. You’re paying for it, so if you have feedback, tell me what you want and I’ll try to write it like that. But as for hands-on, that wasn’t in our contract.”
He let it go until they got back to the hotel, when he switched off the growling V8 and looked thoughtfully at the steering wheel, putting on his best poised internal struggle. He held it, the two of them sitting in the dark while the engine’s rumble faded into the slow tick of the cooling block.
“Look,” he said, “I was asking you up. I know it’s not appropriate. I just . . . it’s been difficult since Carol left . . . I’ve been . . . it’s been really hard to . . . feel things . . . But you . . .” He looked over at her, then up at the windshield, inhaling, blinking as if holding back tears. “You make me feel things.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Suzie said, opening the door and half sliding out before turning back to look at him. This time he was sure it was contempt. “If this is some shit between you and Remy, duke it out on your time. I’m not a fucking football.”
“I—” Jim began.
Suzie cut him off: “If, by some chance,” she went on, “you just genuinely, truly, madly, deeply want to get into my pants, you’re gonna have to do better than feelings. It’s fucking sad. S–A–D sad. But you know what, sad man who’s sad, I’ll give you some tech support. A little lesson in scoring with grown-ass women. You got to get over this ‘I can help you with your homework’ fucking bullshit. Just ask me, like an adult, if I’d like to come up and fuck. Try saying, ‘Suzie, I think you’re very attractive, and I’d like to have sex with you. Would you like to come up to my room and fuck?’”
His cheeks flushed and his pants felt tight. She was even more appealing than before, somehow, and the blood pounding in his ears seemed the only sound he’d ever heard. “Suzie,” he said, his throat thick, giving her his best Ryan Gosling, “I think you’re very attractive. Would you like to come up and fuck?”
“No,” she said. “Not with you. Not ever.” Then the door slammed and she was gone.
The roaring in his ears crashed like a roof caving in, and he got out and shouted her name across the lot as she disappeared inside the hotel. “Fuck,” he screamed, slamming his fist into the Valiant’s green fender, then “Fuck” again when the pain pierced his red-clouded mind like a white wire. He locked the Valiant and walked around the parking lot, once, twice, and again, then went up to his room and took a shower, poured himself some whiskey, and drank and watched TV until he fell asleep, muttering every now and again fuck fucking frigid fucking cunt fuck fuck.
Bleach sun shuddering humid over endless yellow-sprouting cornfields, low green rows of soy, off-white box architecture, strip malls and highways, highways and parking lots, parking lots brilliant with the shine of two hundred sixty million gas-powered combustion-engine personal-transit devices, five billion three hundred million metric tons of carbon dioxide rising up over billboards reading porn destroys love and jesus is coming and in the beginning god created . . .
They rolled west and southwest, leaving behind the last frontiers, riding the jade Valiant across the scarred back of America, the wide flat plane broken by crossed lines of fiber-optic cable, natural gas, oil, and concrete, the seemingly endless and endlessly fertile acreage of Monsanto and Cargill and Dow, Beck’s Hybrids and Tyson and JBS United, the holy sweep of waving wheat and heavy-headed barley, red sorghum and golden canola, pig factories and chicken factories and cattle factories, land once wide with white oak savannas, fed by flooding rivers, ruled by warrior nomads who lived without knowing the fear of death, land once home to massed flocks and herds of black-eyed beasts so innumerable they darkened the skies and shook the earth with their passing, buffalo and passenger pigeon, antelope, heron, elk, and puma, land now roamed by driverless semis and robot tractors, all automated slaughterhouses, automated factories, automated farms, this land they drove down into, entering the heart of the thing, a heart bounded in concrete and prefab, tract homes surrounded by waste lots.
“Democracy!” Suzie read. “Near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully singing! Ma femme! For the brood beyond us and of us, for those who belong here and those to come, I exultant to be ready for them will now shake out carols stronger and haughtier than have ever yet been heard upon the earth!”
Things at breakfast had been strained, conversation awkward. Indianapolis, Monrovia, Cloverdale.
The water from the tap hard and bitter. The skies hazy gray. The smell of chickenshit and pigshit stinks in from miles off, making them wonder for long minutes if something’s dead in the vents before finally seeing the meat factory in the distance, its simmering lake of fecal slop blazing in the sun’s rays.
