Mark pinches a smelly gnat and gazes out his window. DeHaven’s driving fast enough so the rural highway’s broken center line looks almost solid. The corn is stunted right here a bit, and Mark’s view goes sheer to the earth’s curve: dark green yielding to pale green, to dark green, to just green, with some tight white farmhouses and wind-breaking trees clumped at the seam of the southern horizon.
J.D. Steelritter, like many older adults, is kind of a bigot. Mark Nechtr, like most young people in this awkward age, is NOT. But his aracism derives, he’d admit, from reasons that are totally self-interested. If all blacks are great dancers and athletes, and all Orientals are smart and identical and industrious, and all Jews are great makers of money and literature, wielders of a clout born of cohesion, and all Latins great lovers and stiletto-wielders and slippers-past-borders—well then gee, what does that make all plain old American WASPs? What one great feature, for the racist, brings us whitebreads together under the solid roof of stereotype? Nothing. A nameless faceless Great White Male. Racism seems to Mark a kind of weird masochism. A way to make us feel utterly and pointlessly alone. Unidentified. More than Sternberg hates being embodied, more than D.L. hates premodern realism, Mark hates to believe he is Alone. Solipsism affects him like Ambrosian metafiction affects him. It’s the high siren’s song of the wrist’s big razor. It’s the end of the long, long, long race you’re watching, but at the end you fail to see who won, so entranced are you with the exhausted beauty of the runners’ faces as they cross the taped line to totter in agonized circles, hands on hips, bent.
In a related development, Mark Nechtr is now revealed by me to have professionally diagnosed emotional problems. He’s actually been in and out of places, something that would astonish the kids at E.C.T. who value and love him. It’s not that Mark’s emotions are disordered or troubled, but that he is troubled in relation to them. That’s why he usually appears cool, neutrally cheery. When he has emotions, it’s like he’s denied access to them. He doesn’t ever feel in possession of his emotions. When he has them, they feel far from him; he feels disembodied, other. Except when he shoots, he very rarely feels anything at all. And when he is shooting, pulling slowly on his complicated bow, his statued hands in fingerless black archer’s gloves, the 12 strands singing and wicked shaft whistling as it starts left of where it ends, he stands somewhere outside himself, eyewitness to his own joy.
I.e. either he doesn’t feel anything, or he doesn’t feel anything.
Magda Ambrose-Gatz’s predicament is the obverse, and way more noble and tragic. And but no one can ever know this. Because where Mark’s makeup is that of a subject, Magda’s own character—female, and precontemporary—is that of an object. Mark affects that of which Magda is an effect. She has always been an object: of child Ambrose’s prepubescent, femininely-rhymed longing; of adult Ambrose’s cold postmodern construction; of the land speculator’s need for läbensraum; of the unfeeling hand of agricultural mac- and microeconomics; of J.D. Steelritter’s desire to sell desire; and now of Mark’s own speculative machinery. There’s neither claustrophobia nor egress for this ageless alumna, this lovely seaside girl whose errant trainer-strap built a flat Funhouse, who probably wouldn’t know the betrayed taste of a cooked flower if it bit her on her ageless orange nose. But she never objects. She takes it awfully well. She never has to affect neutral cheer, or health. Unlike the young Mark Nechtr.
The sunlight gets quartzy, the sun Southward; its slant creeps across Magda’s dappled Orlon skirt, toward him. Mark Nechtr is just way luckier than she. He, silently, objects to just about everything. He has desires, though he doesn’t yet know what for. He wishes he had the arrogant balls to just sit down and make up a story about the adult Magda, about the Reunion and the Funhouse franchise, Jack Lord, about Ambrose’s supply of fried roses, his perverse reward for eating beauty, the special arrow he’s lost but can’t throw away. A song of tough love for a generation whose eyes have moved fish-like to the sides of its head, forward vision usurped by a numb need to survive the now, side-placed eyes scanning for any garde of which to be avant. In the story he wants to make up, the one that doesn’t stab him, he’d be just an object—of irritation, accusation, desire: response. He wouldn’t be a subject. Not that. Never that. To be a subject is to be Alone. Trapped. Kept from yourself. Nechtr and Sternberg and DeHaven Steelritter all know this horror: that you can kiss anyone’s spine but your own. Make love to anybody or anything except…
But Mark can never know that other boys know this, too. He never talks about himself, see. This silence, for which he is loved, radiates cry-like from his central delusion and contemporary flaw. If his young companions have their own special delusions—D.L.’s that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive, Sternberg’s that a body is a prison and not a shelter—Mark’s is that he’s the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world. It’s a solipsistic delusion.
