Girl With Curious Hair

WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE TAKES ITS WAY

BACKGROUND THAT INTRUDES AND LOOMS: LOVERS AND PROPOSITIONS

THOUGH Drew-Lynn Eberhardt produced much, and Mark Nechtr did not, Mark was loved by us all in the East Chesapeake Tradeschool Writing Program that first year, and D.L. was not. I can explain this. D.L. was severely thin, thin in a way that suggested not delicacy but a kind of stinginess about how much of herself she'd extend to the space around her. Thin the way mean nuns are thin. She walked funny, with the pelvis-led posture of a man at a urinal; she carried her arms either wrapped around her chest or out and down at a scarecrow's jangly right angles; she was slatternly and exuded pheromones apparently attractive only to bacteria; she had a fatal taste for: (1) polyester; (2) pantsuits; (3) lime green.

Vs. Mark Nechtr, who was one of those late-adolescent chosen who radiate the kind of careless health so complete it's sickening. Ate poorly, last slept well long before the Colts went West, had no regimen; however strongly built, well-proportioned, thick-necked, dark. Healthy. Strong. (This was back when these qualities revealed things about people, before health-club franchises' careful engineering of anatomy disrupted ancient Aryan order and permitted those who were inherently meant to be pale and weak to appear dark and strong.) Not handsome in a to-die-for way, just this monstrous radiance of ordinary health — a commodity rare, and thus valuable, in Baltimore. We in the writing program — shit, even the kids over at E.C.T. Divinity — could love only what we valued.

Also because D.L. was also weird, and conspicuously so, even in an environment — a graduate writing program — where neurosis was oxygen, colorful tics arranged and worn like jewelry. D.L. carried Tarot cards, and threw them (in class), would leave her loft only on her psychic's endorsement, wore daily the prenominate lime synthetics — a lonely onion in a petunia-patch of carefully casual cotton skirts, tie-dyes, those baggy pastel post-Bermudas, clogs, sandals, sneakers, surgeons' clothes.

Also because she also seemed greedy and self-serving, and not near naïve enough to get away with the way she seemed. She idolized Professor Ambrose with a passion, but in a greedy and self-serving way that probably turned Ambrose himself off right from the very first workshop, when she brought a conspicuously battered copy of Lost in the Funhouse for him to autograph — at East Chesapeake Trade something One Did Not Do. Was thus, for our interpretive purposes, right from day one, a sycophant, an ass-kisser.

Also because she actually went around calling herself a postmodernist. No matter where you are, you Don't Do This. By convention it's seen as pompous and dumb. She made a big deal of flouting convention, but there was little to love about her convention-flouting; she honestly, it seemed to us, couldn't see far enough past her infatuation with her own crafted cleverness to separate posture from pose, desire from supplication. She wasn't the sort of free spirit you could love: she did what she wanted, but it was neither valuable nor free.

We could all remember the opening line of the first story she turned in for the very first workshop: "Nouns verbed by, adverbially adjectival." Nuff said? Professor Ambrose summed it up well— though not without tact — when he told the workshop that Ms. Eberhardt's stories tended "not to work for him" because of what he called a certain "Look-Mom-no-hands quality" that ran through her work. You don't want her facial reaction described.

At least she produced, though. She was fiendishly, coldly fertile. True, certain catty coffeehouse arguments were advanced concerning the preferability of constipation to diarrhea, but Mark Nechtr never joined in. He spoke rarely, and certainly never about the kids he studied under Ambrose with, or the overall promise of their work, or their neuroses and tics, or their exchanges of bodily fluids. He kept his oar out of other people's fluids and minded his own healthy business. This was interpreted by the community as the sort of dignified reticence only the valued can afford, and so he was even more loved. It was actually kind of sickening — D.L.'s fellow McDonald's alumnus Tom Sternberg, the diplopic ad actor, had Mark pegged as one of those painfully radiant types whose apparent blindness to their own radiance only makes the sting of the light meaner. Sternberg had Mark so pegged by the time they'd all met as arranged at Maryland International Airport and departed via red-eye for Chicago's O'Hare, thence by complimentary LordAloft copter to Collision, Illinois, and the scheduled Reunion of everyone who has ever been in a McDonald's commercial, arranged by J.D. Steelritter Advertising and featuring a party to end all parties, a spectacular collective Reunion commercial, the ribbon-cutting revelation of the new Funhouse franchise's flagship discotheque, and the promised appearance of Jack Lord, dramatic Hawaiian policeman, sculptor, pilot, and — again under the aegis of the same J.D. Steelritter who'd put Sternberg and D.L. together as commercial children thirteen years ago to the day whose start I've interrupted — director of a new and deregulated helicopter-shuttle franchise, LordAloft, that was going national as of today, Reunion day.

All that may have seemed like a digression from this background, and as of now a prolix and confusing one, and I'll say that I'm sorry, and that I am acutely aware of the fact that our time together is valuable. Honest. So, conscious of the need to get economically to business, here are some plain, true, unengaging propositions I'll ask you just to acknowledge. Mark Nechtr is a suburban Baltimore native, young, and (another thing he didn't ever talk about) a trust-fund baby, heir to a detergent fortune. He is enrolled in a graduate writing program at the East Chesapeake Tradeschool, where he turned down the offer of financial aid, for obvious reasons, but pretty gracious ones. He is a fair competitive target archer, has been shooting competitively ever since he lost his technical virginity to a squat sweatshirted Trinitarian YWCA instructor who proselytized him on the virtues of 12-strand strings, fingerless leather gloves, blankly total concentration, dead release, and the advantages of arrows fletched by hand. Mark tends to walk almost tiptoed— something about exaggerated arches — has vaguely oriental eyes, radiates the aforementioned radiance, though he has glove-paled hands and a proclivity for neckless, rather effeminate surgeon shirts— slight imperfections that enhanced the overall perfection of the etc. etc.

