Four for a Quarter: Fictions

Four Dead in Ohio

KENT, OHIO

It doesn't help that the girl is not a student, had run away and found herself on May 4^th kneeling next to one of the bodies. The.30–06 round from the Ohio National Guard troop's M1 Garand rifle found him there. It doesn't help either that he too found himself at this shared space and time, the bullet entering his mouth, on his way to, let's say, a literature class that would consider a contemporary poem self-consciously meditating on the efficacy of poetry to accomplish anything of real importance in the real world. The bullet strikes him through his mouth, enters his brain, killing him instantly. Meanwhile, the physics of the recent fusillade, the thermodynamics of the energy released in the reaction shaped within the brass precinct of the crimped cartridge, the military science of massed and sustained and suppressing fire is expressed irrefutably in the outcome and recorded in the phototropic mechanics of the chemical emulsion of contrast, heightened by the technique of burn and dodge, captured in the famous photograph. At the same time 342 miles southeast, a soldier, a member of the Third Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) attached to the Sentinel unit, stands post at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery. The soldiers of the Old Guard are the only troops in the United States Army that can parade with bayonets fixed, a privilege that commemorates an action taken at the Battle of Cerro Gordo in the War with Mexico. And the Sentinel on this day has his bayonet fixed. He glides along at ninety strides per minute marching the twenty-one steps on the mat in front of the tomb, pausing twenty-one seconds before turning and repositioning his M1 Garand rifle with bayonet fixed to the shoulder opposite the tomb, pausing another twenty-one seconds, and then walking another twenty-one steps back past the sarcophagus where the original Unknown Soldier is entombed and the slabs of marble on the plaza floor entombing the Unknowns from the Second World War and the Korean Conflict. What isn't known now is if there will be a fourth Unknown from the war being fought in Vietnam. No one knows how it will resolve. The war in Southeast Asia has only now expanded into other theaters of operation, into Cambodia and Laos. The knowledge of this has sparked protests around the country. At Kent State University, in Ohio, four are being killed at this moment by the massed, sustained, and suppressing fire of the Ohio National Guard. The Sentinel standing post wears no rank insignia to assure that he will not outrank the unknown rank of the Unknowns he guards. What is not known at this moment is that the current war in Southeast Asia will present a problem of knowing and not knowing. The kind of fighting being conducted there, the advances in forensic sciences, especially in the fields of mitochondrial DNA, will make it impossible to not know from now on. There will be, in the future, those who are still missing. The Lost will be lost during the conflict in Southeast Asia, but there will no longer be the question of identity. Any remains found — a crumb of bone or sliver of sinew, tuft of hair, piece of tooth, sample of skin — provide a sufficient key. The crypt of the Unknown for the Vietnam War will remain empty, will be, at some future date, rededicated, no longer the resting place of that kind of uncertainty, and will be transformed to another uncertainty, to the empty bed of those who simply disappeared, who have left no trace. The girl kneeling next to the body of the student in Ohio — I feel as if I should know her. I feel I should know the body. I should know everything. They are missing. They are missed. There is something missing. Everything is missing.

LA HONDA, CALIFORNIA

On the living room floor, Neil Young sits tinkering with an O gauge Lionel engine, a Nickel Plate Berkshire, as big as a loaf of bread, black, detailed down to the handholds on the running boards and the pilot. The bell swings on its gimbal, each coal in the tender etched, given depth. He unscrews the sandbox cowling. There is a wired portal inside the guts of the toy. He seeks to bug the engine with a silicon chip. Imprinted in its circuitry is the music of the real locomotive. He recorded it, a run-by in Lima, Ohio, a static display brought back to steam. He stood in a crowd of men with directional microphones aimed, reel-to-reel Wollensaks running, amplifying dishes focused as the engine spun its wheels, caught and coughed, huffed to life with that thump thump thump as the exhaust expelled. He got it down, wired, this riff. That pant and this hiss, remembered in the fused sand, coded in the cinders of ones and nils. A miniature speaker is hidden in the rig, buried behind the grill of the smokestack. If it works, he thinks, the sound of the bellowing smoke will bellow out like smoke. He sets the engine on the rails, pets it like a pet. Its running lights dim, merely sopping up the leaking amperage before he turns the juice on full, twisting the knob on the transformer. The toy train starts, begins to move, jerks, all electric and steamless. Then the sound streams from the tympanic boiler, vibrating a diaphragm no bigger than a pencil's eraser. The sound sounds real, he thinks, sounds as if you were there, reduced by scale, a diminished chord, but, still, polished by the memory, the memory the sound has evoked, and he waits, listens closely, knows, there, there will be a long sustained sad slow whistle at the crossing, a kind of warning, and, even in miniature and over this great distance and lost time, a lament.

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

He was eighteen months old when his father (a student here protesting the continuing harassment on Lynch Street that then bisected the campus and gave egress to the white outsiders who threatened the students emerging from Stewart Hall) was shot dead in front of Alexander Hall. This was a few days after the killings in Ohio. Two killed in Mississippi, twelve more wounded. The police used Browning pump-action shotguns, and later the FBI estimated over four hundred rounds struck Alexander Hall, where the police line had swept the protest from Lynch Street — named for a black elected official and not, ironically, some grim historical designation of purpose. This was made clear years later when the man's initials, J.R., were affixed to the signs, changing the word from an act to actor. After the shooting, as the wounded were carried to the hospital, the police (according to testimony) deliberately picked over the ground, retrieving the spent shells. The pictures of the aftermath reveal and witnesses report that the building was “riddled“ by gunfire. The windowpanes of the five-story dorm were all shattered, and the blue decorative panels were shredded by overlapping patterns of shot. His father died of wounds from two double-O gauge pellets in his brain, another piercing his right eye, a fourth buried under his left arm. He returns to the word “riddled,“ its inadequacy to describe the ferocity of the damage meted out that night. He sees the building every day. There is now a grassed-over plaza where Lynch Street once was, a monument for his father and Green, some solid slabs of marble. In his grandmother's garden he used a riddle to sift the dirt fine from stone and other debris. The screens in the dorm room window were ripped and torn. He shook the dirt back and forth, sieved it through the riddle, and the pebbles, double-O gauge and larger calibers, collected in the concave mesh with, sometimes, a piece of glass, a bottle cap, a bone. What happened happened. He panned out the dust. What was left was leavings, a cairn of small stones, evidence only that something was over, done. And all the meager residue can be, in retrospect, made-up, manufactured, faked. His life, this life then is a fiction, a made thing. His father's death a fact. A fact, yes, the fictions, the residue of his death all around him. He likes to read the building, left standing, stopping on his way back to his own dorm, placing his fingers in the still visible and accessible (what shall he call them?) bullet holes, in the brick façade, a kind of Braille, a blind riddle, a kind of real.

SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS

It was true. He made nothing much from his invention — the famous gas-operated, semiautomatic rifle that he developed as a government employee at the Springfield Army Arsenal. The rifle, everyone agrees, was an essential part of the American success on the battlefields of the Second World War. John Garand surrendered any right to compensation, signing over his patents, the licenses to manufacture, to the government, his employer. He never drew more than his civil service grade. His name, the name that named the rifle, was a kind of compensation. At his funeral, the honor detail of three — a sailor, a marine, and a soldier — snapped off seven volleys, live rounds, saluting the creator of the weapon they were using to salute. The.30-caliber slugs, twenty-one of them, now following their own logic, arched over Springfield, Massachusetts, propelled by the expanding gas of the ignited powder, that expansion of gas the phenomenon that Garand insightfully captured and returned to the gun's receiver to eject the spent shell and automatically chamber the next round in his rifle, which was then ready to be fired by the next twitch of the trigger. The ceremony left one bullet each in the magazines of the three rifles. The M1 clip holds eight bullets. The spent magazine was the one design flaw. The automatic ejection of the clip made a distinctive clicking sound and often warned an attentive enemy of the rifleman's momentary vulnerability as he reloaded. And this was exactly what the soldier, a private first class from Lima, of the Ohio National Guard deployed on the campus of Kent State University, was thinking as his exhausted clip ejected after he finished firing a salvo into the mob of students in front of him. The metal clip made a flat, pinging counter-punctuation to the sharp crack of the eight previous quarter notes — the bullets' staccato ignitions. The distinctive report of the Garand M1 rifle. As he rammed home the fresh clip, squeezing it into the guts of the Garand with his thumb leveraged against the polished wood and steel, he was reminded of the anecdote, probably apocryphal, of the standard ration of ammunition issued to firing squads, how one weapon is secretly loaded with blanks, which allows all the members of the squad to cede responsibility, to believe that someone's actions might have no consequence, or, more exactly, one's action might not contain the lethal ingredient, so rendering that action a reenactment only, a kind of theater, a play, a ritual that is both real and not real, where something happens and where something only appears to happen. The blank is a placebo, more potent in the mind than the body. Later he will see his picture in Life magazine, captured as he reloads the magazine of his Garand M1 semiautomatic rifle, just before he shoulders the weapon and fires again into the smear of the crowd of out-of-focus students off in the distance now on his left flank, a bank of fog in that depleted background.

The Four Sides of a Triangle: Proof

A TO B

Yesterday

I took your picture once while you were in the bathtub having tea. You held the cup to your lips, the saucer beneath the cup to catch any drips. Your hair was wet, combed back on your head. Your breasts floated on the surface of the water. I had a slide made, and, yesterday, with you gone and me alone in this rented apartment, I taped it up in the middle of a big picture window above my desk, a chip of stained glass. I look out that window, out through you looking up at me in the steam taking your picture. Each night, with the lights out in my apartment, I watched through her window, a woman in the building across the street step from her shower and reach first for a towel to wrap around her wet hair.

B TO A

Not That Long Before

You took my picture as the baby crowned, his hair matted and matte black, a shade darker than my own. His head pulsed out when I pushed, slid back in after. It was months later you developed that unfinished roll and I found those pictures with the other pictures. There was the picture of me, of the dark dome of my baby's head in the oval frame of my stretched labia. It had been the next-to-last one that came back in a pack which contained the series of silhouettes of me a few nights before the night my water broke. I wanted some evidence of how I looked, how dark my nipples had become, how rich and thick my hair. With a wet finger I made myself hard. I teased out a strand of my hair. I pointed to that dark line which had developed, dissecting my belly, running from between my breasts around and down, dark against my skin as if someone had drawn it with a crayon or lipstick and that disappeared almost immediately, along with everything else, after.