“I’d describe my current thinking as a sort of progressive minimalism,” DeHaven is telling Drew-Lynn, who’s killed the radio drama to hear the clown’s description of his ambitions as an atonal composer with a bitchingly expensive Yamaha DX-7, to replace his outmoded Moog. “What I’m aiming for is a kind of fusion of the energy and what’s the word verve of popular music with the intellect of like a Smetana or a Humperdinck.”
J.D. snorts, but is otherwise strangely quiet, as if brooding. The car roars and the wind roars. It’s too hot even to mention.
“I detest any and all kinds of minimalism,” D.L. says firmly.
DeHaven shrugs and removes the illuminated red nose and yarn wig, revealing a curved Steelritteroid nose and dark hair of surprising brevity and lustre.
“Well minimalism in music just means the repetition of these real simple chords. Except the minimal attractiveness comes from simplicity of the repetition and not the simplicity of the chords.”
“Put it back on,” J.D. growls, shifting the cigar in his mouth to indicate without looking at the red tangle that now lies, like a yarn wig with a glowing nose, resembling nothing, beneath the rearview’s dancing dice.
“Pop, for Christ’s sake—”
“Am I unbent? Did we not have a conversation just now back there? Did we not both make concessions? Did we not arrive at a negotiated settlement about what a job was?”
“But Christ Pop it’s hot, and I—”
J.D. stares straight ahead. “Define for me, speck of mine, the negotiated meaning of the word ‘job,’ again.”
DeHaven stares icily at a black highway he’s long stopped having to see, replacing the red wig but leaving it askew. The red nose, heavy with AA cell, slides toward the defroster-crack between windshield and dash and is lost from view.
Between teeth DeHaven says: “A job is where, when you take on a job, you do things whether it feels good to do them or not, because you promised, by the fact of taking on the job.”
“What a memory. Makes a father swell with—”
“I don’t see how anybody here gives a shit if I wear a red wig or not.”
“You represent McDonald’s, shitspeck. It’s not you who’s driving. You represent the world’s community restaurant.”
“It is awfully hot, Mr. Steelritter,” Magda says, leaning forward to make herself heard. Mark hears her. The only evidence of a bra is a kind of knob at her back’s center, under her brown Orlon blouse, over her spine.
J.D. ignores her. “Have some fucking pride, DeHaven.”
“We there, just about?” Sternberg pipes up, his hands in his lap as he stares reluctantly at Magda’s blouse’s knob, where hooks that men can’t undo and women can undo with just one hand behind their back lie engaged in complexly-imagined relations.
“No,” says J.D.
“Umm, long way?”
“Odometer’s just about ready to roll,” says DeHaven, watching the numbered wheels’ implacable spin.
J.D. broods, removes, crunches, and reignites. The red interior fills again with the green sti
nk of cigar. Sternberg goes back to being ignored. D.L.’s cough sounds like a laugh, and is also ignored. A classy no-nonsense scarecrow of black woven iron, more like a decoration than a real scarecrow, right up flush roadside, messes nastily for an instant with the car’s shadow. Mark’s just as glad about the wig’s being back on, not out of any special ill will toward this Ronald kid—
“Anyway, my music I want to do has affinities with the work of like a Glass or a Reich, but with more… progression. Harmonically it’s even more atonal, and rhythmically it’s got this kind of fascist quality I’m drawn to, a kind of jackboots-marching-on-a-small-Polish-town quality.”
