“Cooking flowers is supposed to get you off?” DeHaven says. His half-and-half clown’s profile pivots between creepy confusion and complete fear of his own instrumentation.
“They’re a drug?” Sternberg says. “Except organic? An anti-fear pro-desire drug?”
“They’re wrong,” D.L. says in the strident voice of her Tarot tutor. “They stand for the fact that they’re wrong. They’re not only obscene symbols, they’re clumsy symbols.”
“Steelritter…,” Magda begins huskily.
J.D. waves the rearview image of her orange face and askew wig aside, now so into what he’s bet his life on that he’s almost sublimated his utter dread about rain diluting the Reunion. Fucking Midwest weather. He says, “The Post-product missy’s right, on this one. They’re just symbols. They’re about as subtle as a brick, for Christ’s sake.”
“Eating symbols?”
DeHaven’s looking at the steady red light. “Pop?”
J.D. cannot believe the back-stabbing innocence of a man who’d pass out symbols like they grew on trees. He addresses the back through the rearview. “And you think how you appear, how you feel, are your adman’s only levers? Your only source of fear? That Today has gone on forever?”
Sternberg’s affirmative is ear-splitting.
“Then you’ve got some coming of age to do, Mr. Always-looks-at-himself-half-the-time. ’Cause the ad business goes way, way back. You’ve got fears so deeply conditioned they’re ingrained. Built right in. Hidden in plain sight. You know you feel it, back there. This feeling it’s so conditioned it’s part of you. As in there’s certain things that, no matter what, one doesn’t do those things. You don’t kill your father. You don’t betray your lover. You don’t lie. Except when absolutely necessary. You don’t aim a loaded weapon. Except in self-defense.”
“You don’t disappear,” D.L. says tonelessly. “You don’t scald people in their sleep.”
“I’d go ahead and put those up there, too,” J.D. nods seriously, grim. “And another one, see. You don’t put what’s beautiful inside you, as fuel, when the whole reason it’s beautiful is that it’s outside you. Supposedly certain things are in the world. To see. Not to chew up and swallow and expel.”
DeHaven’s point of view on all this is diffracted. He’s thinking of the probably several tons of roses he’s consumed, at the farmhouse, over his childhood; and experiencing a growing affinity with D.L. Eberhardt, who’s looking, as she hears the confirmation of her psychic’s sagest advice, more and more like a cat hissing at the big shadow of some nameless and total threat—and has pretty well-developed canine teeth to begin with—and he’s getting more and more afraid that a sleep-deprived J.D. is maybe off his fatherly nut, a bit, about the roses that have no, and I mean zero, historical effect on DeHaven; and the de-nosed clown is afraid that J.D.’s going to make him drive his malevolent car, that he built and lubricated with his own two ungloved hands, right into oil-depletion and seizure and breakdown; and begins to wish very much that they could simply stop, idle a bit, let J.D. calm down about what’re only after all snacks and commercials, let DeHaven have a look at his own dipstick… that they could simply stop to check how things are, under the glittered hood; that they could suffer a brief interruption that would maybe probably ultimately save time; wishes they—
“Pop.”
“But those deep-in-your-bones feelings are conditioning, too,” J.D. says. “You know what the first real ingenious timeless ad campaign even was?” He sees in the rearview two blank stares flanking two closed eyes. “Jesus,” he shakes his head in disgust. “But the boredom, at least: even you kids know you feel the boredom in your gut, right along with the fear. ‘Do not do what is not right.’ Tired image. Hackneyed jingle. No marriage, anymore. Obsolete. Conditioning has obsolescence built right in. Like the Jew what’s his name and his bells and dogs that drool. Dog hears the ching of that fucking bell over and over, plus his pups, generations of dogs, ching, ching, till the sound is like the sound of the dogs’ own blood in their heads—they can’t hear it anymore, don’t listen—they after a while stop the drooling over meat the bell had started. Give them enough time and enough bells and they start yawning, at the ching. Over at Steelritter Ads we’ve done conditioning research up to here,” holding one hand like a blade to his fine head’s top, gently squeezing the flowers with the other, in the bag.
“Not doing what you know deep down is wrong to do is boring?” Mark says, feeling the stab of a particular numbness he associates with qualities that ought to make him glow.