Highway patrol, weigh stations, Shell, Arco, Conoco. Terre Haute, Casey, Greenup, Teutopolis, Effingham.
“I will make the songs of passion to give them their way,” Suzie read, “and your songs outlawed offenders, for I scan you with kindred eyes, and carry you with me the same as any.”
Altamont, Vandalia, Greenville, Granite City. Amoco, ExxonMobil, BP.
The first few days they ran high on the feeling of novelty, excited by the project and the promise of it, the sensory shock of going from New York schiz to hours sitting cramped in rolling steel. They read Suzie’s pages, they read a Gideon Bible, they read a copy of Leaves of Grass Suzie had brought along to raise the intellectual tenor of the project. They talked about their favorite sushi restaurants, movies they’d seen recently, the last show they binge-watched, Twitter and Snapchat and fake news, how fucked up America was and could you believe it. They argued about whether or not it mattered to vote in presidential elections, discussed people they knew who knew somebody who’d served in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or Korea or Mexico, reminisced about places they’d traveled. Remy gave mini-lectures, prepared from notes and Wikipedia, on Missouri’s statehood, demographic changes across the Great Plains during World War II, the history of the John Birch Society, and the rise of the Koch brothers. Suzie tried to explain Melville’s The Confidence-Man to Jim, but gave up and promised to buy him a copy next time they came to a Barnes & Noble and read it to him in the car. Despite whatever interpersonal and romantic tensions might have given the hours a certain piquant tang, it still had all seemed like fun, like a road trip, until they turned south and the air began to thicken around them. The sun’s heat turned sour, perverse, and the car became a baking box.
“What are tho
se, cicadas?” Remy asked. “It’s like the soundtrack to Psycho.”
East St. Louis, Pacific, Union. Lunch at Hagie’s 19 after a fierce debate over whether Subway was real food or not.
Soon the car became another cell, too much the same four interior surfaces, same burning metal and leather, same cube rolling over monotonous gray-black roads through monotonous gray-green highway emptiness, same songs on the radio, same assumptions and expectations, same plot, same stops, same beginning, same end, same Suzie and Remy and Jim steeping in their body odor. 76, Unocal, Grandee’s Big Jim’s Truck Stop, St. Clair, Sullivan, Bourbon, Cuba, St. James, Rolla, Newburg, Waynesville, Lebanon, Phillipsburg, Conway, Marshfield, Springfield.
“I will make the true poem of riches,” Suzie read, “to earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward and is not dropt by death; I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the bard of personality, and I will show male and female that either is the equal of the other, and sexual organs and acts! Do you concentrate in me, for I am determined to tell you with courageous clear voices to prove you illustrious, and I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, and I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turned to beautiful results, and I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”
Republic, Mount Vernon, Sarcoxie, Joplin, Neosho, Fort Crowder, Goodman, Anderson, Pineville, Bella Vista, Bentonville, Lowell, Flying J, Petro, Love’s, Pilot.
Suzie smoked and watched for roadkill. Now with all of them implicated, she had to be on all the time, the energy charged and fragile and feral, and she couldn’t let her weak side show to either one at any point for fear they’d push their advantage to extremes. In the night, alone in her room, she let herself remember that she liked them both, more or less, and that even still Jim’s damaged rich-boy drama held a darkly glimmering appeal, whereas Remy on the other hand was comforting in an abstract way, like a Mies van der Rohe chair. Thinking through the narrative possibilities, the options narrowed to one or two sustainable outcomes: either she hooked up with Jim, or she hooked up with no one and they kept their precarious balance as professionals. A sustained coupling with Remy would drive Jim out of his head, leave her disappointed and restless, and endanger the trip. Some kind of easy trio would be the utopian option, though she doubted Jim went for that kind of thing. No, the sexual politics of the situation, given their gender identities and bodies, presented only two choices, and those choices, knowing herself, seemed to narrow to one. Yet she refused to accept the inevitability of her and Jim fucking, first because she believed she was free to decide what she wanted—she wasn’t some fucking algorithm—and second because he was a jerk. So for the time being it was walk the line, but you know what, she thought, fuck that. I do what I want.