“Hush,” J.D. says absently.
“It’s music that grabs you by the lapels and says give me all your land or I’ll gut your livestock,” DeHaven sums up quickly. “Though in a much more cerebral way. And with percussion out the ass.”
—but because its removal had revealed that the clown’s heavy garish makeup simply ended, right around the top of his neck and the curve of his round cheeks, yielding to regular red wind-burned Steelritter skin with an abruptness that Mark just didn’t like at all.
“Don’t you even remember?” D.L. has turned to address Sternberg. “Don’t you remember how out of the way the McDonald’s set was, back then?”
“Collision’s in the middle of nowhere, kiddo.”
“C.I.A.’s the closet airport and helipad, but it’s still no laughing matter, how remote Collision is.”
“On purpose,” J.D. says, balancing his cigar on his heavy lower lip. “You don’t go to client. You make client come to you. That way the cap’s in his hand. Client comes a complex series of long ways to see you, has a tough journey, encounters bad roads and no maps and detours: client’s convinced already, en route, that your services have value, for him to be wandering all over hell’s half acre like this just to find you.” J.D. beams grimly. Mark notes that DeHaven can silently lip-sync his father’s whole speech. Plus his summation:
“A-very-wise-guru-at-the-top-of-a-tough-to-climb-mountain stratagem,” J.D. says. “It’s no coincidence it’s the gurus on mountains who’re wise. You get to the top: you’re already theirs.”
Everyone lets this sink uneasily in.
Sternberg clears his smoker’s throat, directing this sound somehow at the flight attendant beside him. “Sorry about your skirt, and stabbing your date’s fruit.”
“It’s all right,” Magda says, smoothing yellow hair back behind her ears. “And he wasn’t my date.”
“Except what about my Dexter?” Mark asks flatly.
“He was just a passenger,” Magda explains.
“My arrow, Sternberg,” Mark says, leaning a bit to look across Magda’s front at Tom’s boiled-egg-colored eye, trying to feel angry. “You left it back there, didn’t you.”
“I have it,” Magda says.
Mark shifts his gaze to her. A sudden jounce—pothole; “Shit,” DeHaven exclaims—makes his stomach rise in that rapid-descent way.
“It’s in my carry-on.” She smiles. “In the trunk. I’ll give it back to you when we’re there.”
Mark looks at her orange face. “Thank you. It’s kind of my favorite. It’s the only one I can get through Security. It’s aluminum.” He pauses. “Thanks again.”
She laughs. “It looked pretty obscene, just sticking out of that compote. I thought one of you’d want it.”
“Well thank you,” Sternberg says.
“Yes. Thanks.” The thing cannot be lost. Even shot it at the sea once. Off an old wharf. Except it floated, though, glinting; hung in the water by its cedar knock; came in on the sluggish tide within hours.
And Mark had waited for it. On the crumbled wharf that smelled of fish. The fact that the arrow can’t disappear is both a comfort and a worry. It makes Nechtr feel special, true. But from special it’s not very far to Alone.
Although we all, Mark would know if he bothered to ask J.D. Steelritter, who’d done solipsistic-delusion-fear research back in the halcyon days of singles bars, we all have our little solipsistic delusions. All of us. The truth’s all there, too, tracked and graphed in black and white—forgotten, now that fear of disease has superseded fear of retiring alone—sitting in dusty aluminum clipboards in a back archive at J.D. Steelritter Advertising, in Collision, where they’re headed. We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd. It’s Steelritter’s meat.