J.D. hears nothing but his own small voice and For Whom: “So thus the same fears that inform your whole what’s the word.…”
“Character,” murmurs Magda Ambrose-Gatz.
“… character: can’t hear them, can’t be moved by them, they’re such old hat, by today,” J.D. says. He turns, hiking an elbow. “Your adman’s basic challenge: how to get folks’ fannies out of chairs; how to turn millennial boredom around, get things back on track, back toward the finish line? How to turn stasis into movement, either flight or pursuit?”
“Make the listening unfashionable?” Mark says.
J.D.’s tired eyes widen as he nods. “But how to do that? How to do that? With symbols, is how. You make a gesture. You show you desire not to hear the ching.”
“You behead an unsubtle image of what beauty is and fry it in lard and consume and digest and excrete it?”
“Turn your biggest fear into your one real desire?”
“Sounds pretty damn political,” Sternberg suggests.
“Except what’s everybody’s biggest fear?”
“That Mormon researcher had whole lists of them.”
“Pop.”
“No no no,” J.D. shakes his head impatiently, gesturing with a cigar he does not hold. “The one big one. The one everybody has. The one that binds us up, as a crowd.”
“Death?”
“Dishonor?”
“I’d go with death, darling.”
“My vote still goes to having a body, dudes.”
“Pop.”
“You gesture,” J.D. says. “You sell out the squeak of your own head’s blood. You sell out, but for selling-out’s own sake, without end or object”—he looks above right, at the storm clouds, which are getting spectacular—“change the tired channel from life, honor, out of nothing but a desire to love what you fear: the whole huge historical Judeo-Christian campaign starts to spin in reverse, from inside.”
“A campaign spins?”
“We’re bored animals”—J.D. makes a summing-up gesture. “Even the naïve ones know that. Bored numb with the sound of bells, the taste of meat. But ring meat,” he says, “and you can bet your life you’ll eat a bell. And like it.”
The unmuffled engine dies, the jacked-up car coasting in a sudden roaring absence of homemade sound and halting in the shoulderless space between rural blacktop and bare fallow field, by the field’s ditch, in dirt, maybe a quarter-mile from where the road they’re on takes its last curve left, West, dead into Northeast Collision. All that’s there to hold your eye up ahead are three tiny rural shacks, shanties, up by the big broad leftward curve. The shanties keep you from seeing exactly where the curved road goes.
The complete silence in the quiet car, as it rolls to a crunching stop in the dirt, is like whole minutes of that second right after loud music stops. “Like it” ricochets around in the red interior as the malevolent car gives up the ghost in the roadside dirt, coming to rest perpendicular to a barbed fence between a lush verdant healthy cornfield and a rich black fallow field, boiling with confused pests lured by a taste for quality.
“Varoom,” the clown says to himself weakly, squashing a placid gnat.
J.D. is suddenly very calm. He has a wristwatch. Jack Lord is scheduled to arrive over Collision soon. He is afraid. Sadness and anger and disgust at Ambrose’s not-worth-it betrayal are scattered like the dust the car’s halt has made, all before the great cold wind of a genuis�
�s fear. J.D.’s two great sheet-wrecking nightmares are missing his own Reunion and being stalled in someplace sweeping and panoramic and unenclosed and ever-growing.
There’s a great ripping fart of thunder.
“Fix the car, please,” he says softly as the first fat drops hit the windshield.
DeHaven is out with a stiff whimper. The windshield yields a sudden view of glittered hood.
“Could we just walk?” asks D.L.
“Not getting out of the car,” J.D. says calmly. “Still two total miles or more. Rain. My suit will run. I can’t preside wet. We’ll stay here. The kid’s got a way with machines.”
Streaks of DeHaven’s real face can be seen through the trademark face as the clown slams the hood shut in the spattered rain. The dice under the rearview jump at the slam, and the oil light pulses.
“Filter’s a gem,” he says, reentering. “My dipstick’s clean as a whistle.”
“I’ll let that pass,” J.D. says coolly.
“The lubrication seems totally OK,” the clown sums up in a voice that makes you think he wishes it weren’t.
“So start the car,” J.D. says, managing at once both to clap his hands and look at his watch. “Hibbego. Let’s go. Couple more miles. It’ll be tit.”
