by Roy Scranton
Springdale, Chicken Capital of the World! Tyson Foods, Inc. They have another fight that night, this time over who’s supposed to clean the trash out of the car, then split for their rooms, tensions high. Suzie goes to Remy’s room and they get high and watch a Westworld rerun, then she goes to bed alone. At breakfast there’s an argument about whether or not they should go deeper into Arkansas, finally settled two to one against, Remy and Suzie aligning to block Jim. Jim sees what’s happening and it infuriates him, but he’s a patient man. Anyway, this movie is scripted. They hit 412 west for OKC.
Mostly she missed her cat, her routine, and although she hated her work and the stupid constant crises, she found she missed that, too, just the comfort of the routine. Was she turning into the kind of person who’d rather stay home? The one who lets things go? And if so, is it just a function of age, or some slippage in her character? She wasn’t really sure anymore who she was exactly: something more or less than a big weird bug stuck on the inside of a southbound windshield. Also, after the jolt of novelty wore off, the long silence and flat land freed her mind to reflect on the past in a way not often available in the hunter-predator crowd-splicing attention economy of the digital urban day. This reflection was something she didn’t particularly welcome; it was painful and sad and confusing to think back on her family, her childhood, her life on the plains and elsewhere, the choices she’d made. One time she almost burst into tears because she remembered a birthday present someone gave her childhood best friend when they were both little, she must have been seven, a sparkly charm necklace reading princess. Suzie stole the necklace one night when she slept over, then buried it in a hole in her yard, motivated by envy perhaps or just malice, and the mingled rush of pleasure, fear, and guilt that hit her when she saw her friend crying over the lost charm made her flesh tingle even today. What an awful thing, she thought, and how am I any better now? When was the last time I saw—what was her name—Christie? Krista? Crystal? Would I apologize if I saw her today, or keep it to myself? Or forget again what happened?
Siloam Springs, Chouteau, Inola, Texaco, Citgo, Philips 66.
“I will not make poems with reference to parts,” she chanted, “but I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble, and I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all days, and I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but has reference to the soul, because having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul.”
Tulsa, Sapulpa, Bristow, Stroud, Davenport, Sinclair, Sunoco, Chevron.
Jim, on the other hand, despite his irritation, was secretly pleased, for although the driving was getting pretty goddamned boring, they were over the transition and beginning to settle into the thing itself, which was developing a pleasant edge. All this was almost exactly what he’d had in mind, and he looked forward to more fights and was happy because the animal is never more alive than when it’s fighting. He wanted them together but estranged, and it was all shaping up quite nicely. He thought ahead to the desert, the wind and sand and burn, and thought of his Colt buried deep in his rolling suitcase, its weight, the smell of slick oil, the firm feel of the heavy rounds, the barrel’s hard thrust. He imagined Suzie howling in the juniper, half mad, her voice worn to its last ragged human strains—and he couldn’t help but smile, glad for the challenge and thrilled at the prospect of it, the autonomy of art. He wondered if she would cry. Oh, she was tough, no question. But everyone had their breaking point. Then he’d pick up the pieces and she’d look at him so gratefully, so tenderly, it would change everything.
Travel Centers of America, Valero, Chandler, Wellston.
Remy filmed her mounting the steps to the western gate, the afternoon sun flashing off the bronze wall and the numbers over the entry. She walked with grace and slowly, trailing white, veiled in white, carrying a white bouquet.
“That’s good,” Jim said. “Just like that.”
She passed through the doorway, framed between the bronze and the emptiness of the cotton-streaked Oklahoma blue, 9:03 above her like the name of a god.
“Stay on the door, now, don’t focus on the number, don’t focus on the inscription. Just let it zoom out very, very slowly until we get the street and the cars and everything.”
Remy held the camera level on its tripod, letting it run, then began to do what Jim asked, slowly opening out to the rest of the world. As the view pulled farther and farther back, the monument seemed dwarfed—not by the insignificant Oklahoma City high-rises, hotels, and government buildings, but by the immensity of heaven itself.
“Great . . . great . . . great . . . ,” Jim said. “Cut.”
They folded up the tripod then hustled across Harvey Avenue and through the gate, where they found Suzie leaning in the shade, fanning herself with a brochure.
“This dress is a fucking oven,” she said, throwing back her veil.
“Heat wave,” Remy said. “Wet bulb’s supposed to get up over a hundred today.”
“Awesome. Nothing near as sexy as a wedding dress with pit stains. I’m gonna smell like a trucker by the time we’re done, if I don’t get heat stroke first.”
“I have to admit, I’m somewhat disappointed by how empty it is here,” Jim said, looking out over the long, shallow memorial pool hazing in the heat, a skin of water over slabs of black granite edged by white and gray stones, which separated the eastern and western Gates of Time. To the north of the pool a few scattered trees—the Rescuers’ Orchard and the Survivor Tree—framed the way up a small rise to the blocky eyesore Journal Record Building. The south side opened to a field of empty chairs, glass and bronze, surrounded by evergreen pines.