How he was civilly married to Drew-Lynn Eberhardt was, quickly: one fine day he witnessed the lime-clad postmodernist write something really petty and vicious on the seminar room's green blackboard, right before the first bell rang for Dr. Ambrose's workshop; she saw him see her — shit, he was sitting right there, the only one of the eleven other students in the room that early; but D.L, seeing him see, still didn't erase the thing, wouldn't; she was on her way out of the whole Program by then; tactfully cool receptions from Ambrose always broke the hottest bulbs' thin skins first; she didn't care what the unproductive big-necked object of the seminar's love saw; he could go on ahead and rat on her, tell Ambrose what he'd seen her write, or erase it, since you two are on such great good pedagogical terms. Well and she fled, in her pelvis-led way, in tears, as the bell rang, clutching her own polyester chest with a pathetic vulnerability that stirred something in this boy who, underneath a sunny hide-brown healthy surface, saw himself as pretty vulnerable and fucked up in his own right. But so he didn't move to erase the petty critical limerick, and didn't rat to Ambrose, to any of us, about who'd written it. He was unworried about us thinking he'd written it, so we didn't, and anyway authorial identity was obvious— D.L. was the only student AWOL that day, and the thing had her dry, sour spite all over it (besides being self-conscious and bad). Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist. And Professor Ambrose, though he said nothing, didn't even use the eraser at first, was nevertheless visibly hurt: he had the reputation of being a pretty sensitive guy, off the page. Actually he was devastated, was what he wrote J.D. Steelritter, but he never told Mark Nechtr that.

By now Mark and D.L. were being seen together. Why? You can bet that question got asked, the subject of their fluids receiving the attention of many oars.

She because Mark was healthy and loved, and hadn't ratted, had minded his own business, even in the face of what he'd seen and what we all wanted from Ambrose. He hadn't ratted, which D.L. couldn't understand and so genuflected to as mystery, as something deserving of respect, as virtue (she loves the word virtue, and even manages, as the coptering three of them sneeze in a harmony with the abrupt Midwest dawn, to pronounce the word vaguely as she sneezes: vuh, vuh, vuhrshoo—the habit drives Mark quietly up the wall).

Yes and but he, Mark: why? Well, first because, that fine sea-breezy day, Mark had thought he'd maybe seen a little true thing, a tiny central kernel of illumination in that failed limerick D.L. had composed and graphed critically over Professor Ambrose's — and American metafiction's — most famous story, an accidentally-acute splinter that got under Mark's skin and split wider the shivers and cracks inside him, as somebody being taught how but not why to write fiction. He had, quietly, stopped totally trusting his teacher, inside, by then. Mark was down, blocked, confused then about what he was even doing at E.C.T., not producing what he was supposed to be producing. This condition was not helped by the respect — love, really — that came at him from everywhere in the Program, except from D.L.

Well and Mark saw D.L. around — he was a demon for coffee, and D.L. always sat there, in coffeehouses, alone, with a notebook for trapping little inspirations before they could get away. To make it short, they eventually hooked up — more or less because of something she'd written and something he'd not said. Just hooked up, in that gloaming territory between just friends and whatever isn't friendship. They'd rap, do the beach, collect the odd shell, she'd tell him about the day's troubles, she watched him place third in the Atlantic Coast 30-yard Championships, Young Adult Division. One rainy day, when the breeze off the bay didn't smell like anything at all, when she'd had word about something vague and parental and was just awfully down, she propositioned him. They happened to make love. But just once. They were lovers one time. There nevertheless took place, as D.L. liked to put it, a little miracle. The sort of miracle that transubstantiates the physical (blood) into the spiritual (certain claims on Mark as an honorable lover). It's very important to Mark that he be able to see himself as a decent and responsible guy, and so he sucked up the objections of practically all his friends and did right by a one-time unloved lover. Most in the Program thought it was the kind of rare unfashionable gesture that these days only someone of incredible value could afford to make. The little miracle — basically from one fuck, with protection, his—is now close to the third trimester, though the way D.L. carries herself you'd never know it was that far.

Invited to the civil ceremony are twelve guests, among them D.L.'s psychic and Mark's old Trinitarian archery coach. Mark's Dad gives them a Visa card with no limit, in the Dad's name, to help establish credit. Her psychic gives D.L. a quartz crystal way too big and phallic to be taken seriously. The proselytizing coach gives Mark a Dexter Aluminum target arrow with a nock of Port Orford cedar. Top of the line. The BMW of target arrows. Though D.L. makes no secret of her distaste for BMWs, the Dexter Aluminum's the best arrow Mark's ever had, and (sadly?) the main reason why the ceremony was, for him, the high point of a not at all promising marriage, so far.

OK true, that was all both too quick and too slow, for background — both intrusive and sketchy. But please, whether your imagination's engaged or not, please just acknowledge the propositions, is all. Because time is severely limited, and whatever might be important lies ahead. So, as we say in the nation's flat green gut, Hibbego, without further hemming or ado, in an uncompromisingly terse flash-foward, straight and without grace or delay to

THE DAY OF THE MOMENT WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR

For lovers, the Funhouse is fun.

For phonies, the Funhouse is love.

But for whom, the proles grouse,

Is the Funhouse a house?

Who lives there, when push comes to shove?

was the piece of anti-Ambrose doggerel the poor sensitive birth-marked guy walked into the seminar room for his MF 3–5 to find drawn onto the slateboard with the kind of chalk you almost got to wash off. He was devastated, said the long letter Ambrose had sent Steelritter to threaten about why he was maybe as a client and entrepreneur pulling out of the whole Funouse franchise idea. Kids and students are a shitty and shifty bunch, in J.D. Steelritter's opinion. Like dogs, that you have to worry about getting bit when you hold out the meat they whine for. Ambrose said he'd been devastated: there it was, he'd said — when you rendered all the nourishes and allusions and general crap out of his letter — there it was, criticism, right there, even where you ought to be able to least expect it. Criticism: it never left him alone. It lowered his quality of lifestyle. So why go ahead and try to build a Funhouse in every major market, for people to criticize, he'd realized, he said. Who needed the grief? Ambrose needed not grief, he'd written, any more than brave Philoctetes of yore had needed that snakebite.

What snake? J.D.'d cabled back. What yore? Relax, he'd cabled. Cool off. Unwind. Read some of that Stoic shit you like. Have a Lite. Dip into some of the roses I sent sub rosa for you alone, friend. Reflect. Think over the totality of everybody's investment in the thing so far. Of time, money, money, time, spirit. Don't do anything hasty. Trust me, who's earned your trust. Cold feet are natural, as the day draws near.

The super-sized ego of an arrogant pussy, is what J.D. had really thought. Of course you need it. Spare me chumpness about this.