DeHaven shakes his head miserably, his lipstick rained into something sad. The trashcan clatter of more thunder is now indistinguishable from echoes of that thunder. Big Midwest drops start hitting the car’s roof in that rhythmless, tentative, pre-serious way.
“Start the car!” Sternberg screams, so that Magda jumps on the hump. Mark closes his eyes, silent, lost in his own counsel.
DeHaven hooks a begrimed wrist over the fuzzy wheel and lights an unfiltered with maddening deliberation. He shakes his head:
“This car doesn’t just stop and start. The engine’s Detroit and the ignition’s foreign. It’s an admittedly ad hoc combination. You’d call it a bad marriage, Pop. But those were the parts I could get deals on. So I have to just keep it running all the time. Can’t let it stop. A motherfucker on gas. You wouldn’t let me park it by the greenhouses, Pop, remember? Because of the exhaust? It doesn’t even need a key, see?”—pointing a grease-tipped glove-finger at the empty slant of an ignition receptacle where a key should be. “Because if it stops, when you try to start it, the engine goes like out of control.” He exhales smoke with force. “Plus it was the oil light made it stall, Pop,” indicating the little plastic window that covers his costume’s nose. “I’m sure we’ve got internal problems somewhere. I’ll fuck up the belts.”
“Try it, please.”
“I’ll make the timing belt jump if I do. We’ll jump time. We’ll fuse cylinders.”
“Give it a try, please, son,” J.D. whispers, as roof-rain sounds.
The empty ignition screams to life. And, true to the clown’s word, the car’s idle is now wild, tortured; the engine revs crazily, way too high, so that ancient needles flap spastically in the dash. The malevolent car stalls the second the clown reaches up by the furry wheel to put it in a forward gear. It shudders.
“Great,” Sternberg yells, having cadged the Ziploc J.D.’s left on the front seat’s backrest. “Great. Fix the car, you shitspeck rotten clown.” He feels too enclosed to bear.
The adman is looking through the shield’s angled rivulets at the three wharf-gray shanties up where the last road takes its final Westward curve. The ancient askew shacks are interconnected by a system of corrugated plumbing pipe. J.D. breathes deeply and counts the three shanties out loud, willing the Reunion to remain temporarily on hold. They’ll wait for him. Jack, aloft with his bullhorn, above a sea of red smiles, the cameras sweeping panoramic, looking for what to latch onto. The rain can be worked in somehow. Could enhance the whole conceit. Funhouse 1 will be opened and used, then ’dozered. J.D. Steelritter gets stabbed in the back by a client exactly once. No Funhouse franchise. No erection of memory for Herr Professor C____ Ambrose, rat. No angled systems of mirrors Windexed nightly by anally compulsive teams in white. No barrels and disks on the dance floor. No happy fellatory door. No parts that shine, burnished to reflect and refer to every other part. No whole new dimension in alone fun.
It’s going to rain one fuck of a lot, they can all see. 2500W steams. The stuff seems to fall in bright curtains that close and part at the discretion of gusts. The rain threatens to enclose the stalled car. Sternberg’s bad cheek is right up next to his smeared window, pressing against it, bloodlessly white. He’s sure he’s going to puke. The clouds before the curve and car are huge. They have an almost Trump-like architectural ambition. Mark can see still more rain coming, off to the West, but coming, braids of it hanging from the sky and whipping back and forth like tinsel in wind, the real meat of the thunderstorm now probably over Collision and the now-obscured giant arches and the sheltering tight-roofed Funhouse club, where all the adults and former kids are in out of the elements, waiting, raising flashcards emblazoned with the word GLASS, drinking the symbolic health of the very idea of toasting itself. He’s sure now they’ve got it all backwards.
“Look, kid. Three shanties up there,” J.D. points. He squeezes his son’s pastel shoulder pad. “I want you to go have a look and a knock, see if anybody’s home. Somebody rural, with a way with a homemade idle.”
“The car’s going to go down in this mud, Pop,” DeHaven sniffles across D.L. “We’ll get stuck sure, anyway. The fucker’s already level, in back.” He wipes clotted talc off his cheek. “God am I sorry, Pop.”