“It’s eerie,” said Remy. “You’re from Oklahoma, Suzie. Have you been here before?”
“No, but I remember it happening. We’d just come back from Japan and I had to start junior high in the middle of the year. The bombing seemed like part of the general fuckedupness of my life at the time, like of course there’d be a terrorist attack.”
“I didn’t know you lived in Japan,” Remy said.
“I tend to block it out myself.”
“The brochure says the Journal Record Building houses the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism,” said Jim. “After we’re done here, I want to film that.”
“Either of you gentlemen have any water?” Suzie asked.
“I’ll go get some while you two shoot the next sequence,” Jim said.
First he had to set up the shot. He wanted Remy right next to the gate, in the shade, and for Suzie to walk though again, ever so slowly, and for Remy to keep the camera tight on her face. Then he wanted her to drift from the gate to the edge of the pool, the camera keeping the same focus, letting her shift against the ground. There she’d take a few steps and stop, look around, not quite startled but more like she remembered something important, like she left the oven on. Then she’d take a few steps away from the pool and sort of sag, withering slightly, like she remembered the house already burned down and the oven didn’t matter anymore. He wanted her to sort of waver there, standing but sinking, almost falling, almost floating, almost dropping the bouquet but not quite, then after a minute step lightly back to the pool. Then she’d walk to the east corner and delicately crumple into a fetal position.
“As you go down,” he said, “drop the bouquet and clutch your hands to your stomach. Go slow. Hold the shot. Everything is about slowness. If you can shake, like racked with sobs, that’d be perfect. Make the fall last as long as you can. If anyone comes up to help or bother you or whatever, ignore them. Remy will take care of it. The whole take, from the gate to the end of the fall, should take forty minutes, so do everything real, real slow.”
“You definitely better get me some water, then. And some Chiclets.”
“Chiclets?”
“You got breath r
ike Gojira. Maybe the pork enchilada you had for lunch, I don’t know, but I can hardly hear you right now, Gene-san, ’cuz you reeky rike shitbomb.”
“Fine,” he said. “Just go really, really slow. If you go too fast, we’ll have to do the whole thing over.”
“What about interference?” Remy asked.
“Let it bounce,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute and then I can handle any hard stuff. Let’s set up.”
So they set up and Suzie went back out the gate and Jim watched Remy film her walk slow, ever so slow, yet graceful and easy, yes, spectral. When he was satisfied with her speed and confident the shot would take the right amount of time, he went around the gate and into the street, past a statue of Jesus weeping, searching for some kind of corner store.
Jim looked up and down the street, trying to rely on his city sense to guide him toward the nearest store, a sense that in New York could hardly fail to uncover a bodega anywhere but in the most denuded wastes. Here, though, he had little luck, and had to walk five blocks before finding a Panera stuck awkwardly on an otherwise empty street. He bought several bottles of water and three iced teas, and by the time he got back to the memorial Suzie was just collapsing, ever so slowly, at the corner of the pool. It looked just like he wanted, maybe even better. He watched, entranced by seeing his imagination come to life, as she folded in on herself and then shook, painful and tender, like a virgin being stabbed by the finest ancient bone blade. Remy held it for a full ten minutes and, although some of the pedestrians walking through the memorial gawked, none of them blocked the shot. Perfect. When Remy stopped the camera, Jim clapped. “Great,” he shouted, and Suzie sat up smiling, giving him a thumbs-up. Jim headed around the pool while Remy dismounted the camera.
“Good?” she asked.
“Superb. You really earned your water.”
“Thanks.”
“I got you an iced tea, too. You walk really well.”
“Practice, man, practice.” After taking a long drink of water, she stretched her legs in front of her, leaned back on one hand, and lit a cigarette. “What next?”
Jim looked over at the glass and bronze chairs. “I got some ideas,” he said.
They shot into the afternoon, tracking Suzie walking among the chairs and around the Survivor Tree. As the day wore on, she began to wonder what Jim thought he was getting at with all this footage. None of it quite cohered. The bombing remained for her wedged into a particular moment in her life, a media-historical blister erupting out of her own junior-high anomie, or so it felt, mixed into the grim spring of the O. J. Simpson trial and war in Bosnia, a little after Kurt Cobain blew his brains out and a little before whatever the rest of the nineties were, dial-up, MySpace, Monica Lewinsky. Or was MySpace later? She remembered vaguely what the story had been, some militia nut and his buddies drove a truck full of homemade explosives down from Michigan, something like that. And wasn’t he a vet? Gulf War? Panama? She wished she had her phone so she could look it up. From the plaque, she knew one hundred sixty-eight people had died, nineteen of them children. According to the informational brochure, “three unborn children died along with their mothers.” Their names were listed on their mothers’ chairs. She remembered Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North testifying in the Iran-Contra hearings on TV, visiting Genbaku Dome at Hiroshima with her dad when they were stationed in Japan, antiaircraft tracers rising up out of Baghdad on CNN when the US started bombing Iraq the first time, the artist’s sketch of the Unabomber in a hoodie and mirrorshades, Branch Davidians at Waco, the shoot-out at Ruby Ridge, and a YouTube video explaining 9/11 was an inside job. Now Nazis ran the country. What the fuck happened?