A TO C

About the Same Time

I take your picture as you make yourself come, the blank print snapping from the camera. You take it from me as you roll over. As I slide into you, you hold still, meeting me with a little grunt I force out of you. All the time you are watching the print develop. It begins with the small black speck of your hair, your hand growing from it, your arm spreading up your body between your breasts and leading to your taut neck and sharp chin, the wet sheen of your parted lips, your open and unfocused eyes.

A TO B

Years Before

We all had our picture taken that weekend, the four of us, using a one-hundred-year-old camera. We dressed up in antique clothes — hats with feathers, high collars with floppy bow ties, lots of buttons. The single lens on the camera had been replaced by one with four apertures, and, afterward, we watched as the plate of tin was snipped into four smaller squares. The etched image on each was the same, the four of us in disguise, posed and stiff, holding our breaths, trying not to blink, not moving for a minute, but each was also minutely different because of the slight distance between each lens that focused this one long exposure. Later, in our room, we listened to them in theirs make love, the thin motel walls separating the headboard of our bed from the headboard of theirs. I had brought magazines with pictures because I thought it would help, but hearing them that way had the opposite effect of what I had hoped. You got dressed, embarrassed, covering your flushed skin. You disappeared into the bathroom to pull your hair back into place. I looked at our two metal squares. I looked at her, and I looked at her. Back and forth, back and forth, trying to catch the slight shift in the angle of sight, the four lines of vision looking back at the camera then and, now, at me seeing this seeing.

FAQs

FLIGHT LEADER

So, yesterday I am on the phone with a group of students from Mary Washington College who are asking me questions about writing, an interview for a new magazine they are starting called Pendulum, and there is trouble with the connection they are trying to use — they are trying to use Skype for the first time — and each time they connect they sound like the sound of ripping cloth or more exactly muffled ripping cloth, and then a recorded voice with a British accent comes on and says this phone call is being recorded and then the call is cut off, and then they call me back several times until they connect, and then they ask me the first question which is a question I get often when I do interviews which is how do you find the time to write? — or maybe something like, do you need time to write? — and I am getting ready to answer my frequently answered answer when this ripping sound comes tearing into the house as if the ripping sound in the phone has leaked out and been amplified on steroids, and I look up and see the silhouette of a jet aircraft cut through the quadrant of mullions of the window I am sitting across from, streaking through the graphed paper of the tree branches, overwhelming the static of the phone connection, and I ask them, did you hear that? and they all — it is a conference call, and I think there are four of them, but I can't be sure — answer, yes, and I tell them the Blue Angels are in town, and that was a Blue Angel practicing for the air show that will take place tomorrow over at the airfield right across the river from my house.

WING

Outside now, a second jet, dark blue and close enough to the ground I can see the gold trim and the gold number 2 in Helvetica painted on the outside port surface of the port vertical stabilizer, and the jet is so close to the ground (I have gone outside now, and I don't think the voices on the phone know I have, but they can't help but hear the screaming of the jets as they vector back and forth over the neighborhood doing a maneuver they call an opposing knife's edge) that I can see the rudder flexing, and the control surface that is the whole horizontal stabilizer digs into the air, ricocheting the jet up up up, and then the afterburners kick on and through that roar I hear the second question which is what is the difference between fact and fiction? and I am preparing to answer that one with my frequently answered answer about how a fact is a thing done and a fiction is a thing made so that even the most real thing, after it is done, has no reality, and how even the most made-up thing, when it is made up, has a reality — the reality of a book, say, of words on paper, a transcript you can hold, manipulate — when the two jets meeting at the apex of the loop they have both been pulling begin to emit a dark blue smoke that I will learn later is a paraffin-based solid vaporized by the flame in the engines, and the punctuation of the smoke, a kind of cursive wave, is already drifting to the north as the planes (one tucked under the wing of the other) disappear over the horizon toward Mississippi.

FAT ALBERT

The sound, too, of the two jets is drifting away, though it seems (when you do hear anything) the sound is always trailing way behind the jet that is actually making the sound, or, even stranger, the echoes from some other run-by are running ahead of the jet, reverberating, coming to meet the jet as it dives toward the ground, and the sound is bouncing off the ground up to meet it, a kind of stutter or shriek, and the students on the phone ask me if I think teaching has affected my writing, and they can actually hear through the phone the sound of the jets bouncing off the sky and the ground and the trees and the river and the houses, and I give them an answer about how writing isn't like the other subjects of the university, how it is more like a gift that runs through us all, both students and teachers, that what is received must be given away, that art is erotic property, property that stays in motion when, suddenly, a huge blue C-130 cargo airplane, the one the Blue Angels named Fat Albert, rises up behind my house, as if it were a big balloon floating up, almost nicking the top of the longleaf pines in my neighbor's backyard, its four turboprops digging into the humid air as it lumbers so slowly; it is so slow, especially after the blinking speed of the jets, that it doesn't seem to have enough oomph to remain aloft, always already about to fall, as it is more like a blimp, a zeppelin, wallowing now right overhead as it rolls port, showing me its belly like a whale sounding and stalling, sliding backward, it seems, but then splashing forward, a graceful awkwardness out of the water, over the golf course, its overstuffed rounded and rounding organic shadow casting on the organic cutouts of the greens and bunkers and ponds, and the plane shakes, straining to find an inch of lift, and hunkering down to gain momentum, and then seeming to levitate, wagging its tail and launching, like a navy-blue cetaceous cumulus cloud, shading, now blotting out the bloated sun.

SLOT

The jets are back as the intermission clown car of the cargo plane settles down for a landing on the other side of the river, and the jets — there are four of them now — in their famous formation of four, emerge from behind a cloud, diamond-shaped, the fourth airplane in the slot beneath and behind the lead plane that's wingtip-to-wingtip with his two wingmen's wingtips, but that is hard to see, hard to say, because what is behind or below or above changes instantly effortlessly constantly, it seems, as the planes move through the delta-v of this calculus, rearranging themselves in each dimension — x, y, z, and time — and from this distance, it looks as if there is just one plane instead of four, so precise is the handling as the “they“ that is really an “it“ roll and pitch and yaw as one, and the students have all been talking to me on the other end of the phone, asking their last question, saying this question coming now at me at the speed of sound, at the speed of light, is their last question, and it is this: would I consider publishing something online, as their magazine Pendulum is published online, and would I send them something to publish? and with the four blue jets up in the blue-going-to-white sky, their manufactured blue smoke spilling from them, another signature, with serifs and accents and underlines, I tell the students that I am working on a book of fictions made up of things made up of fours — the four chambers of the heart, the four seasons, the four humors, the four winds, etc., etc., etc., etc., and I am working on something now I will try to finish and send to them to consider putting in the magazine, and I am watching the formation reposition itself into what I will learn later is called a Double Farvel, with two of the four planes inverted, creating a mirrored image of each other, before they break apart once again, corkscrewing through the air, vectoring to each corner of the sky, reining in their speeds, then raising their noses at an extreme angle to almost stall, and then extending their gear, banking, and heading for the airport over the river, and I tell the students that the Blue Angels seem to be finished for the day, and the pilots of the F/A 18s will now attempt what they call a “landing“ on land but that they usually “land“ at sea, on an aircraft carrier (they are Navy planes, after all, and the pilots are not pilots because in the Navy a pilot is someone who pilots a ship not an airship, so these pilots are naval aviators), and they are about to land on land and not on the deck of a ship with a tail hook and arresting cables, the ungainly and suddenly ungraceful difficult ending to what has been all effortless and elegant, the falling, gliding, silence, all taken back with a vengeance, in the final maneuver called, simply, a controlled crash, the only true answer without question…gravity.

Four Eyes

MOOSH

I see him goggled with his glasses, sitting in the sitting room, the space that is the split-level of the split-level, between the upstairs and downstairs, where he has come to live with my Aunt Mad and her family, blind by then. He shaves by feel and misses patches of whiskers on his cheek or leaves swaths of stubble on purpose. He grabs my hand to skin his skin. “Moosh,“ he says, and “Moosh“ again, sands my hand. His eyes, magnified, run behind the useless lenses of his useless eyes. I see the scum of the cataracts, enlarged by the glasses' lenses, mica veneers, a cloudy wax beneath the waxy glass. The right eye blinded outright, a spring sprung from a couch long ago — a darkness penetrating, spiraling into the aperture of the iris — as he moved furniture at the Hotel Indiana where he was a custodian of cushions, a janitor of the terrazzo. The whites of his runny eyes are nougat. They, the eyes, weep as if they've forgotten that they are weeping, more a welling leak that tears and tears. “Moosh,“ he says and says again, those double Os scooping out the sight for the sound. At Grandma's wake, years before, no one saw him disappear. I found him later in the basement of the old house — the basement dug out for the dirt to be used in the backyard garden — lost in the dark, trapped in what had been the coal bin once and now was the root cellar seamed with sacks of seed potatoes gone bad, their eyes sprouting a pulpy fur of fingers.

MA

I see her see the saints, Anthony of Padua, the patron of lost things, lost people, and Jude, the patron of losing, of lost lost causes. She read with a glass, magnified, squinting, coaxing the print to grow. She mussed the Mass cards, spread them out on the kitchen table like tarot, like my baseball cards, the statistics, the details of the dead, the final prayers, recipe cards for funerals. I fielded my cards across the table — St. Mickey, St. Willie, St. Aparicio, St. Sandy, St. Ernie — my voice introducing them to the audience of her, a public address booming, echoing in the vast stadium of her kitchen, her echo doubling the litany of the canon. Later, when she decides to die and then dies, she will say that the saints have said it is so, so she does. That was after I lost my eyeteeth, pulled to make spaces for the spacers. The new bands smarted, wired my mouth closed, a declension — tender, tenderly, tenderness. I look angelic in the first communion portrait, a pseudosaint, orthodontic. She looked at me askance. Cornered me in the corner of her eye. She saw me as another icon, saw me suffer under a mal occhio. So, she made the mal occhio mirrored back at my mal occhio to combat it. At the kitchen table, she mumbled the mumble while drip-dropping the olio in the water, watching until, at last, it collected itself into the shiny slimy worry beads she worried, the sign I'd been seen, and then spat and pinned the amulets of twisted horn to pierce open the bad glance. I saw her see the saints in the light falling through her kitchen windows. They talked to her in pulses of light, plosives of color. I followed instructions, building the scale model of the Avenger, its parts spread out on the floor spread with morning papers, the words worming under my gaze. It was blue, the airplane, and its wings folded and the decals were stars. The furniture was wrapped in plastic she polished. I fogged the clear plastic of the toy canopy with the dissolving glue on my fingers. The pilot's head was the size of a pea. I fit tab A into slot B, lost a blue piece in the nap of the rug. I caught her looking as I looked.