Criticism is response. Which is good. If J.D. lays out a campaign strategy nobody criticizes, then J.D. right away knows the idea's a dink, a bad marriage of jingle and image, one that won't produce, just lays there, no copulation of engaging gears, no spin inside the market's spin. You need it. Eat it up. It's attention. It engages imaginations. It sells. It works off desire, and sells. It sold books, it'll sell mirrored discotheque franchises. The criticism'll be what fills the seats with fannies. J.D.'d bet his life.

Standing there, past weary, his whole fine face, which tended to rush toward its own center anyhow, centered around a cigar he waits to crunch and spit the tip of, a fried-flower taste hanging like fog on his palate, standing at a window of the bunting-bedecked (WELCOME MCDONALD'S ALUMNI WELCOME JACK LORD WELCOME PLEASE SEE NEAREST STEELRITTER ALUMNI ASSISTANCE REPRESENTATIVE FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND DIRECTIONS WELCOME!) and redecorated (in Mrs. Steelritter's favorite muted grays and dusty plum) Central Illinois Airport, waiting for sunrise and the LordAloft 5:10 A.M. shuttle from O'Hare to descend with the very last couple of alumni kids, J.D.'d bet his life. Admen do this. Bet their life on criticism, attention, desire, fear, love, marriage of concession and market. Retention of image. Loyalty to brand. Empathy with client. Sales. On life. Life!

Life goes on. You're empty, sad, probably the least appreciated creative virtuoso in the industry; well and but life just goes on, emptily, sadly, with always direction but never center. The hubless wheel spins ever faster, no? Yes. Admen approach challenges thus: concede what's hopelessly true, what you can't make folks ever want to not be so; concede; then take your creative arm and hammer a big soaked wedge, hard as can be, into whatever's open to interpretation. Interpret, argue, sing, whisper, work the wedge down into the pulp, where the real red juices be, where folks feel alone, fear their genitals, embrace their own shadows, want so badly it's a great subsonic groan, a lambent static only the trained adman's sticky ear can trap, retain, digest. Interpretation, he's fond of telling DeHaven, is persuasion's driveway. Persuasion is desire. Desire is the monstrous pulse, the trillion-hearted river that is the care and feeding of J.D. and Mrs. J.D. Steelritter and their clown of a son DeHaven. Meat on a table already groaning under meat, festooned with homegrown food. This is J.D.'s way since the Lucky Strike campaign, the first, in '45. Then McDonald's, through Ray, in '53. Coca-Cola. Arm & Hammer. Kellogg's. The Funhouse. LordAloft Shuttles. The American daydream, what made Us great: make a concession, take a stand.

So then why waste time even thinking cold artistic feet and Funhouses? There's a Reunion coming, and it will cap things, put them right, for J.D.'s forever. He can hardly wait. Behind him, in the terminal, DeHaven, his spawn, is greeting the second-to-last bunch of alums, just off a Dallas Delta, he's checking off names of every creed, passing out Reunion nametags: two little gold-filled arches, to pin on, a peel-off sticker printed Hi! MY NAME IS and then with room for a name and year of appearance. DeHaven sleep-deprived too, but stoned, too — on reefers, doobers, whatever they called it now — eyes red as his yarn wig and violently rouged mouth slack and dry and a smell off his clown suit like oily ropes way below deck. Why the waste of time, the feeling like worry stands just to J.D.'s left? Because For Whom, the little bastard has kept repeating, intoning, for two solid days and nights, while he and a J.D. who believes in the personal touch have driven back and forth, outlasting their cars, shuttling folks to the revel site, finally reduced to DeHaven's own souped-up hoodlummy car, the clown who loves to drive, drives with just one wrist hooked over the wheel in that way J.D. hates, that look-how-little-I-care way, back and forth, father and son, personally touching, meeting, greeting, orienting, shuttling impressed and eager alumni to Collision, Ill., a decent little hike, on roads rural and dangerous, plus ugly; and the shit-speck, for reasons J.D. cares about even less than he understands, he kept repeating it, For Whom, over and over, West and then back East, useless to scream at the kid to shut up, today J.D. needs a sullen Ronald like a kidney stone. For Whom, intoned, toneless, zom-bily stoned; and the little For Whom jingle — J.D. Steelritter has an ear nonpareil for jingles — has stuck and sunk through that sleep-deprived ear and is there, rattling, unfindable~penny-in-drier-like, in the head of J.D. Steelritter, a head that is fine, perfectly round, freckled of brow, scimitarred of nose, generous and wet of lower lip, quick to center on anything oral. DeHaven, who knows zero from any plans or big pictures, has worked the jingled line in there, an angry bee in J.D.'s bonnet; it's now detached from his harlequin son and plays without cease in a held, high-C idiot note, the note of a test pattern, a test of Emergency Broadcast Systems, the whine of no real sleep for maybe five days, a whiny question, from an ego in tweeds, a question the smug old avant-gardist had clearly asked just so he could right away answer it, the most irritating-type question, self-conscious, rhetorical, a waste of resources and time.. and J.D. tells most folks don't waste his time, just start the fucking show.

OK but in that malicious little prodigal spiteful ungrateful jab at his delicate client, who he'd finally soothed and signed but couldn't induce to appear, today — was there not maybe a something there? Something true and sad and hubless, that goes on? Does a Funhouse need to be more than Fun? More than New and Improved Fun? Are actual house-considerations at work in this campaign, unseen? For whom is the Funhouse an enclosure, maybe? Does he, J.D., live in anything like a Funhouse? J.D. lives at the J.D. Steelritter Advertising Complex in Collision, 111.; J.D. lives on and manages the few-acre rose farm his own itinerant father had stuck in the lapel of a corn-green state and then plowed himself into; J.D. lives deep inside J.D., marrying images and jingles, poking his sword of a nose out at isolated and alone moments to sniff the winds of fashion, fear, desire — the Trade Winds that blow overhead, moving between Coasts. J.D. has built the second-largest advertising agency in American history from the fringe that is the country's center, from a piss-poor little accidental town, smashed and stuck deep, corn-surrounded, in a flat blanket of soil so verdant and black it is one of only two things he truly fears. J.D. is of Central Illinois. Central Illinois is, by no imaginer's stretch, a Funhouse.

But neither is it enclosed. Enclosed? It's the most disclosed, open place you could ever fear to see.