O the sadness of J.D. Steelritter, a man who brings crowds into being! A crowded planet would lie right down for love of the men who build what they want built. But for the man who builds their wants? A drink on the house? God forbid a pat on the back, ever? A hug? A television Movie of the Week, the “J.D. Steelritter Story,” sponsored by his sponsors, J.D. portrayed as the type of hero who overcomes? A sensitive novel from C____ Ambrose in which J.D., manipulator of image and sign, succumbs via epistasis to the bewitchment of the Mesmermaze he spins and is forced via resolution to transcend, to come of age, to see? Something, no? But no. TV about bodies politic and people with dying bodies or robbers and cops puncturing bodies or doctors resealing bodies. Novels about novelists writing novels about novelists, who never succumb. Cute stories that slouch, sullen, clever, coy, no hair on the chests forever.
Though let’s not get a wild hair up anything: he has no real bones to pick with Ambrose-as-builder, -entrepreneur, -Consumer. And why think of anything except what’s just ahead? The Reunion will be huge. Larger than life. Beyond belief. Forty-four thousand actors, endorsers, celebrities, former actors, returning. 44,000 who will—photorecorded—reunite, greet, meet and eat. Eat. An irruption of ninety-nine-and-forty-four-one-hundredths percent pure consumption. The cameras’ shots will be panoramic. You’ll need the side-placed eyes of a deep-depth fish just to even hope to take it all in. The enormous crowd J.D. hath wrought over thirty years of time purchased second by expensive second will come together, lose the supplicants’ courtesy that atomizes crowds, and desire past all earthly care the rendition of fat, the sigh of oil, the sparkle of carbonation, the consumption of government-inspected flesh. They will revel in meat, lips stained purple with the fried blood of Steelritter’s floral tonnage.
Still-distant Collision is a madhouse. Frantic, clotted, teeming with alumni begging to stay. The obverse of Saigon’s fall. The townspeople, descendants of an accidental market, have learned to change big bills—everywhere there are souvenirs, homemade concession stands. Twin arches of plated gold have been erected, each the size of St. Louis’s Gateway, and below their giant twin paraboloid zeniths a gemmed altar that demands, recorded, to let it give you a break. The predella itself a lawn-sized golden patty. And everything that’s been built—arches, altar, predella—has been perforated and filled to spurt and shower U.S.D.A. Grade A blood at the ecstatic moment of Jack Lord’s helicoptered approach. The sight will be halcyon, chialistic. He will watch desire build to that red-and-gold pitch, that split-second shudder and sneeze of thirty years’ consumers, succumbing, as one. And this is the one secret of a public genius: it will be the Storm before the Calm. Gorged with flora and the fauna their money’s killed and shipped frozen to serve billions, the alumni will give in, reveling, utterly.
And that, as they say, will be that. No one will ever
leave the rose farm’s Reunion. The revelation of What They Want will be on them; and, in that revelation of Desire, they will Possess. They will all Pay The Price—without persuasion. It’s J.D.’s swan song. No more need for J.D. Steelritter Advertising or its helmsman’s genius. Life, the truth, will be its own commercial. Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that’s been its object all along. And, in Death, it will of course become Life. The last commercial. Popular culture, the U.S. of A.’s great lalated lullaby, the big remind-a-pad on the refrigerator of belief, will, forever unsponsored, tumble into carefully salted soil. The public, one great need, will not miss being reminded of what they believe. They’ll doubt what they fear, believe what they wish; and, united, as Reunion, their wishes will make it so. Their wishes will, yes, come true. Fact will be fiction will be fact. Ambrose and his academic heirs will rule, without rules. Meatfiction.
And Steelritter, in what he’s foreseen? He’ll retire to the intersection where everything started. At peace in the roaring crowd’s center. Maybe have a long-needed nap, stretched out on the intersected road, each limb a direction, cigar a sundial. He’ll relax and feel the great heavy earthspin beneath him stutter, flicker, oppose.
He will be the object of appreciation. He will be not just needed. He will be loved. Beloved. Because he will Re-Present the Product.
He broods, riding shotgun. He’s smoked his cigar down to the point where he feels the heat of the thing on his lips. The woven-iron scarecrow recedes in no time. He pegs his butt out the window and, because he wants it so, ceases to brood, his great forehead smoothing like a smartly-snapped sheet. Soon they’ll make the last turn West.
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