GRANDMA BLANCHE

I see her, eyes closed, in the bed she is going to die in. I have just arrived, taking the red-eye overnight to make it in time. Everyone will say she waited for me to arrive, and when I did arrive we didn't wait long to witness the last laboring breaths, her eyelids fluttering. Everyone says she had been dying a long time, sitting up in her chair, staring out through the picture window, awake through the day, through the night, seeing shadows in the shadows, dust in the clouds of dust blown up from the ball diamonds in the park across the street. Everyone said it was the cable, the witnessing all the Eyewitness News that put her over this edge, the flickering loop of muggings and murders in the Loop, daily box scores of death. I'm not so sure. I watched her watch out all my life. Stare. Always there, she was never there. She wore trifocals, their optics fragmenting her eyes, fracturing the light, bluing there, going to indigo, then violet, her unblinking eyes a puzzle beneath the broken-up stains. The television was black-and-white, even after color had been invented, and the screen was haloed by a lighted frame advertised by Zenith to soften contrast. Her chair was angled so she could catch the oblique pictures bouncing from the TV and the ones glancing in through the picture window. She watched me for her daughter, my mother, who worked as I was growing up. I watched her fall asleep sitting up, her eyes not closing. Playing in the front yard so that she could keep an eye on me, I made faces and waved my arms to startle her pictured inside the window. She didn't start but didn't take her eyes from me, the optical illusions of flat portraits where the look follows you back and forth, and I went back and forth, her mirage of me, the only movement her eyes panning as I moved. No one knew where she went when she went behind her eyes, but everyone agreed that as she failed she went there more and more, her eyes turned inward. We wondered what she was imagining, what she saw when she wasn't seeing. We all asked her all the time what she was thinking when she was thinking and what did she dream when she dreamed and, “Oh, nothing,“ was what she always answered when she answered at all.

GRANDPA JIM

I see blue, yellow, but I am deficient in the reds and greens, see them only through crossed wires in my mind. Knowing grass is green, I see the gray of the gray I see as grass, a grass green when I think about it. It has always been hard to explain, how the brain's circuitry saturates the absence with this solid mass of missing information. It's in the genes. He was truly colorblind, and I could half-understand the gradient of grays his brain fudged with, niggling the nervous mechanism of misfiring. Imagine this pale world one big paint-by-number pattern and the pallet, this spectrum of grays, deflected only by intensity, by darkness and light, by value but not by hue, all drawn out within the outline until the brain supplied a pigment's alias. The brain is always fooling itself. He was an electrician, a member of the Brotherhood, whose union buttons pictured a fist squeezing a bundle of jittery lightning. Each year's button screened a different pastel shade. He wore the current year on his beige porkpie hat. A green, I think. He wired together every school science fair project for me. Each year, I displayed the schematics of circuits, series and parallel, illuminating big Christmas tree bulbs — in primary yellow blue red orange green — screwed into the porcelain sockets. See, I would say about the series, when one bulb burns out the circuit's broken. Without the light, the colors left, blacked to black. He stripped the copper wire of its plastic insulation, crimping the coating, each with its own tinted sheath, wrenching it from the wire underneath, and then threaded the white copper wire into the screw connections connecting. The wires came in all colors, of course, the scraps of insulation exhausted confetti. I saw what he saw. Saw it in the way he saw it. Not knowing what is missing, a transmission of this lackluster lack. We watched the television skewed to black, to white, even as it announced its living color. Spies were everywhere, always hesitating over the spilled-gut circuitry of some explosive device, attempting to ascertain which wire to clip to defuse the bomb, sorting through the nest of leads, a gray coiling spume of the same. We watched the beaked pliers peck and tease, all shading and shadow, one wire now balanced on the whitest edge of the scissor. No, not that one, he said into the depths of the invisible scanning light, light drained of its knowing.

Mount Rushmore

WASHINGTON

Freud fucked us up, this Father business. The Mother business as well. He, Sigmund, is the inventor of the modern novel, is the novelist of the twentieth century, the founder of the form. He is the Father, that again, of the notion of Character and even more importantly the notion of the character of Character, this business of depth, this business of three dimensions, this business of complex. The forefather of the epiphany of The Epiphany and the transformation of transformation of Character that follows. He, Freud, elicits in me a kind of envy, yes, Envy, that I have not, in all my years, invented or, in all my years to come, will never invent, any Character as real as Ego, as real as Id. There! There are fictions for you. So contagious as to jump the page, reformulate the brain chemistry so completely as to deny the efficacy and accuracy of Brain Chemistry to explain the brain. His invention of the Subconscious and the Unconscious naturalizes inside us (Inside Us!) the idea of the Subconscious, the Unconscious (See!) as if these fictions are not fictions. I like the bib of slag spilling down the General's chest, a graphic demonstration that the head of the Head of State was always in state there inside the mountain. See the limestone-wigged helmet of the figurehead on the brow of the cliff ship! The lithic waste is the cascading, foaming bow wake. George is a kind of Venus in drag and Penis in person, the titanic member being the progenitor of his Country, sure, but also Love, I guess, or at least that compelling drive of Sex, emerging from the sea of solid rock.

JEFFERSON

He was the writer. Well, Lincoln, too, wrote, signed on to write Jefferson's sequel. And Jefferson is the one whose backstory has legs. The heritage of his transmitted DNA decoded as avidly as the Declaration is parsed for intention. My favorite plot twist? The branch of Hemmings's children by Tom who passed into Ohio, refusing to cotton up to the analysis of their genes, preferring White-ness over Jefferson-ness. How odd our desire that this one have a life that is narrative, not simply anecdote. And irony too. Backstory and, there on the escarpment, he's got George's back. The inventor of political parties, the originator of difference. The Great Deconstructor has the least “face.“ No distinguishing marks save that distinction of no distinguishing marks. Okay, red hair, but this is a monochromatic mountain. Jefferson pulls duty, in two dimensions, flat visage on the screwy two-dollar bill. J is our K of presidents. Anonymous and somewhat known with the suggestion there are things one wants to know. And inside Jefferson is Madison, the symbiote inside the big brain, the watch in the pocket. Madison writes Jefferson; Jefferson writes America. America is the Great American Novel.

ROOSEVELT

Reading left to right: Roosevelt. The Modernist whose medium is stuff, stuff like mountains, like canals, like painting battleships white and sending them on a performance piece around the world. Probably his idea to create the thing itself, this wacky stunt in South Dakota. Or at least it was in the air he breathed, expelled. His is the spitting image of the contemporaneous Zeitgeist, the modesty of the placement of his visage tips off the self-consciousness of the facade. The least equal of these equal giants but nonetheless the Great Sculptor of the ideal of giants. The last of firsts but the first of lasts. There is real artistry in the rendering of the pince-nez. The glasses are there but not. A transparent reproduction of Transparency. Transparency the dominant ideology of the age, our age. The trick of Realism, its tricklessness. See, these busts bloomed on the mountaintop, a spontaneous generation like maggots appearing on rotting meat. WYSIWYG is what you see and what you get from this point on. No bull. The eye is drawn to those eyes magnified by the invisible glass. What are you looking at? The writing of novels, I think, is so beside the point, isn't it? One writes novels to write the author of the novel. The book itself does not last, is not carved on the side of a mountain, is not printed on money. Funny, the New Critical transparency was to focus on The Work and not The Author of The Work. But it is always Marvel's “To His Coy Mistress.“ Every work comes with that apostrophe of possession. The Author ain't dead. The Author ain't even ain't.

LINCOLN

The most dead one. How did Washington die? Jefferson? Roosevelt? Lincoln's death was the one dramatized, in a theater no less, by an actor acting and acting. History is scripted. The show goes on. Literally, the show goes on. Our American Cousin performed daily like clockwork. The clocks all set for ten after ten. What ever happened to pageants? The great theatrical recreations of historical events by ordinary citizens, descendants of the participants in the original events, on the sites where the original events first transpired? Sure, the Mormons perform each summer, on another mountain in New York, the visitation of the angel to the Prophet Joseph Smith. Now there's a novel! But the art form of the pageant, the Pre-Postmodern art form, seems to have waned. Perhaps. Perhaps pageantry continues but is only now disguised as Real Life, Story and History the same. The recent War in Iraq was staged. It was held in theater. How did the President watch the performance? Not that much differently than I did, I bet. Like a King in Shakespeare watching a play on stage upon the stage. Like the Subjects of a King watching the pageantry of royalty, of war. My favorite part was the soldier, wounded in the hand, waiting for the evacuation by helicopter, who had the word HAND written on his forehead, talking to his mother, half a world away by satellite phone, talking to his mother in real time (Real Time!) while I watched. That was my favorite part. Lincoln's forehead was a stage. In the movie, North by Northwest. All of the presidents look on when the actor Cary Grant playing the role of Roger Thorn-hill playing the role of Mr. Kaplan performs a staged performance of his (Cary Grant playing Roger Thornhill playing Mr. Kaplan) death all witnessed by the back-projected image of the mountain, there, through the window by the barbershop quartet of stone. At the moment of the assassination The Real World approaches harmony with the Fiction of the World. Sic Semper Tyrannis!