He remembers the historical graphics Ambrose's agents had produced when they first, '76, ran the franchise idea up J.D.'s pole. Ocean City, off Baltimore, with laureates and tides and fish-stink— one of the last great true undeodorable stinks — the Amusement Park little Ambrose had mooned around in Depression-time and then bronzed in that infuckingsufferable story J.D.'s tried hard to read, to understand the client — that Ocean City Park was enclosed, though. The park was enclosed, and not by mirrors or ticket windows or dj booths. So then well.

But where was his head? The Park had burnt down, he'd traveled to personally research and found it down. Everything, turns out, fried crisp and hollow before the big-deal story even changed hands, back in the '60s, just when J.D. was building Ray Kroc into myth. How must it feel for Ambrose now, looking at it, burnt? Sad. J.D.'s never seen a no-shit fire. J.D.'s never been in a house that is not still a house, as far as he knows. Even his father's farmhouse and greenhouse, his mother's incorporating car, still stand and sit, intact. So is there a whispered worrisome something behind that rattling whined For Whom? Say you're standing by the gutted skeleton of a former Funhouse, with the door's grinning face a ruin, the plastic Fat Lady melted and then frozen lopsided, a blob, maybe supine, her drippy frozen laughing eyes now upward at a dead-white crab-meat sky, the House itself gutted, open, a bunch of black beams crossed and curved and supporting nothing, no roof, say there you are, and say maybe you say, I was in that, once, pointing; were you? If the that's down, burnt open, disclosed, Fat May's legs of plastic hilarity twisted and apart, yes the whole enclosure disclosed, kind of naked? No wonder the poor bastard tried to write the roof back on, put the whole thing erect. But J.D. almost smiles around the wet shaft of a cigar he cannot taste: the Tidewater boy will have his House back, in the West, a thousandfold. All he wants. Every wish come true. Big time.

J.D. stands brooding at the terminal glass. Jesus, Ocean City, in the past: gull sounds, rotty kelp waving like a big head's just underwater, a drowned giant with sluggish hair; and the homes: wharf-colored, pale gray and off-white. Rich dead salt smell. Slow.

Vs. Illinois, in the present, the here and now, looking: black sky; then licorice sky; maybe a crow's caw: dawn. Very little time wasted about dawn in Illinois. It's because it's always been so open. J.D. looks out the terminal window over the tarmac at the LordAloft landing pad, the underwater blue of landing lights in a circle under a by-now licorice sky pricked with fading stars, trillions of them, the corn tallishly black and still, even with wind, and wet with precipitate dew. Facing Eastward like this it's almost hard to even look: flat right to the earth's curve, East: never a hill, no western skyline of Collision's silos and arches and neon; the East from here is one broad sweep — there's nothing to hold your eye, you have to pan back and forth, like a big No, your eyes so relaxed and without object they almost roll. It can be scary.

But this moment, now: he holds, stabs his cigar into an ashtray's fine sand, no For Whom's for now, this one moment. This one instant, no more, each eastern rise: there's a certain pre-dawn fire about everything. The distant commuter planes and refueling trucks, the stars fluttering to stay seen, the shuddering corn, the very oxygen of Illinois seems, in this one moment, to shiver as on the point of combustion. Just one daily moment, like that, the flat East drenched in deregulated gas and somehow. . waiting.

And the fragile pre-ignition shimmer is gone. With nothing vertical between you and the horizon, the sun's just suddenly up. No rosy fingers, just an abrupt red palm; the Reunion day's ignition is spasmically brief: the sun seems to get all of a sudden just sneezed up into the faded sky, the eastern horizon shuddering at what it's expelled. A helicopter appears, one of Jack Lord's slope-head pilots, riding out of the instant sunrise.

J.D. should turn his broad back. To business. The kids are on that thing; they'd promised. The LordAloft 5:10 from O'Hare settles like a great gentle hand, a blur of bubble and blades, and its tornadic wind throws chaff and odd crap and shakes the corn— green, now, dusky, food for animals — and dew glitters, the corn one ocean, check that J.D. one cornfield, one hand passed over, producing one wave. Not sluggish and dead, but gentle and — [keep]

— but this landing and de-ignition gets to him, too, this change in the rate of the blades' spin. J.D. stares, rapt. You stare into a spinning thing, stare hard: you can see something inside the spin sputter, catch, and seem to spin backwards inside the spin, against the spin. Sometimes. Sometimes maybe four different spins, each opposite its own outside. Watching what spins: it's a hobby, but J.D. knows it has to do with desire, so the time spent's not shot. Even though he loves it. Anything with a circular spin and clearly marked axes, speeding or slowing: spoked wheels, helicopter blades (the real reason he's put so much time into LordAloft, admiration for Jack Lord and recognition of a void in the market aside), windmills, fans' spiraled petals. Any wheel without hub or Constance. The best was a liveried carriage's right front wheel, once: a blur of delicately stretched spokes, then a perfect backwards spin, inside the spin, as trot became canter and the thing clopped away on a London street, spinning. On leave from the War. The big one. It was J.D.'s first spin.

By the way, not too much of this is important, either. But it's true, and J.D. is here at the broad smeared C.I. Airport window, not helping DeHaven greet the next-to-last, so he can scan for the final alumni children: Eberhardt '70, Sternberg '70. They're supposed to be among these folks now de-coptering, bent low under blades, hands to headwear against a swirl of chaff and dawn-fog. But no kids. Everyone coming off the tarmac and into the lei-strewn gate's entrance looks far too adult, purposeful, neither shifty nor shitty. Shitty? Adult? J.D. Steelritter's own DeHaven Steelritter is a professional trademark. A clown. The clown. Been the campaign's Ronald a year now, ever since that last Ronald's indiscretion with that Malay girl (Oh Lord though skin like cream-shot coffee, and eyes?) in the Enchanted French-Fry Forest forced J.D. to see to it that that particular clown would never work in the industry again. Ever. The smears of lurid lipstick on that child's au-lait belly! The red nose clapped, with the obscenity of adult force, over her own! The goose-bruises — though thank God no poke-bruises, so no concessions needed, whole thing explainable to Malay stage mother as Stage Fright as she led the little thing away, the girl's legs shaky like a new foal's. Sweet Jesus never again one of those grizzled circus clowns, any man you can get twelve of in a Honda Civic you don't trust them, no? No.