“Hush, kid. Not your fault. Just go have a look. Please. Here,” handing him the noseless yarn tangle from the dashboard. “Wear the wig. Keep your head dry. Don’t catch cold. No sniffling Ronalds.”
DeHaven keeps his chin up. “Right.” He’s out of the car and behind the silver curtain of serious rain—you can hear the hiss as his cigarette’s hit and extinguished—and he’s off up the road, his orange yarn held to his scalp like a hairnet, riding-habit hips jouncing under his orange trousers, big red shoes sending water everywhere, up the steaming rural blacktop road and out of sight into the breath-mist that collects on the windshield of the utterly enclosed, sheltering, rained-upon car.
This is pretty much the climax of the whole journey, by the way, pending arrival. The final impediment—reimbursement and revelry and meat and fried roses, all the roses anyone could want, roses right out the bazoo, just up ahead: past the impediment.
Drew-Lynn Eberhardt can tell DeHaven Steelritter and J.D. love each other, deep down, and this affects her. She is enormously sensitive to who is loved by whom.
While J.D. Steelritter settles back cigarless, letting condensation collect unwiped over a watch-face which why worry if worrying won’t serve purposes; while D.L. flicks at the dice that hang from the rearview; while Tom Sternberg snacks, watching his gabardines go up and down like a derrick at his discretion alone; Magda uses an initialed cotton hankie to wipe at Mark’s window, and they look out at the fallow field to the left of the fence, the black muddy field fallow and empty right to the skyline but for Pest-Aside-maddened pests and one old, rickety, blue-collar, and totally superfluous scarecrow. The scarecrow looks somehow both noble and pathetic, like a stoic guard standing sleepless watch over an empty vault. Mark and Magda both look at the field and scarecrow and all-business Illinois rain like people who are deprived. Magda feels an overwhelming—and completely nonoracular—compulsion to talk to somebody. Mark, a born listener, right from day one, feels nothing at all.
ACTUALLY PROBABLY NOT THE LAST INTRUSIVE INTERRUPTION
Mark Nechtr’s ambivalent artistic attitude toward his teacher Dr. Ambrose—the fact that Ambrose is warm and tactful and unloverlike aside—and the fried-rose business completely and totally out of this picture altogether—really derives from Mark’s new Trinitarian distrust of the fictional classifications that Ambrose seems to love and has entered, curling, looking for shelter from the very same cold critical winds that, in the fullness of time, had carved Ambrose’s classified n
iche in the first place, see.
See—Mark tells the orange-faced flight attendant as they part a briefly-open-anyway curtain of water and enter the rain comparatively unseen, she shoeless and brown-skirted, his fashionable surgeon’s shirt soaking quickly to a light green film over much health—dividing this fiction business into realistic and naturalistic and surrealistic and modern and postmodern and new-realistic and meta- is like dividing history into cosmic and tragic and prophetic and apocalyptic; is like dividing human beings into white and black and brown and yellow and orange. It atomizes, does not bind crowds, and, like everything timelessly dumb, leads to blind hatred, blind loyalty, blind supplication. Difference is no lover; it lives and dies dancing on the skins of things, tracing bare outlines as it feels for avenues of entry into exactly what it’s made seamless. What Ambrose’s “different” fictions do are just shadows, made various by the movements of men against one light. This one light is always desire. This is a truth so true it’s B.C. If you’re going to make lists to hide inside, he tells the stewardess—referring now to the D.L. he would love to hate—if you’re going to classify everything, you might at least divide by the knife of what is desired, of where in the sky to look for the nothing-new sun. Divide from inside. Homiletic fiction desires peace. Eleemosynary fiction desires charity. Iconodulistic fiction desires order. Prurient fiction desires desire. Apocalyptic fiction desires the inevitable change it hides behind fearing.
Mark, if he were ever a real fiction writer, thinks he would like to try to be a Trinitarian writer. Trinitarian fiction, distinctively American, desires that change which stays always the same. It’s cold as any supermarket—probably more economics than art—tracing the rate of a rate of change’s change to a zero we pretend’s not there, lying as it does behind Newton’s fig leaf. It’s an art that hides, tiny and fanged, in the eyes of storms, the axes of spins, the cold, still heart in the lover’s pounding heart. It is triply subject, and good.
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