Four Fourths

JULY 4^TH, 1979, BALTIMORE

That summer I read all of Chandler, Hammett, Cain, one paperback book after the next in an old eight-story apartment building on St. Paul Street called the St. Paul. On the fourth floor, I had one room and a bathroom that served as the kitchen, the hot plate on the toilet tank. My apartment had been a bedroom in a bigger apartment next door, cannibalized into its own space generating rent, ninety-five bucks the first of the month. I had filled it up with used office furniture, dinged gray-metal bookcases, and a store-cut foam mattress on rough pallets on the floor. Out the one window, I could see over Lovegrove Alley to North Charles Street and the park beyond with the statues of Confederate generals and Edgar Allan Poe, who looked in stone a lot like John Wilkes Booth. It would be easy here to say it was hot that summer, but it wasn't. For some reason it wasn't hot and not even cool, but cold. The room's one doorway had two doors — a solid oak one that could be left open for ventilation and still be screened by the second one, a painted pine plantation shutter that let in some air and the echoing sounds from the hallway. There was another door in the room leaning up against a wall next to the bookcase stacked with the detective novels I was reading. I had found the door in the basement. I liked to look around the old building, see how it had been renovated over the years, how everything fit together. There in the basement with the storage lockers, the coin laundry, and the old coal bunkers was a room made out of warped studs and unfinished drywall. The door was open. A janitor's room once, I guessed. There was a bed frame, a broken chair. I looked behind the door, closing it, and discovered the inside side covered with bits of paper glued or thumbtacked or stapled to the wood — gum wrappers and cigarette packs, ticket stubs and matchbooks, a ferry schedule, racing forms, magazine advertisements, paper watch-faces, fortune cookie fortunes, and Mass cards. A private's sleeve chevron stripe, oyster shells, dominoes, a child's block (the letter M), several kinds of keys and coins, a comb with some teeth missing where the brad went through. And everywhere between the paper appliqué and the odds and ends were dozens of every kind of screw and nail holding nothing, it seemed, but screwed or pounded into the inside of the door at different depths for their own sakes. I unhinged the whole door one night and took it back upstairs to my room. I'd read in bed. I read the door and my books. It was cold that summer. I'd turn the page and look up, get distracted by the door. Something new, I'd find it there. Stamps. Baseball card. Time card. Bottle cap. Betting slip. Evidence. The fireworks that Fourth of July were being launched from Memorial Stadium on 33^rd Street not that far away. I had found the way up to the roof. I bought a folding beach chair, aluminum tubes with webbing, and took it, a blanket, and a book with me to the roof. I unfolded the chair on the wooden boardwalk that seemed to float above the gravel roof, sat down, and waited. It was cold. I said that. I wrapped up in the blanket, read. I was the only person on the roof, though I could hear the crowds of people down below making their way up St. Paul and 33^rd Streets to the stadium. It took a long time to get dark, and I read The Big Sleep until I fell asleep. I woke up finally in the silence after the loud cracking booms of the firework finale stopped, the smoke of all the explosions, black on the black night sky, drifting south toward the Inner Harbor.

JULY 4^TH, 1980, AMES, IOWA

That summer I moved to town a month early before the job started and rented an apartment on the ground floor of an old brick house near the power plant downtown. At night, I walked to Main Street through Band Shell Park that did have an old band shell used, I found out, for concerts once a week by the city's band, wearing uniforms left over from the high school production of Music Man, playing Sousa marches and Sound of Music songs at dirge tempo. In the branches of the oaks beyond the band shell, a cow, a Jersey, perched, or so it seemed, content and grazing. Boyd's Dairy's life-sized sign swayed above the ice cream stand, suspended by invisible wires from old flagpoles. Boyd's served four flavors — chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and a daily special that was usually bubblegum. I got a scoop of chocolate in a cup, walked down Main Street to the deserted train station, and sat on the platform under the eaves, my back against the wide clapboards, and looked out over the double-track right-of-way. I waited for the next train going through, east or west, forty or fifty a day, grain trains mainly, made up of closed hopper cars or gondolas painted in ice cream pastel colors hauled by the green and yellow engines of the Chicago and Northwestern, the Cheap and Nothing Wasted, blowing the horns through every crossing all through town and punctuated on the end with a caboose in a blindingly bright shade of safety yellow whose brakeman or conductor in the bay window usually took the time to wave at me as I waved back with my pink plastic spoon. When I first moved to town, I walked through the park and past Boyd's Dairy and up Main Street to the Hotel Muhm to have my hair cut by the barber whose shop was in the lobby. That summer I was reading westerns, starting with The Last of the Mohicans, Shane, and Little Big Man. I had The Virginian when I went inside, and began to read it after I sat down to wait my turn. Then the barber finished with the customer, and the customer paid while the barber dusted the seat of the chair with a towel. I dog-eared the page in my book and sat down in the empty seat, waiting for the barber to drape the sheet around my neck. “I don't cut long hair,“ he said. “OK,“ I said to the barber standing behind me. “I said,“ he said, “I don't cut long hair.“ My hair was long, I thought, that was why I came in for a haircut, but not that long. Before I could say anything more, the barber said, “I don't cut your hair.“ And I got up and left. When I opened the door to the flat, I saw the door I found in Baltimore leaning against the far wall of the big empty living room that had been converted into my bedroom by the convertible couch converted into an unmade bed. I still had to finish the unfinished white pine wood bookcases, staining them later to look like dark oak. Soon after that, my tooth began to ache, one in back on the left, the lower jaw, from the cold daily ice cream, and I had to find a dentist. I didn't have a car then, so I walked into the first office I could walk to. The dentist was able to have a look right then, no waiting, and I sat in the chair with my finger still in my place in The Virginian. My wisdom teeth were impacted, all of them, and the dentist recommended they come out as soon as possible and recommended the long holiday weekend. I had been told that there was a neighborhood parade on my block — bicycles and red wagons tricked out with crepe paper and streamers, kazoo bands, batons, hula hoops, and everyone with little flags. Recovering after the procedure, I could take my lawn chair and sit by the curb, see the kids ignite snakes on the sidewalk and light sparklers in the daylight, watch the riding lawn mowers trailing bunting and the dogs and cats dressed up like minutemen. I never made it to the parade, only imagined it in my stupor brought on by the pain pills I was given, the leftover effects of the amnesia drugs that kept me awake for the removal of teeth numbered 1, 16, 17, 32 but left me remembering nothing, nothing of it until I woke up on the train platform, my ear to the ground, the steel wheels stuttering over a rail joint, waiting for this train, convinced that a wave from the brakeman or the conductor was all I needed to get better, the cool mint colors of the cars already gone, forgotten, a balm.

JULY 4^TH, 1983, BRANFORD, CONNECTICUT

That summer I rented a house in Branford, a shoreline village outside New Haven. The house, an old foursquare with a big screened-in porch, was built above a pebble beach overlooking a very calm Long Island Sound. Long Island itself was in the distance, a thickening of the pencil-line horizon off to the south. I read, in a hammock strung up on the porch, all of Patrick O'Brian's books set on sailing ships during the Napoleonic Wars, which always mention the hammocks strung up between the beams of the lower decks of the frigates, the men-of-war, the ships-of-the-lines. I would look up from the book to see the Sound off in the distance — through the screen, the branches of trees, and over the roofs — suddenly filled with sails of all types reaching across the cove and then turning and tacking back down east. Speedboats darted across the wakes, the only wave in the water, going up on step and slapping back down to make a sound that would reach me many seconds after it happened. When I wasn't reading, I walked through the neighborhoods, the houses mostly year-round places whose inhabitants lived all the time at the beach so that the novelty of the ocean had worn off. They vacationed elsewhere. On the cross-country drive to get there, I went through Amish settlements in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and stopped once in one of the stores and bought a big, black, broad-brimmed flat straw hat I wore as I walked through Branford and down to the beach with my folding chair and flag-striped towel to watch the boats wheel, the fang-shaped sails stirring in the smooth water with the bright sunlight amplifying what little chop there was, a sprinkle of sparkle. I rolled up my long pants to the knees and waded out into the shallow water. The breeze that pushed the boats blew further out. The shade from my hat cast a black shadow like a hole into which I could step, fall completely through. I had driven out to Branford in a '67 Dodge Dart I inherited from an aunt. The temperature gauge had never worked until it did one night, instantly jumping from C to H as I drove through fields in Iowa, fireflies sparking off the corn all around me. The radiator blew, blowing fluid through the hood onto the windshield. Ever after, mechanics, who loved working on the ancient engine, the old slant-six, clucked when they saw the blood-red that rust had painted the engine and its compartment. From Branford, I drove the Dart into New Haven, stood in line for a seat in one of the pizza places there, something the guidebooks said I should do. By the end of the summer, I ended up liking Sally's more than Pepe's, not so much for the pizza as for the many pictures of Sinatra on the wall there. I waited by myself in the lines outside and often sat with strangers inside, taking up the odd seat, and only mentioned I was spending the summer in Branford if anyone asked. I read about old sea battles and walked to the beach and through the town and then back up to try to write something myself — a story or a poem — as I rocked slowly back and forth in the hammock on the porch. Or, as a change of pace, I hiked up the road toward the interstate, to the Trolley Museum and rode an old street car — the PCC salvaged from Philadelphia, the bright red open-sided convertible car from Brooklyn, or the drab trolley from the St. Charles line in New Orleans with the destination placard scrolled to Desire. The cars trundled through the salt marshes and scrub forest, sparks spilling from the overhead wire on the turns. At Short Beach, where the track ended, the motorman got out to lower the trailing trolley and then forked up the leading trolley to contact the wire. He got back inside, flipped the backs of the seats over rattan benches to face the front, and powered up the car to go back in the other direction. I turned the lights out in the house the night of the Fourth. The neighborhood around me was dark, the houses emptied out. The local families going into New Haven to celebrate, a vacation from the permanent vacation the village seemed to live. There was no moon but plenty of stars drifting south and west. Far away on the north shore of Long Island the fireworks there began, launched to bloom silently just above a seam in the dark. The explosions were so small that I couldn't tell the patterns or be sure of the color, only the intensity of light. The porch screen blurred the little smudges further, framed them in the pricked openings of the wire mesh. It is all perspective, the miniature bombardment that breathed out and then smeared, falling back into the sea. Up and down the length of the island, the static scatter of sparks, as if they were signaling each other, a couple dozen patches flaring up, tendrils of one or two high altitude rockets arching back over the lit-up pulse of smoke. Fleck of rust. Burning mold. A random pantomime that seemed to communicate, in some subdued but desperate code, that something urgent was happening somewhere else.