But so DeHaven Steelritter? adult? putative son? possible heir? usurper? Who could love this DeHaven K. Steelritter — age: needs a shave; height; slouches, with intent; weight: who could know under either leather or this big-hipped dot-pocked outfit and swim-fin shoes; education: as school is not a hundred percent easy and pleasurable it's "bogus"; aspiration: atonal composer (alleged), to accept prime wages for doing the bare minimal and spending the rest of his time fucking off (apparent)? He represents the Product. Is Ronald McDonald. Professionally. This son, this sty on the cosmic eyelid, this SHRDLU in the cosmic ad copy, represents the world's community restaurant.

And but gratitude? This job is a plum, clown-wise — veteran clowns would have given left nuts for even a giggled audition. But the fix was in, after the Stage Fright snafu. J.D. Steelritter controls, and since the one-Collision-Illinois-Ray-Kroc-burger-stand beginning has controlled, the image and perception of McDonald's franchise empire.

No alumni on this LordAloft. They missed it. Children. The fly in every fucking machine's perfect lubricant. DeHaven is looking over at J.D. and shrugging, checking his fat clipboard, shrugging with that what-are-you-gonna-do apathy he directs at every impediment. J.D. ponders. What is his son? Those Jews have a word for it, no? Schlemiel is the clumsy waiter who spills the scalding soup? Schlamazl is the totally innocent hapless guy who gets spilled on? Then J.D. Steelritter's son is the customer who ordered that soup (on credit), and now wants his goddamn soup, and wants quiet from that screaming scalded guy over there so he can eat his soup with all the peaceful quiet enjoyment he hasn't earned. A child who exited a womb inconvenienced.

To avoid misunderstanding or prejudice, J.D. is sad, but not usually this bitter. Most of all this is sleep-deprivation, anxiety, an almost Christmas-Eve-like anticipation, plus extended proximity to a son, which let's face it taxes even the most richly patient parent. DeHaven's not a bad kid, J.D. knows. He's good with the commercial children. Brings out a gentleness that would have surprised a lesser adman. The kid'll sure never give anybody Stage Fright.

But he's an apprentice clown who gets to be the third Ronald McDonald in American franchise history, and yet it's clear he doesn't appreciate it, he doesn't like the job — and, worse, doesn't like the job like a sleeping person dislikes things, with a torpid whimper and an infant's total frown — the latter he's doing now, and the frown disturbs J.D., rattles him, his son's skin's frown under a manic painted grin… it looks grotesque, a kind of crude circle of lip and lipstick, so your impression, that you should never get from a mouth that represents a restaurant, is just of a hole, a blank dime, an empty entrance you'd only want to exit.

Sternberg '70 and Eberhardt 70 are late. They missed the LordAloft 5:10. There's another at 7:10. J.D.'s idea to have them run regular as trains. So wait and hope for the next LordAloft? Fuck around with O'Hare's Kafkan bureaucracy and have them looked for and/ or maybe paged? But everyone else is here, on the way into Collision and Funhouse 1 and McDonald's 1 to await the high-noon appearance of LordAloft 1, and the revels until then have been carefully structured. And J.D.'s got this obsession that everything like this he structures has got to be tidy, complete, fulfilled, enclosed. Not a single no-show except for two late kids who promised 5:10, in the contract. What's to do?

J.D. jumps a bit as DeHaven's voice appears next to his sensitive ear.

"Done," the big clown says, popping off the costume's red plastic battery-lit nose with a kind of fuck-you-in-Italian gesture he likes. "Couple no-shows, though, Pop."

J.D. snaps at him to put his nose on, in public, for Christ's sake, still looking squinted at what the East's expelled. That little worrisome sleep-deprived For Whom rattles, still, at that high-static idiot pitch.

WHY THE KIDS ARE LATE

After the flight from M.I. Airport, after luggage roulette — try packing a seventy-piece bow plus quiver — Tom Sternberg edged furtively into an O'Hare men's room and stayed in there for a really long time. Mark Nechtr got distracted watching a guy with long soft hair and beard, and a clipboard, who was giving away money in the commuter terminal. The man was well-dressed, respectable. The treasury notes were crisp. Mark couldn't determine what the scam was. He ruled out Cult because the guy had an utterly ordinary expression: no Krishna glaze or Bagwanite's pirate squint; no Moonie's mannequin cheer. Yet people kept avoiding him. He kept asking them what they were afraid of. Beefy types with holsters and field radios eventually led him off. What was the scam? The guy was maybe thirty, tops. Mark, a born watcher, watched, from a distance.

MORE QUICKLY WHY THEY'RE LATE

The LordAloft pilot, a Polynesian in a just bitching three-piece and mirrored glasses, wouldn't allow Mark's disassembled bow or quiver on the helicopter. The twelve shuttle passengers all sit together in a big plastic bubble: all luggage on LordAloft is accessible in-flight. Target arrows are deadly weapons, after all. There are FAA regulations that even the deregulated might not make, but must obey, koniki? A serious archer doesn't just leave his equipment, so what's to do. The helicopter ascends without them, sprays them with dark tarmac crud. Cases and carry-ons and almost-full quiver are spread out on the landing pad. Drew-Lynn is half-asleep, tranquilized, treating Mark's arm like a banister. Sternberg has his thumb tentatively against his forehead, where there's a bit of a poison-sumac cyst that's developed. Their reserved seats ascend; they recede. Sternberg's a bit honked off at Mark for being the sort you don't leave without. It's clear what's to do. They go back inside O'Hare's commuter terminal and transfer to the LordAloft 7:10. They kill time. D.L. sleeps in a weird chair whose attached TV wants quarters. Sternberg rehaunts the men's room after loud requests for a comb. Mark stows his bow's case and strings, quiver and wooden arrows, fingerless archer's gloves, tincture of benzoin (for calluses) and fletcher in a tall rental locker. The key he keeps for his four quarters is unloseably huge. He was supposed to try to maybe write a bit, but mostly shoot, at whatever YWCA's to be found downstate, while D.L. and her pen pal Sternberg, who's pegged as a furtive but so far generally OK sort, are reuniting, reveling, and appearing in a panoramic commercial, and awaiting Jack Lord.

HOW THE COMPLIMENTARY FLIGHT TO CHICAGO WAS

Not complimentary for Mark, who's just along.