It’s terrifying to realize the depth of your ignorance, the incoherent ignorance of your own past, the confused ignorance of your present, and to see that your life is a groping, half-blind stumble through foggy, unknown lands marked out here and there by lurid screenshots jacked into your skull by mass-media conglomerates, memes on repeat, empty concepts repeated until they become true, while your poor Paleolithic brain works overtime to connect the dots, keep the plot together, connect yesterday to tomorrow in a straight line that goes somewhere hopeful.
When they finished shooting, she asked him, “Who am I supposed to be all dressed up like this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. The image came to me when I read about the chairs and the pool. It’s ghostly, so maybe you’re a ghost? The ghost of Oklahoma, maybe? The ghost of Tom Joad? Does it matter?”
“Jeez, and I was counting on you having some cockeyed gibberish ready with which to clothe this exercise in a fug of intellectual pretension.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Jim said. “Let’s try the museum.”
At the entrance was a sign reading no photography. no pets. no muslims., so Remy ran back to the car to get what they called the ninja cam, an American flag lapel pin with a tiny spy camera. They toured the museum, read about the events of April 19, 1995, looked at the stopped clock and bits of rubble, listened to an audio recording of the explosion, watched videos at interactive computer stations explaining what survivors and others had experienced in the first hours after the attack, followed the steps of the investigation, paid their respects at the Gallery of Honor, read about the funerals and mourning that had followed, and finished in a room labeled hope, decorated with golden origami cranes. In the gift shop Suzie bought a T-shirt reading i ♥ oklahoma.
Then they took a brief tour of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, which turned out to be a reading room adjacent to some offices. Jim asked the curly-haired, matronly receptionist if he could see the institute at work, and she told him, “Honey, you done seen it. Mostly what we do is information clearinghouse, so we collect on terrorism prevention and distribute online. Here, take a brochure. We got ones on ISIS, Russian cyberterrorism, MS-13, ecoterrorists, and Black Lives Matter—maybe you’ve seen our website, MIPT dot org? That’s where we do our real work. You can graph incidents there and connect with vigilance-training programs all over the country. Here’s a brochure on MIPT, this one’s on the border wall, and here’s one that tells what you can do to fight global jihad.”
Jim took the brochures and thanked her. They shot some more late-afternoon footage around the pool, then grabbed sandwiches at Panera and hit the road, rolling southwest into the blasted red of the setting sun, silent for miles. They did Suzie’s pages. Colossal thunderheads rose into the sky, veined by sheet lightning, dumping rain across distant flats, then dissipated into the west.
Somewhere out in the plains they were overtaken by a long line of tan five-tons, Humvees, and armored personnel carriers full of faceless men in Wiley X shades and digital camo, M4 carbines jutting from windows, some trucks mounted with machine guns manned by dark-goggled grunts in armor, a sudden unfolding of combat steel into humdrum traffic.
“Get that, quick,” Jim said to Remy, who turned and filmed the convoy until a machine gunner spotted him. The gunner pointed at Remy and shook his head, then drew a line across his throat. Remy lowered the camera. Truck after truck rumbled by, then they were gone.
His hand on the doorknob. The yellow lamplight falling from the end table over the couch across the floor. The cot still folded in the corner. His cheek twitches in the half-light. He slides the key card in the pocket of his khakis. His hand on the doorknob. Her hoodie on the back of the couch. His cheek twitches in the half-light.
Her voice in the next room.
The cot still folded in the corner. The moon three-quarters full through the window, his gut and rib cage. Jim stands listening for another gasp in the other room, his stomach tightening. The carpet is soft and thick, dark brown with a pattern of tiny white squares. He sees his torso reflected in the screen, sees himself caught—or waiting to catch. His hand heavy with the Colt.
He hears a quiet grunt. His cheek twitches in the half-light. The fireplace, the kitc
henette, the cot still folded in the corner.
The moon in the window.
Rolling down the road toward Quartz Mountain Lodge, fattening moon plump in the wide, star-spattered sky, “Don’t Be Cruel” playing on the radio. Remy’s face reflecting light from the camera’s viewscreen in the back, the viewscreen showing featureless black backs of heads, headlights on the road, the dotted yellow line dividing the darkness ahead. Suzie turns to face Jim in silhouette, talking, her glasses in silhouette, lips talking. The dashboard lights submarine green, an attack chopper.
Eyes gleam stray light.
The car’s hum a womb. The car itself a womb, metal and hum. The world outside wraps like black tape or reels of film. The Valiant rolls, and in the distance they can see the resort’s lights shining like the promised land, reflected in the black lake below, moon shining in the black lake below, now there’s two of everything.
She walks away down the low hill edging the black lake, leaving Jim standing by the small tree, leaving Jim silhouetted against the fat white moon.