JULY 4^TH, 20—, FORT WAYNE, INDIANA

That summer I went back home to sell my parents' house, living there, sleeping in my old room, getting the place ready to put on the market. I had to cull through everything, decide what I would put in the garage sale, what I would give away, what I would cart off to the dump. My father collected souvenir golf balls he kept in pressed-paper egg crates. Each ball was printed with a different stencil or decal commemorating some event, a company or tournament logo, sports team mascot, fortune cookie saying, motivational motto. My mother framed pictures using the same frames over and over, stripping out the picture and mat, replacing it with a new mat and photo, then storing the old one behind the new one sealed up inside the brown paper backing. Opening up the paper backing of a picture was like opening a Christmas present, with the gift being the layers and layers of past pictures, of annual Christmas photos, say, July Fourth picnics in the backyard, stashed there. The Christmas shots were department store studio pictures of the three of us and then just the two of them through the years. The wallet-sized copies had been sent out in the Christmas cards. I read science fiction at night, books about the future after a day of grubbing through the past. I read brittle paperbacks, foxing pocketbook editions I read first when I lived there — Dick and Clarke and Asimov and Bradbury's Martian Chronicles—on the same couch I had read them years before. I worked on curb appeal, cutting the lawn in a checkerboard pattern like my father had. I shaped the hedges, cleaned the gutters, painted the shutters, changed the seasonal wind sock from Easter's green and purple to the striped and starred bunting of Memorial Day that would do for the Fourth of July. The backyard butted up against the boundary of an office park with its cluster of brick and glass box buildings sloping away gently down the contour of a hill to a pond where a gaggle of Canada geese milled. In the parking lot of the nearest building, an endoscopy office, my parents used to watch the fireworks fired from the top deck of the parking garage on the college campus on the other side of the bypass. It was easy to drag some chairs and a cooler to a spot there and watch the lot fill up with pickup trucks and vans of families arriving to hold vigils of the night coming on, the sun falling toward the campus. In the dusk, legal bottle rockets lifted off of truck beds. Firecrackers sputtered on the ground next to the gathering vehicles as they crept along looking for a parking spot. Cherry bombs spooked the geese that spat. In the black windows of the next building over, I could see the glinting rows of computers, their screen savers, I imagined, flickering and rolling. A contract company of the post office that remotely examined badly addressed mail and routed it remotely to where it was supposed to go. The screen savers saving the screen, the flashes there reflected in the glass of the windows as if each window pictured its own tiny fireworks display. I thought about the workers who would be back soon enough at those consoles after the holiday, scanning the lost and diverted mail scrolling on the screens, attempting to read the blots and smudges splattered on the envelopes, the fractals and fragments of the stuttering hands of correspondents from somewhere. They would try to put a spine in some smear, make fragments mean something once again, the parts more than the whole or at least something whole enough to mean. Like that “i“ there in that cloud of inky sky. I imagine the dark dot dotting that “i“ as a concentrated black hole, an absence collapsing into the zenith of a rocket's launch, exploding over the straight streak of its exhaust. For that instant, a lit mass of a million billion pieces flaring then nothing. More than nothing. And nothing more.

Chili 4-Way

MICHIGAN PIKE

When you were in college, at Butler, you would drive out Michigan Pike to eat at the Steak 'n Shake there. It looked like a Steak 'n Shake, but it wasn't quite right. It looked the same as other Steak 'n Shakes — black-and-white with the chromium fixtures and the enameled tiled walls and ceramic tile floor. The staff wore the paper hats and the check pants, the white aprons, and the red bow ties. But often you were the only customer. You sat at a table, not the counter, and scanned the menu as as many as a dozen waiters and waitresses waited for you to order. This was a training restaurant for the restaurant chain, self-conscious of its self-consciousness, a hamburger university. There were waiters and waitresses in training watching how your waiter would take your order, and there were waiter and waitress trainers who were being followed by other waiters and waitresses in training watching the waiter and the waiters and waitresses watching the waiter taking your order after bringing several glasses of welcoming water. They crowded around the table in their spotless uniforms like hospital interns around your bed, waiting, taking notes on their checkered clipboards. There were television cameras everywhere and television monitors everywhere displaying what the television cameras where recording. There, the grill cook and the dozen or so trainee grill cooks pressed with the fork and spatula the meat pucks into perfect steak burgers. There, one after the other flipped each patty once, crossed the instruments at right angles and pressed down again forming the perfect circles of meat, the evidence of this broadcast on snowy monitors next to those displaying the scoops of ice cream falling perfectly and endlessly into a parade of mixing shake mixing cans. There was even a monitor that showed the bank of monitors and one that showed the monitor showing that monitor, and in it the endless regression of televisions within televisions, the black-and-white clad waiters and waitresses and the grill cooks and prep chefs moving like a chorus line, constructing your two doubles that you had ordered an acceptable duration of time ago. And the caterpillar of service snaked with your plates of perfectly plated food held by the waiter at the head-end trailed by a conga line of identical servers back to your perfect table where the television cameras panned to focus on you eating your two doubles and showing you eating your two doubles in the monitor that showed the monitor of the double you eating. And everyone in the place made sure you had everything you needed and said they'd be back to check and then came back to check and asked you if you wouldn't mind filling out the survey about the service and food and a survey about the survey and the survey about the survey's survey. The sandwiches were perfect. And the milk shake. The French fries were all exactly the same length and arranged in a pleasing random jumble. The real stainless steel cutlery gleamed, and the real dishes and the glass glasses gleamed. As you left, at every empty table, an employee wiped and polished the Formica tabletop, watched over by two or three others, nodding unconsciously in what you took to be approval.

96^TH STREET

She would meet him when he was in town, when he was going through town, at the Steak 'n Shake right off I-69 on 96^th Street. They both remembered when this part of the city had not been part of the city, had been nothing but farmland, nothing but woods. She grew up in the city. He grew up in another part of the state. They met later after both their lives were settled. Now 96^th Street was all strip malls and box stores and freestanding drive-ins. Sometimes, after they would meet at the Steak 'n Shake, they would decide to drive separately to one of the motels nearby and spend a few hours there before she would go back to work, her family, her home and he would get back on the road to drive back to his home, his family. Or he would stay the night, call his wife to say he was too tired to keep driving, would get an early start the next day. On the nights he stayed over, he drove back to the Steak 'n Shake and had dinner, trying to get the table they had shared hours before. In the parking lots outside, as the parking lots' lights came on, teenagers gathered in crowds of cars. Everyone out there milled about, switching rides, changing places, slamming the doors, flashing the car lights. Some of the kids would come inside to order shakes and fries, take the order back out between the pools of light to pass around the drinks and the bags of fries to their friends in the shadows. He watched through the plate glass with its camouflage of advertisement the purposeful loitering in the lots outside. Earlier that day at the same table, they had talked about how things had changed and how they wanted them to stay the same. She always ordered a Coke but Steak 'n Shake had its own brand of pop. King Cola. It tasted the same, she always said, but it was different. He always ordered chili, and as they talked he crushed each oyster cracker separately in the plastic bag, one at a time, turning the crackers into finer and finer crumbs, a dust of crumbs, before he would tear open the bag and pour the cracker crumbs into the bowl of chili. That day when she ordered the King Cola she was told that Steak 'n Shake now served regular Coca-Cola. The waitress waited while she considered. There was a Diet Coke now too, and that's what she ordered after she thought about it. When the waitress came back with the drink, she dropped off the bags of crackers, and without thinking, he began to pinch and pop the crackers inside the bag. He asked her how the new cola tasted. She used a straw. The same, she said, and different.

KEYSTONE

Bob called. I had been out of town. I had just walked in. I was hungry after the trip. The phone rang. It was Bob.

“If anybody asks where you were Saturday night, you were with me,“ he said.

“Okay,“ I said. “Where were we?“

Bob thought for a second. “We were at the old Steak 'n Shake on Keystone.“

“What did I eat?“ I said.

“What? What did you have to eat?“

“At the Steak 'n Shake. If someone asks.“

Bob thought again.

“You had Chili 4-Way.“

“Okay.“

He hung up, and I went back out to find something to eat in earnest. The car was still warm. I drove over to the Steak 'n Shake on Emerson Avenue. I looked at the menu. There was Chili, there was Chili Mac, there was Chili 3-Way, and there was Chili 5-Way. I had remembered incorrectly.

NORMAL

We visited Normal to eat at the original Steak 'n Shake. The chain was founded in Normal in 1934, and the first restaurant was still standing after all these years. We liked to eat at the Steak 'n Shakes in Indianapolis, where we are from, that are all modern and new but retain, by design, what we believed was the look and feel of the original. We especially liked the trademarked logo of the disk with wings and the slogan that graced the actual restaurant china: “In Sight It Must Be Right.“ The company history online has pictures of the original Steak 'n Shake in Normal that looks even more retro than the retro restaurants they are building now. We could see how they were trying to retain, in the present, a suggestion of the past. Then, there were carhops, too, and marquee lighting with signs that swooped and curved into streamlined decorations on the roof. It was all very modern for its time and, now, in the pictures looked like the past's idea of the future. And here we were in that future looking back to a past that, for us, never was. Turns out that “In Sight It Must Be Right“ meant something specific back then. We could see, if we were customers then, the cooks grind the steaks into ground meat right before our eyes. The fine cuts of meat being turned into the ropey cables of meat as the cooks in immaculate white aprons turned the old-fashioned cranks of the machines. We guess, back then, people didn't trust what went into things like that, that eating out, then, was more of an adventure. So we wanted to see for ourselves, the past, go back in time, we thought, to see the real past in Normal instead of what was left of the past today in Indianapolis. Turns out we were too late. By the time we got there — driving through the farmlands of Indiana, Illinois, the fields dotted with cattle gazing on the green grass of the gently rolling pastures passing by — the original Steak 'n Shake had been demolished, or was in the process of being demolished, the yellow bulldozers still moving the ruins around into neat piles of rubble. We parked the car and watched them tidy up. We mixed into the crowd of onlookers watching. The setting sun, shining through the arch of water being sprayed on the debris to keep the dust in check, created a miniature diminished rainbow over what we had come looking for.

Four Signs

PLENTY

There is an economy of form found in nature. Look at the horn, a helix, the same pitch as Watson's DNA contemplated in Bloomington, Indiana. Is there a message here to be transmitted? Perhaps a flagpole. No, only a name. SCOTT'S. Now that jogs some ancient racial memory of thrift tacked onto all this abundance.