And in general not great at all. Drew-Lynn is neurosis in motion, and simply cannot abide take-off if certain cards show up on the pre-flight Tarot she spreads on the fold-down tray. Death is actually OK: that card just means change. But the Tower, the Nine of Swords, any really charismatic non-Death arcana — these do not reassure, from the tray. D.L. claims that every possible option this throw betrays is cataclysmic, even with the crystal to focus negative ions and positive karma, and so things get off to a shaky start, as they leave M.I.A. behind.

AURAL ILLUSTRATION OF THE FLIGHT'S SHAKINESS FROM THE

CONTEMPORARY ACTOR AND CLAUSTROPHOBE

POINT OF VIEW OF TOM STERNBERG, TRAGIC

"I suppose I should apologize, Mark."

"It's OK, Sweets."

"I'm bad at will, I've decided. Postmodernism doesn't stress the efficacy of will, as you know. Although you can't deny I tried."

"D.L., screaming 'This thing's going down! We're all toast!' before we've even started moving doesn't seem like trying all that hard, Sweets. . "

"See, you're mad."

"But it's OK. How you doing over there, Tom?"

"He's trying to sleep."

"I can't sleep, I hate these fucking things," Tom says. The inside of his head has been a disappointing view. "They're too big outside, too small inside. Hard to even breathe." He lights a 100 and holds the long thing way away from D.L., for whom smoke is antimatter.

"Like to take something?" Mark asks him.

"Something?"

"For tranquility, I mean. D.L's not taking anything, because of the baby, but she's got everything from chloral hydrate to Dalmane fifteens," Mark says.

"We'll see. I don't think I want to be stumbling around O'Hare, when we land. It's probably a fuck of a hike to the LordAloft gates. I hate airports maybe even worse than planes. They're all the same." He closes both eyes.

D.L. to Mark: "I took something, darling. I'll say I'm sorry. I promised, then I went and took something. That Nine of Swords. ."

"I know you took something."

"How do you know? You didn't either know. I took them in the lavatory."

"You took thirty milligrams of chloral hydrate and a Dalmane fifteen. It's in the way your head is wobbling."

What's contemporarily tragic about Sternberg is that he has a fatal physical flaw. One of his eyes is turned completely around in his head. From the front it looks like a boiled egg. It won't come back around straight. It's like an injury. It's incredibly bad for his ambitions as a commercial actor. He doesn't talk about what the backward eye sees. He's offended that D.L. in person asked him right off the bat.

He has other flaws, too.

"I'm bad at will, Mark, I've admitted."

"And then you drank a screwdriver. Right now the little miracle is probably rolling around in there totally stoned. It probably has no idea where it is or what's going on."

"You are mad."

"I'm not mad."

"But if you're mad just say so. Just express it. Don't be all anal all the time. Even Ambrose would express it."

"Why don't you just get some sleep, since you and the baby took something."

"There's a word for people like you, Mark. 'Minimal.' You never really react to things. Even art. You hardly ever give me feedback, even."

"I feed back, Drew. I gave you feedback just yesterday. I said I liked the ambiguousness of that 'FIRM DOCTORS TELEPHONE POLES' title. Why you're pissed is that I only said I thought a twenty-page poem that's all punctuation wouldn't be much fun for anybody to actually read. That's feedback. It's just not the reaction you want to hear."

"You persistently confuse reaction with this antiquated insistence that…"

Sternberg whimpers, pulls from his back slacks pocket a seat-warm Reunion brochure and unfolds the square it's in. The brochure is screamingly colored, high-tech, glossy except where it's faded from being folded into a square. It details the attractions and itinerary of the Reunion of everybody who's ever represented McDonald's.

HOW THEY ALL KNOW EACH OTHER

Sternberg out of Boston and D.L. out of Hunt Valley were both in the same McDonald's commercial on the McDonald's-site-turned-set in Collision, Ill., in 1970. They were small children in 1970. They've corresponded since around puberty. So Mark and Sternberg are connected through D.L.

WHERE THEY LIVE NOW

Tom Sternberg lives with his parents in Boston's Back Bay while he attends cattle calls and pesters agents and tries to break into the adult commercial industry. Mark and D.L live in an airy and utterly Yupster Baltimore condo complex, in a spacious suite D.L. has fashioned into as close to a squalid garret as circumstances permit (given that their housekeeper's a Philistine).

WHY D.L. AND TOM HAVE NEVER ONCE GONE HUNGRY

AT MEALTIME

Not well known is the fact that anyone who has ever appeared in a McDonald's commercial receives a never-expiring coupon entitling them to unlimited free hamburgers at any McDonald's franchise, anywhere, anytime. It is a fringe benefit bestowed on commercial alumni by J.D. Steelritter Advertising in a stroke of sheer marketing genius. It allows McDonald's to proclaim, beneath each set of golden arches, exactly how many billions and billions and billions of hamburgers have been "served" so far. Of course the franchise is under no FCC or FTC obligation to mention that a decent percentage of these served burgers are in fact not paid for. The higher numbers breed higher numbers. Consumers are impressed, naturally, by the inflated number of items consumed, and consume even more. Actors are digestively secure, and so McDonald's gigs are regarded in the industry as plums. And the enormous (partly free) volume of service actually conduces to what microeconomists call economies of scale: the flesh is shipped from Argentina by the megaton and cooked, turned, and served according to timers. The food is the same from Coast to Coast. Dependable. Soothing. It's that rarest of transactions: everybody wins. We regard the How-Many-Served sign as just what our interpretation makes it: the sign of the world's community restaurant. It was J.D. Steelritter's second-greatest stroke of marketing genius. After the Reunion and Reunion commercial it will be his third-greatest.

* * *

For Tom Sternberg, airports are not fun. They blur and do not hold his eye. Central Illinois Airport is no exception. For the contemporarily tragic, all airports are the same: orange-faced blondes, slit-skirted stewardesses with luggage they can pull, college boys with Nazi cheekbones, the inevitable green vest of the airport-lounge bartender. Black-haired women in yellow. P.A. announcers just one mouth-marble short of incomprehensible. Blankly harried junior-executive types, the kind who are made by their employers to travel, hauling complicated cases and what look like over-the-shoulder body bags for their identical shiny-seated uniforms. College girls, with cheekbones, in gym shorts with Greek letters on the ass. Crowds, people hugging. Ashtrays beneath No Smoking signs. A rabbi runs for a missed connection. A pale woman totes a limp infant. A lone and disoriented Oriental's black bangs ride his forehead, fencelike. Latino men in bell-bottoms walk in conspiratorial two's, one holding a metal suitcase.