And, Watson, what genetics. What genie's been engineering the produce? The green fuselage of cucumber, the warhead carrots, the blimp tomato. Nothing in the world expresses these exact colors. Lemon yellow, orange orange. The pineapple, shaped like a stomach, turns into an eggplant when you look at it from the other side. The pair of pears, the green pepper and the red pepper. What is that? An onion? Garlic? Radish? A sprig of cherries, the same color red as the tomatoes and red peppers, and something unnameable out in front. It is the shape of a fruit, the dusty color of a vegetable. Which reminds me of the old saw about tomatoes — fruit or vegetable?

It is a stock boy's nightmare. His pyramids spilling from the grassy green counters of produce. His legs, a blur, a cartoon. The ripe fruit rolling, splitting open as it was meant to do. The seeds are dispersed everywhere. Vines, then, beginning to grow from behind the canned goods, a jungle there in aisle four.

It is like an explosion, with all the tricks of photography — time lapse, slow motion, cropped, retouched.

It is a vending machine that cannot stop vending. Lucy is our Eve, the housewife, with a bandana done up in horns. She reaches, plucks, eats endlessly.

It is that old television game show. Contestants sweep through the aisles, dumping food into cart after cart.

It is the terror in the eyes of the child posed next to the pumpkin bigger than he is.

Scott's big horn screws itself into the clouds. At night I can hear the worms in my garden. They cast long shadows with their casting, twine, untwine, leaving empty holes in the black earth the next morning.

PERFECTION

The loaf of bread is as big as a boxcar. Derailed from the sign, it scissors upward, its end sheared away and crumbled as if it were too much to ask to simply open it. Perhaps the whole loaf is to be used at once, and no one thinks to save the bag. The apparent carelessness of packaging, like the clear window of a written style, is transparent, ignorable. Not technique at all, but content. A one-pound loaf. You have held it in your hand. At this distance, it seems no bigger. Art has fooled you again as you reach out to squeeze it.

But it is yellow. As yellow as her hair. As yellow as the coat of butter (not waxy, not melted) spread evenly to the crust of the single slice she will always be eating. It is like the kiss Keats talks about on the ancient preserve jar. The red of her lips just meets the yellow of the butter. And the curve of her mouth Us into the parabolic arch of that slice. And her blue eyes are looking up away from the bread and butter as if, at any second, those blue eyes will roll all the way up beneath her creamy lids at the first instant she realizes just what it is she has tasted and finds it impossible to stop tasting and to stop saying Mmmm and impossible (all reflex now) to stop herself from closing her eyes as she will find it impossible to stop from closing her eyes when, later, she will kiss that boy at the picnic, their lips slick from the buttered bread they have eaten, the golden buzzing of bees in their ears, and the yellow light of the sun pressing on their closed lids.

But it is white bread. Where is the heel? You are in the middle of things. The slices keep falling, full face, the landing profile. The stack of bread on the plate never rises to shut off this stumbling. It is a steady state. It is another illusion you live by. It is the plenty that is never quite enough, like the bottomless cup of coffee. It is almost perfect. Each slice a slice closer to the whole truth. Each slice a slice closer to the end of this story and even beyond the end to the last blank pages, whiter without printing, at the end of the book. A book that was a story. A story that was like your life.

But wait, there is more.

POWER

My dad was a janitor all his life over at the GE. We lived on Brandruff Street by the Wabash tracks. From our backyard, where we kept a garden of trellised tomatoes, pole beans, and grape arbors, we could see the top floors of the factory beyond the rails and warehouses. I staked the plants. Strips of white cloth trained the stems up the poles and wires. GE's got factories everywhere, making all kinds of things electrical. The Broadway GE made the lightbulbs. My dad worked third trick. He changed lightbulbs with new lightbulbs off the line. Union rules, that old joke. Yes, it took three guys, two to turn the ladder while he held the bulb. On the roof was the GE sign. GENERAL ELECTRIC spelled out in thousands of bulbs. The old intertwined initials blazing in a circle of script above it. G and the E laced together. Each night, my dad woke up and, ready for work, sat with me in the garden. We listened to the plants grow. Fireflies sparked upward off the tips of the lush leaves. The trains shunted back and forth in the yard. With binoculars, he focused on the burning sign, floating above the roof. Later, I watched him, a blurred shadow, crawl across the light, making his way along the brilliant scaffolding, to the single extinguished bulb. I had to look away. Only the brightest stars were in the sky, the rest washed out by all the light of the city. My father kept his eyes closed as much as he could even behind the polarized window of the welder's mask he wore. He'd look away, he told me, to where he thought our dark house would be, where I would be in the vast darkness below.

PALETTE

At night after closing, the crazed blacktop of the parking lot is sealed, the thick tar swept along the split seams, slapped about cursively with sopping mops that splatter and spray antimatter milky ways, black stars on black backdrops, the constellations unreadable in this light, a kind of Palmer primer of crippled capitals, detached legs and leaking ovoid gestures gone awry, creases on a palm incised, scored, toothy selvage. Over all these alphabets and glyphs, a slurry film is broadcast by machine, all pneumatic nozzled steamed sheeting, plowing back and forth, lapping the air-brushed edge over the edge, masking (a mat of matte black hermetic iced devil's food cake, empty black void, a desert dessert) the edge edged with another edge. And after that, while this new nothing dries, the night crew tees up some comped cones à la mode taken from the soda jerk on overtime at the take-out window. These little lamps of lactose lit-up, winnowed with each flickering lick. They're a kind of optical illusion, floating on the air, that their operators (doused in shadow camo leotards of silky asphalt splashes) make disappear.

In the dark, they watch the painter in spotless overalls overhaul the scaffolded sign out front of the Shoppe. It's an artist's palette with eight moons of vibrant neon colors jewelling its rim and a rendering of three sable hair brushes thrust through the illusion of the thumbhole. The script A of the store name drips toward the hummock of the ending z's ascender, loop-less, the italic flourish of its blobby tail, the abdomen of some oversized insect, the splat of the apostrophe, all mimicking the French curve of the big ol' kidney shaped sign, all hip that then goes all square, intersected by the rectangular sign within the sign, all business and no art, the special message board of misplaced applications — M B3EF NO ODLES, TH TUR KEY, F BBQRIBS.

They watch (as the earth's crust cools, sculpting their triple dips of neon-colored ice cream into a concrete demonstration of Zeno's paradox of time and space) the painter paint the pictures of paint, mixing paint on his own homemade palette (a slab of scrap wood) dabbing red paint on the red “paint“ of the red paint of the sign-sized palette.

The painter arcs his way through the whole rainbow of color, each one a substitution for flavor, a gigantic graphic synesthesia, of ice creams already melting into metaphors, comparisons, these synaptic associations made in the palette-shaped brain, wedged into our cone-shaped skulls. This is like this and this is like this and this is like this. It is harder now to tell the painter from the paint. More licking. More liking. More this-ing. The stars overhead look like stars in the sky. The blacktop looks like blacktop. The ice cream tastes like ice cream. The sign looks like Sign. The artist painting the sign, who looks like an artist painting a sign, signs the sign with something that looks like, when you look at it closely, even in this unfathomable and defining blackness (a color that is both all the colors and none of them), another sign.

Thought Balloons

POSTCARD CAPTIONS

1.

On a long reach, the leading airships in the breakaway pod jockey for position as they drift into the third turn near South Bend during the 17^th running of the Tour d'Indiana. Dirigibles, blimps, balloons — all manner of lighter-than-air craft — vie for the coveted Otis R. Bowen Cup in a thrilling race, often taking months to complete, covering the four corners of the state.

2.

In the distinctive barn-red livery of International Harvester, a tractor blimp plows the anvil top of a fertile cumulonimbus, kicking up a trail of cirrus clouds in its wake above the parched summer fields near Monon, Indiana. Following close behind, a John Deere zeppelin prepares to sow the newly turned furrows with seeds of silver iodide in the hope of sparking needed precipitation, a practice invented by noted atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut, brother of Hoosier novelist Kurt.

3.

A rapt crowd of Hoosiers observes as the Oolitic Fire Department douses the smoldering wreckage of the Derek Jeter balloon on Christmas Eve 2002 after it slipped its tethers during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. The three-story balloon, depicting the Yankee slugger sliding headfirst into second, eluded detection during its month-long free flight over the heartland until its fiery reentry in the limestone country of south central Indiana.

4.

Casper Kastellnick, of nearby Port Royal, Kentucky, expertly rides the buoyant atmosphere produced by the world-famous helium springs outside Vevay, Indiana. The lighter-than-air air geysers erupt inertly on a predictable schedule and are of such duration and magnitude as to allow local aficionados time to master their spectacular levitational displays.

Four Places

A ROOM

First, there's the sun (which is eclipsed by the moon {the moon itself obscured by wisps of clouds} haloed by the luminous corona) which is a ball of gas (which is a state of matter characterized by the lowest density and viscosity). All this, in the corner of the stamp (the whorls of raised ink {exactly like the oily residue of thumbprints left by your correspondent} of printing, expanding like a gas {expanding until evenly distributed within its container} to its edge) near the selvage. Now (wait {a second}) where am I?

A TOWN

Pictured: the recently discovered and described “predicate.“ Here, the verb of being has just come into being. An “am“ can't even simply sit since “sit“ hasn't been invented yet. The local population is, however, intrigued. They've begun to “be.“ They have been naming things for decades, are on the verge of naming, “have been naming,“ a verb. Some “nouns,“ like “name,“ are not just nouns but verbs also. Shown in the inset: Things they have “named.“ The “adz.“ The “hibachi.“ The “bustle.“ The “gyroscope.“ The “puck.“ The “quotation mark.“

A VILLAGE

“Who dreamed us here?“ the inhabitants of this village ask in their dreams. They try, upon waking, to renegotiate the covenants inherited from their ancestors — the dazzling hue of their houses, the shifting distribution of their neighborhoods. Their undreamed dreams accumulate, cloud the black, black night with sparks of color. They forget to ask. They ask. They forget they've asked. They ask. Who smudged out the road that was never there? Who erased the sense of a sense of direction? They dream: “Who dreamed us here?“ “Did you?“ they ask. “Did you?“

A RESORT

Spring finds hundreds gathered here to stand for something else. The participants remember to observe, and the observers remember to participate! Everyone remembers to remember! A lock of hair becomes a copse of trees; a fingernail turns into a placid lake. At the cocktail parties, you are encouraged to sample canapés of your own fingers but forget, until you remember, you have no way of picking up your own finger! And later, they unfold the map! Its scale is 1:1! It corresponds exactly and fits like skin! It is your skin!