"Can't say as I like the look of that suitcase," he tells Mark, who is pacing tiptoed in the C.I. Airport commuter terminal, waiting for D.L. to take aspirin and wash her post-tranquil face in the women's room. She's had sleep, though, at least. Said it just made her more tired.

They're late, and so no Ronald or coincident Personnel to meet them as foretold in brochure. Sternberg is now officially sleep-deprived. For him this is not fun, either. It affects his vision. The morning colors have the over-bright primacy of movies filmed pre-Panavision. Fluttery hallucinations dance in his outward eye's periphery. An armless statue on a skateboard. A Cyprus swamp, milky water swirling in pockets, drooling over exposed roots. A rainbow snapping like a whip. Except it turns out they're not even real hallucinations; they're posters: "Visit This Art Gallery"; "Explore Louisiana"; "Buy a Lawnchair at This Store and Get Ready to Check Out a Genuine Midwestern Thunderstorm." And so on. Not real. The closure of Sternberg's reversed eye tickles — eyelashes against raw nerves. A high pitch sounds in his skull — a sleep-dep test pattern, something persistent and shrill in a very small box.

"Is that all corn?" Mark asks, pointing past the terminal window.

"Sure as fuck green, isn't it."

"It's all there is. It's all you can see. I've never seen so much of anything."

"This is farm country, man. Serious farmers. D.L. and I were here as kids, for the commercial. Then it was white. Mom brought me back for an audition the next summer, though. Still has nightmares about all the corn. She wakes up, sometimes."

Mark Nechtr stares, slackly intense, at whatever he looks at. He doesn't even seem sleep-deprived to Sternberg. Radiantly perfect fucker. Creepy stare, though. Has the look of somebody in the front row of a really absorbing show all the time.

Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men's Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He's needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the Lord Aloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O'Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg's shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in that stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs.

Thomas Sternberg is thus, like the Historical Idealists of yore— to whom, if the locutionally muscular and forever terrible enfant Dr. C— Ambrose were fabricating this, he could (and so would)

make frequent and explicit and intellectually-fruitful-no-matter-how-irritating reference — Sternberg is thus preternaturally fascinated with the misdirecting pose of bloodless abstraction. Ideas. He's an idea man. It has nothing to do with how intelligent he is, or isn't. Ideas, good and bad, but always bloodless, just kind of inform his whole character and outlook.

He and Mark are both looking around the commuter terminal. Things are clearing out. Emptying. It's a bit creepy. The terminal has that too-suddenly-hushed feeling of the moment after loud music stops. Curt-looking men in custodial white are tearing down the WELCOME WELCOME bunting. Posters launch themselves at the tourist trade from every wall. One glassed-in print advertises a family bowling center, another a forty-eight-hour continuous showing of "Hawaii Five-O" episodes in the airport's lounges, in honor of Jack Lord and J.D. Steelritter and the LordAloft shuttle service's national kick-off.

One huge poster just dominates the wall opposite Sternberg: an enormous J.D. Steelritter is shown next to an enormous Ronald McDonald, one who resembles J.D., under the greasepaint, in the strange way that, say, rugby resembles football — the enormous Ronald's holding an only slightly less enormous promo-poster of the prototype Funhouse discotheque, of which Sternberg's eye can make out only what looks pretty much like an ordinary house, one you could expect to see lots of in any bedroom community anywhere, except for the enormous cadaverous grin that represents the Funhouse's door. The expression on J.D.'s face is ingenious, already makes you feel deprived not being there with them.

"We're late," D.L. says, returning and immediately clinging to Mark in a way you can't tell if he minds. "They've left, I'm afraid. Those janitors just shrugged when I asked them where anybody is."

Sternberg touches his forehead lightly. "We were supposed to get greeted with nametags, with real gold arches, the brochure said."

"Look at the fields," D.L. says, gesturing at outside, rotating her small head South to North.

We could rent a car, I guess," Mark muses.

"Ever rented a car?" Sternberg asks. "Unbelievable hassle. Like applying for citizenship to someplace. Forms to fill out. Identity to prove. You have to have a fucking credit card. Incredible lines. Picture Moscow on fresh-meat day."

"You got a better idea?"

"I almost thought I saw a kid with a nametag from a McMuffin spot going into the men's room just now," Sternberg says, wanting very much to smoke a 100, eyeing the filters and lone wet-tipped cigar butt in the window's ashtray's sand, but not lighting up, because smoking really makes him have to shit, if he has to shit.

"You want to go in and have a look?"

NO. "We could just cruise around and look for somebody," Sternberg says nonchalantly. "There's no way this place can be as empty as it looks."

It looks pretty empty, though. "Maybe I'll look," Mark ventures.

D.L. loves to put her hands on windows. "Can you even remember which way Collision is, from here?" she yawns. She can't see anything but land, the LordAloft's return to Chicago a blurred and receding dot exiting the window's left border. "If Collision was out there, close by, wouldn't we see it? There's certainly nothing in the way."

"Collision's West of here. That's East, out that window."

"So you don't see anybody to ask," Mark repeats quietly.

"Why are there like no windows facing West in here?"

Mark sighs, cracks pale knuckles, rubs his face. "I do not know. We could try Hertz or something. We've got a credit card. Or we could just walk around and find somebody. Or we could eat. You hungry at all, Tom?"

No way Sternberg is going to eat anything right now. He rarely eats around people anyway. And obversely.

Speaking of speaking about shit: Dr. Ambrose, whom we all admire with a fierceness reserved for the charismatic, could at this point profitably engage in some wordplay around and about the similarities, phonological and then etymological, between the words sca-tology and eschatology. Smooth allusions to Homeric horses pooping death-dealing Ithacans, Luther's excremental vision, Swift's incontinent Yahoos. Neither D.L nor Sternberg, nor J.D. and DeHaven — who're pulling up outside in the pay lot, arguing about something to do with DeHaven's car's ignition — have the equipment to react to opportunity in this particular manner. Mark now feels as though he distrusts wordplay.

So basically they're just standing around, as people will, their luggage a vivid jumble at their feet, kind of bogged down, tired, with that so-near-and-yet type of tension, a sense of somewhere definite they must be at by a definite time, but no clear consensus on how to get there. Since they're late. As Dr. Ambrose might venture to observe, they're figuratively unsure about where to go from here.