Four Calling Birds

“Calling birds“ refers to colly, or collie, birds. “Colly“ or “collie“ means “black.“ It comes from an older English word for coal. “Colly bird“ is the European blackbird. Common in parks and cities in Europe, it looks like a dusky version of its cousin, the American robin. Both belong to the thrush family.

VEERY

The next time they talked on the phone, she told him she had just started to come when she heard her daughter return home downstairs and call out to her. Falling from the bed, she ran across the room to close the door. As she ran, the orgasm caught up with her, the blood rushing from her head, her legs turning spongy, compressing beneath her. When she came, he knew, she often expelled a multi-syllabic, “Fuck,“ and he could hear, though it was distant and hollow with echo (in her haste she hadn't had time to disconnect), the first fricative transmute to a plosive burst of greeting, a schwa-y “Whah,“ closer to the first notes of her daughter's name. The next time they talked, she would tell him how intense it was to be moving through the spasm, all inertia, entropic, irresistible, spilling as she spilled toward the door, her momentum carrying herself and the door forward to a slamming slam he could hear clearly. She said it was like a cartoon, the motion so suddenly staunched, her writhing, her worming. Her back turned to the door, she slid slowly to the floor with the squeak of naked skin on enamel paint, one hand fumbling behind her head for the lock's knob while the other, between her melting legs, tugged at herself, plucked out the minor key tufts of sensation as she settled bare-assed, panting. In fact, the next time they were on the phone, the retelling of this last time was enough to take her over the edge again, the conjuring up of the sprint across the room, the throbbing pulses racing through her racing legs, turning the ground beneath her viscous. “Fuck,“ she said distinctly in his ear. What he did not tell her about that previous time (the time she left the phone connected on the bed to rush to the door, coming while she ran) was that he continued to listen over the distance, hearing the padding feet and the grunting climax and the call and the slamming door and the puckered squeak of her skin on the door. She had been using a vibrator, one that plugged in, and it continued to hum, the sound dampened by the bedclothes. It nested near the phone, creating a humid occluded silence, overdubbing the static hiss sparking off the wire. He too had been about to come when he heard her hear her daughter's voice and start her stumble for the door. Had he come, he wouldn't have uttered a sound, intent, instead, on listening to hear the “Fuck“ slip out of her and positioning his release beneath hers, emitting a kind of melted sigh for her hard consonance to ride on. Now that she was gone, he slowed his stroking and continued to listen closely. There was a window open. It was late spring there, and he swore he could hear the percolating silence of the warming air as it infiltrated the mesh of wire screen near her bed. He lived miles to the south where the spring had long ago turned torrid, his room closed up and dark. He rolled onto his side, insulating his ear away from his other ear, encasing it with the pillow that filtered the bass line purr of the whole-house AC cycling outside. He heard her then miles away talking with her daughter through the door, the door acting as a kind of resonator, transmitting the mundane news that she'd been napping, asking for a moment to get dressed. The vibrator went dead. She unplugged it and pulled it to her, a clatter hitting the floor, the scrape of it as she coiled the cord, the vibrator's hard plastic case stuttering across the sisal rug. He heard drawers of various timbres slide in and out, the little rattle of the swivel pulls against the plates. The jittery knickknacks disturbed in the haste. He heard her, he swears, dressing, her jeans on first, standing, the flat stomps as she skipped twice to balance, the stereo tramp of both feet finding the floor as she pulled up the pants. He listened for the zipper and heard it. Then the soft whisper as she rolled a T-shirt onto her arms followed by that stopped — up submerged sound as her hair, silk, slid through the abraded collar. She walked flat-footed to the door, brushing out her hair as she shuffled, the pitch changing as she stopped, then the sweep of all that hair over the top to brush from behind and below, currying the muffled mass of it back up over her bent bobbing head. And then he heard her leave: the volume of her diminished in his ear, the distant depleted report of her, calling her daughter's name, descending as she descended the stairs. The silence settled out heavier than air. He pressed the phone closer to his ear as if to inject his own hushed self into the recently disturbed acoustic there, to detect any sonic smidgeon left in the mix. Her swallowing. A footfall. Those eyes blinking. He boosted the gain of his signal, attempting to catch her shallow breath breathing. Instead, all he heard in the stillness, spilling in from the open window, was a birdsong, a slurred series of downward inflected quarter notes. Each note tripped progressively lower in pitch, spiraled, cascading down a scale. It began again with a simple, non-inflected cheep, ended with a rolling trill. It was one of the thrushes. The hermit or the robin. He had told her at the beginning of the call that all the flocking robins in his neck of the woods had disappeared a few days before. I am sending them your way, he had told her as they began. A kind of foreplay, he had thought, releasing songbirds north to her along with the heat, the seasons turning, his own sprightly combination of suggestion. There it was again, a long lowering run, arranging itself into a fragment, a phrase, an adjectival clause that modifies a person, place, or thing, an intensifier that amplifies. Very. That sounds like very. Very. Very like very.

MOCKINGBIRD

Their answering machines matched, and they started leaving messages for each other. Beige plastic boxes with a keyboard of buttons — play, fast-forward, erase, rewind. The tape spooled in a transparent cassette stored in a compartment inside. You could see the sprockets turning in the cassette as you listened to it play through a clear plastic window in the lid. Nested in the buttons, a red LED lit up a number indicting the number of calls. Depressing play released the message into the room through the low fidelity speaker wired in such a way as to make everything sound melancholy. They tried to keep each other's tape filled with the magnetic imitations of each other's voice. He would come home to find the machine's number glowing, 21, say, or 25, 22 messages only to find each one of the messages another piece of one long call from her, the machine starting, then cutting her off after a proscribed interval. Each new message contained another message about the message left just before, the procedures she endured to redial and connect, the transitional phrases of “where was I“ and “Oh, yes“ linking all the calls together in the end, a long self-conscious apology for taking up all the tape with the series of calls and indicating that this was a very long and convoluted way to say something she should be able to say simply — that she loved him. She loved him. He was fond of leaving one long message on her machine. Each machine had a setting that allowed for varying the duration of the machine's patience. He expected that he would have to leave a long message, and so he spoke extemporaneously though sometimes from notes and at length about his day, and at every transition point, he linked his mundane and ordinary activities with the phrase, “and I thought of you when…“ or “that made me think of you…“ or “I told myself to remember to tell her.“ And then he would tell her, tell her the structure of his thinking as he thought, of his remembering as he remembered it. Both machines, doling out their seconds, initiated and terminated the time with a nasal beep, flattened bleat, the sound of which programmed itself, a concussion, into each of them. They dreamed of the beep, found that in the messages they would sometimes beep themselves, a charm to ward off the inevitable, rapidly approaching real beep. The sounding of it, the anticipatory silence before it, and the sound itself, and the other silent silence after, its punctuation. They started and stopped on the cue. On cue they entered the noisy space of their connection, and on cue they became again disembodied, distant, silent. They liked the old machines for the mechanical magic they conjured; playing the message, each other's voice filled the room, evoked the other in three wraithlike dimensions that made the voices seem almost corporeal, an actual body solidifying around the skeleton of vibrating air. Each could be in each other's next room, calling down the hallway around the corner. As time passed, the messages began to be more complicated, as each of them attempted to pack the other's tape with more and more information. It started when one of them played a song in the background. A news report on the radio followed, a commercial on television picked up inadvertently. The sound from the street below, the dishwasher turning on, washed over the string of words strung on the spooling, the unspooling tape. Soon, it occurred to both of them that they could play back to each other each other's messages to the other. There, on the answering machine, was the new message and underneath it, in the background, the previous recorded message of the now listener's voice leaving a message. The machine recorded the message of the improvised duet of person and the person in the machine speaking in waffled mono that mimicked a stereo track, leaving a message and at the same time responding to a message that had been left. Those layers now recorded were then played when the next call was made. And the next message added another layer of past messages to the mix. More and more silent spaces on the tape filled with words, words turning to syllables turning to diphthongs and ligatures turning finally into a deep layered mist, bits of alphabets, static murmuring, incomprehensible mass, but strangely intimate, ancient, prehistoric, preverbal. The acoustic of amniotic fluid. Warbles, squeaks, smeared thumps. It was a repertoire of sounds they stole from each other and then gave back as baroque, rococo, atonal fugues. All of the noise became a foil to the final track they applied, recording each other's orgasms over and over again, the wall of auditory stimulus building up from a triggering beep, each other's name burbled up as a downbeat, beating, the gulped hiccupping of breath backbeating, all percussion, cussing counter punctually, attempting to fill in every iota of silence with any un-silent utterance, collapsing all the space between them into the compact sonic puck of the solid absence that mocks and mocks and mocks and mocks them both. The sound then turned liquid, sizzled, finally, like rain, like a tidal rush, a sound your own blood makes in your own ear when you hear it, when you hear it when you listen for it.

RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD

His room in the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel overlooks the Grand River at the point at which it is interrupted by an artificial rapid, a concrete stair-step that spans the river, symmetrical tiers tearing up the glassy flow, an organized baffle. Beyond the river, he looks down on the pie-wedge slice of the Gerald Ford Museum, its acute angle, a cursor, arrowing back to him in his cockeyed corner room. He teaches geometry and finite math to 9^th graders in an Indiana junior high and sells Amway on the side, but soon, he thinks, it will be the other way around. Everyone knows the money is not so much in selling the product — detergents and soaps and perfumes and vitamin supplements — but in selling people on selling the product and then selling them the product they would sell. He likes the geometric progression of the profits, the curving curve of results, the logarithmic rhythm of getting rich quick as his network of distribution compounds and compounds and compounds and compounds. As a numbers person he understands this better than most, loves to diagram, for a prospective distributor, the trellised architecture of the scheme — names within boxes, networks of radiating beams of connecting emanations, doubling down the gridded yellow legal pad. He looks the part. The white poly short-sleeve shirt, the dark waffle knit tie at his throat, the heavy glasses of glossy black plastic with the bitten end of the right temple earpiece. “It's not rocket science,“ he tells the prospective distributor, but his looks suggest it is. He's an analyst from Rand, a grammarian of overflowing flowcharts.

A woman in the lobby of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel — not one of the conventioneers of Amway distributors checking in nor a member of the native elect Dutch Reform who people the environs of the Grand River Valley of southwestern Michigan, but a buyer of office furniture from Philadelphia, touring the nearby Hermann Miller factory — sees him and thinks without thinking that there's a man who needs to get laid.

Instead of getting laid he, the sober conventioneer, returns to his room to order dinner in, prop himself up in the king-sized bed blanketed with the scalloped sheets of notes from today's sessions sorted into piles, his nest feathered. Along the river outside, he sees the copses of rushes in the eddies, rafts in the backwaters along the banks. Perching blackbirds bow over the cattails. The birds launch themselves, dozens of them, intersecting and crisscrossing, squawking, he imagines, to settle once more, jostling on different roosts. From this distance they are dots, fluid punctuation, floating decimal points. He knows the hotel around him is full, its hundreds of rooms occupied with men and women unmoored, at loose ends, and most are here to make connections, construct a honey-combed armature of enterprise — one big hive, the whole ball of wax. The company anoints itself with the moral disinfectants of god and country, and the scrupulous cleanliness marketed in Grand Rapids comes backed by pious guarantees of godliness. But he knows that that filth, that ugliness is as human as apple pie, that he and the company count on it. Hygiene may be the main business model, after all, but the company includes a line of euphemistically disguised lubricants, pheromonal colognes, and atomized herbal propellants in its catalog, samples of which he now deploys upon his own body as he begins to masturbate, listening as he does so for the sounds of other humans all around him, all the rooms filled with humans, making love — the beat of the headboard, a howl from a hissing shower, the giggle that picks the locked connecting door, the spillage of dead weight onto the ceiling that's also a floor. He comes into the sink, reaches beneath to the fascia board of the vanity for a tissue only to discover the built-in dispenser is empty. He pops off the chrome cover to get to the empty cardboard box behind it. The room is stocked with a replacement along with all the other amenities, all Amway brands, of course. He finds hidden behind the empty box a Polaroid picture, the first of many he will find, of a couple having sex, or at least he thinks it is a couple because the pictures are all cropped down to cunts and cocks, lips and tongues, mouths and nipples, hair and hair. The first stowed behind the box spills out onto the faux marble floor. It takes a moment for him to sort out the abstract angles and lines, the trapezoids and rhombi, and when he does, he stares at the fleshy flesh before him, stares it back to the strange plane of the start — solid slabs of his first impression — so he can experience again the sensation of the optical illusion, fading out and back into focus. Now he senses that these surround him, little treasures that are themselves a kind of treasure map. He finds more and more of them. One behind the notice tucked into the plastic sleeve tacked to the door. Inside the zippered upholstery of the armchair cushion. Beneath the desk blotter. Behind the pictures of the lake dunes. On top of the television wardrobe. Inside the dry cleaner's bag. There are three in the Bible. And each time he finds another he starts to search for more. Within the folder of stationery. Under the automatic coffee pot. There is a growing pile on the bed mixed in with his notes of projections and testimonials. He begins to put animated sequences together — four frames of a cock first disappearing inside a cunt then further in and then completely inside only to emerge, in the fourth picture, glistening, the sheen on the skin like the sheen on the still undeveloped print of an instant photograph, the emulsion beginning its wet work, evaporating into the schematic of solid geometry all pyramids, cones, cylinders, and spheres. Bounded space and its infinite absence. He shuffles the prints once more, deals them again onto the cluttered bed, a four-handed game. It is all chance, permutation, game theory that results. How long it must have taken them, he thinks, to create the fragmentation, so many moments of passion — sets and subsets, intersections of oblong fields of Venn diagrams, x's and y's. Each reading of the cards promises a prediction of some future from the residue of a past. He thinks, then, of Christmas and the last day before dismissal. He has his classes listen to a scratchy record of “The Twelve Days of Christmas“ and poses for them an algebraic puzzle to pass the time. How many presents in total does the true love receive? The one partridge and one pear tree multiply through the course of the round to twelve each. The two turtle doves covey up to twenty-two. There would be thirty French hens, and thirty-six calling birds, etcetera. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, through the whole progression of obsessed love. Outside now, the red-winged blackbirds have left their perches along the river, launching from the cattails that then rebound, bristling. The birds levitate into a cloud around a much larger black bird, a crow or a raven in full flight fleeing the dive-bombing, tag-teaming attacks over the overly neat rapid rippling below. Another and another bird peels out of the cloud to intercept the distressed bird attempting to maintain a little altitude. It all takes place in silence, a harried sketch of vectors plotting velocity, gravity, and drag. Even to his trained eye it is impossible to count them all. The red-winged blackbirds can't stop, continue to create this silent racket, persistent pantomime, suspended in the lowering sky.

BLUE JAY

Each married to someone else, they were conscientious enough to call their spouses when they were away together with each other, taking turns to dial home or receive a call while the other busied him- or herself in the bathroom of the hotel room, reading the local attractions magazine. But the room, big as it was, was not big enough to damp the half-heard half conversation going on nearby, making both the participant and the eavesdropper self-conscious, so that the latter got dressed and left the room to take a walk around the property, to loiter in the lobby, or even to have a drink in the bar, half-watching the sports spill from the television floating overhead, finally to call back to the room from a house phone in the elevator lobby and hear the operator report, more often than not, that the line was in use, asking if you wished to leave a message. Leaving the room meant the one leaving had to get dressed since most time in the room was spent undressed — fucking or relaxing after fucking, recovering from fucking, eating and drinking naked in the room. Room service is ordered after fucking and received by one of them, wrapped only in a robe or draped with a long nightshirt that will be stripped off before getting back into bed to feed each other and to talk about what each of them does when they are not together fucking, their lives apart from each other with their own other, who — soon after they have finished their salmon and salad, the warm white wine, after they have both come again — they will call and tell, the person on the other end of the line, what he or she had for dinner and how from the tower of this hotel you can see an endless parade of airliners drifting across the window on approach to the nearby airport, so slow as to seem they would almost stall, fall out of the sky altogether, one after the other, in the dusk, their lights strobing and the exhaust of their engines muffled, to be sure, but still registering a noticeable sound, a muted bellow that rattles, at the right pitch and harmony, the safety glass in the aluminum frames of the hotel's windows. After many nights like this, over many different occasions, in many different airport hotels, no one gets dressed or strays very far from the bed when the other one phones home; instead the one not talking on the telephone fits him or herself into the negative template of the body next to him or her, watches the muted television using the remote to scan the channels in silence as the conversation continues, and the jets outside slide down the glide path, yawing, pitching, rolling, making that yawning roar, turning, as the time passes, into diffuse shade then into simple pixels of a constellation, of pulsing lights that outline the now absent bulk of the darkened backlit shadow of the falling fuselage. A hand rests on a stomach, a leg is thrown over the other's leg as the call continues, half-heard queries concerning that day's mail, the children's school, an appointment rescheduled, the changing weather. The halfhearted embrace proceeds in the midst of the phone call — the mumble at the ear; the other hand, scanning with the remote the blinking television, has evolved from the past's position of polite neutrality, the mutual drifting separation, to this, this cozy almost domestic new intimacy with the lover who hasn't, until now, shared this part of his or her life and the lover who hasn't, until now, wanted any hint of that life overheard, now settling in with this new order of cobbled-together proximity, shrinking distances over distance. The free hand finds a trail of drying come along the belly or on the inside of the thigh, and a finger begins to pick at the crust of it, flaking it with a nail, and as the lover's conversation with home burbles above, the archeology of the skin begun in starts and stops — almost as if this patch here was sterile field divorced from the rest of the resting body — starts to turn more serious, the touching now turning into a shallow massage disguised as absentminded petting, as the voice on the phone that has been so even and controlled spikes a slight fever, a heightened pitch. They glare when they look at each other, hinting at the hint of anger, both about the interruption of the phone call and the phone call's interruption, that gives way to the furthering of the sexual steps they have been perfecting in the hotel room, the one on the line now barely putting together a string of noncommittal head-nodding affirmations to whatever question has just come through, the conflicted look torn in two between the here and there and the now and now, attempting to sort out the unimportant stimuli from the immediate noise and, at the same time, focus the full attention on the faraway, the evening of the evening on the other end of the wire. His cradled half-hard cock rolls in her hand. She holds his hand, his fingers inside her, hard against her to keep them from moving. He shields his nipple, directs her kisses to the rib below. She blocks her ear opposite the handset from his breath. All completed in stifled silence. This end of the conversation kept up. Fucking again, now, through the phone calls, silent, suppressed, turned inward, listening hard to the rasping in the ear, the receiver pressed hard against the head as if each of them, when it is their turn, hangs on to some handle of sanity, anchoring their consciousness while the body below is being dismembered piece by piece. It is a kind of sex toy, the telephone, vibrant but inert, innocuous, a chunk of putty-colored plastic molded to the ear, enzymatic magic, the fulcrum around which they turn, and turning, they both now want to say something, to speak, talk, change the subject, bend it over something, move the conversation from the ear to the mouth, feeling the coming words come, emit the innocent protestations of longing, of feeling the distance and the night closing in, of missing you so much, of letting loose the shared formula of words developed over all these years of partnered arrangement to propel the change of the subject, to signal the desire for desire, speaking the cracked-open code to the loved one on the other end of the wire—“Let's come. Right now. I am almost there already. I'll wait. It's late“—all the excuses of coaxing as the coaxing continues, the lubrication of the imagination, and when she comes, when he comes, the others over there, they come with a long report carried through the lines by means of jostled charged electrons, and the lovers, embedded, ears glued to the phone, listen together, in love now with listening, connected and connected. And after the after, together, in the hotel bathroom, they brush their teeth together, heads down, avoiding the mirror, rinsing and spitting at the same time, getting ready for bed, for sleep. The hotel provides a box that plays a provided CD of ambient sounds taken from nature — the seashore with a running tide, a rapid waterfall scouring a rock ledge, wind in a stand of pine — all designed to cancel out the cascading turbulence of the landing jets, the climbing jets that, as they turn to their outbound headings, tear open the sky, ripping ripped cloth. This shouldn't work, they both think on the edge of sleep, in the dark, their heads filled with a catalog of auditory interference, this should not work, this empty glen, the oak forest in the background, the swish of wiregrass, the drill of a bird's call. This should not work, the rough edge of a blue jay's squawk filing down the aggregate of air oscillating at random and without end, all around them.