HOW THE CENTRAL ILLINOIS TOWN OF COLLISION CAME TO BE INCORPORATED

Fact: all Illinois communities, from well-built Chicago down to Little Egypt, have their origin and reason in the production of nourishment. The soil of Illinois is second only to the Nile delta in terms of decayed-matter percentage, fertility. Illinois has also always been known for its uncountable number of tiny, shittily maintained, shoulderless rural highways, against and alongside which corn grows quickly and thickly and tall. Tall, dense, the gorged corn obscures drivers' ability to see, at intersections of the little roads, whether anything's coming. And the funding necessary for CAUTION signs just never has quite come through.

And so in the early Great Depression era, during which Central Illinois' soil got not one bit dusty, the corn no less verdant, there was an unmarked intersected collision between a wealthy Chicago woman on her way South in a big touring car and a farmer on a small tractor who was crossing the road East to West to get to his other field. The car won the day. The farmer was thrown ass over teakettle into his field, where, hidden by corn, he expired. Loudly. The woman couldn't get to him because her car had knocked him so far into the green, and the humus-clotted soil made the woman's high-heeled shoes just impossible. The woman, who had a cut on her forehead and had killed somebody by knocking him way farther than any person was meant to fly, was traumatized beyond belief or reason. But she had will; and she vowed, right then and there, according to J.D., never to travel again. Ever.

Her vow, plus strength of character, yielded certain implications. Her slightly dented touring car stayed right where it had stalled, and the woman lived in it. Pretty big car. Farmer Kroc's family, across the field, was rather honked off, at first, about the collision and death and disappearance (utter) of their breadwinner's body; but the woman, out of guilt, paid them more than the farmer himself would have brought in in a lifetime; and not only was there no litigation, but the woman became almost an extended Kroc-family member, from her home in the motionless car. Various farm kids, at first out of minimal bare human charity, brought her food and basic essentials, appearing from the walls of corn as out of nowhere with the things she needed to live.

And but in return, plus out of gratitude and guilt, she reimbursed them, for these essentials. In fact she paid anybody who brought her anything she wanted. Inevitably, given the way the world wags, a kind of market was quickly established: here was this urban person in this big car at an intersection equidistantly central to rurally Depressed Champaign, Rantoul, and Urbana, who wanted things, and would exchange money for the things. The area was substantially transfigured. Misery, guilt and charity became prosperity, redemption, market. Itinerant Depressed poor, but with things, and entrepreneurial drive, flocked to the intersection where her tractor-smacked car sat inert, she inside. The redeemed poor built lean-to's, which became perma-tents, which became shanties, thence a kind of nouveaux-bourgeois Rooseveltville, clustered around the site of the collision.

A handsome scimitar-nosed itinerant peddler, bicycling through from back East, where things were just not in good shape at all, bearing East-Coast flora he'd purloined from the lavish funeral of a recently suicided banker, was the one who got in on the ground floor, so to speak. He saw the woman, in the car, and in that kind of ingenious marketing epiphany from which American legend grows, insisted on selling the woman his very top-of-the-line tea-rose bulb. At cost. The bulb was planted in the world's second-richest soil and in no time at all begat a bush. The bush begat countless other bushes, through fertilization, and an irruption of Valentine red began to impose its beauty on the green utterness of the farmerless field's own beauty.

In a parallel development, the destitute itinerant peddler and the wealthy inert woman fell in love with each other, in the big car, eventually begat a child, and then moved out of the car (a car being no place for a child) into a sprawling farmhouse the peddler designed and the woman underwrote, a house from which they never budged again, sustained by those in the surrounding shanties whose origin and reason was sustaining the guilty wealthy woman. The irruption of rose bushes became an actual tea-rose farm, a central dot of red on the state's black-and-green, camouflaged face, and Jack and Mrs. Jack Steelritter raised their well-fed children on the sheltered intersection Jack had discovered between beauty, desire, and discount.

Across the cornfield-turned-rose-farm, the Ray Kroc, Sr., farm family, minus a patriarch, but plus a settlement way beyond legal, and with a son who, once out from under his hard-working father's shadow, discovered he had vision, began to engineer a rotation, shifting the emphasis of their labor and capital in the direction of cattle, potatoes, and sugar. And it became good.

For whom is the Funhouse a house? Maybe for liars, creative types, campaigners, tree surgeons having at the great Saxonic tree. For Tom Sternberg, the Funhouse is less a place of fear and confusion than (grimace) an idea, an ever-distant telos his arrival at which will represent the revelated transformation of a present we stomach by looking beyond. A present comprised by fear of confusion.

OK true, Funhouse 1, like all the foreseen and planned national chain of Funhouse franchises, is, in reality, just a discotheque. A watering hole and meat market and gathering place where the spotlights tell us where and how to swing to the beat. One big enclosed anarchic revel — a Party: where we, via Party rule, gather and pretend with grim Puritan fortitude that we're having just way more fun than anybody could really be having.

OK now but the Funhouse also represents, to Sternberg — as hero, as Protagoras — the Funhouse represents the future. As of right now, the prediction here is that Sternberg will arrive, through the inexorable internal logic of his choice and circumstance, at Collision's Funhouse, as a tagged and registered part of the foretold and long-awaited Reunion of Everyone Who's Ever Represented the Product in a McDonald's Commercial; will unite and interact with the crowd of actors there; will have numerous insights, revelations and epiphanies; and will, ultimately, at the end of the time, confront his future. An implication will be that Sternberg, as an emblem — or synecdochical appendage — of his generation, will countenance, in his future, The Future.

All this is being made explicit both to avoid any possible appearance of Symbolist/New Realist coyness, and also because the true tension of any record of Reunion day just doesn't rely on this stuff, and so hopefully isn't compromised or tranquilized by being made, as Dr. Ambrose told the workshop just before Memorial Day, "desuppressed, anti-replenished, exhausted, in full view."

He'd tell us yes friends and neighborhood association the textual tension and payoff here lies in the exact sort of late-twentieth-century Future this introverted aspiring product-representative will confront. Ambrose explained — and it's all in Mark Nechtr's notes, in a precise crabbed hand — Ambrose held that there are numerous types of potential futures flapping and honking in man's conceptual pond. Specifically that there's differences between the trinity of: a future within time (history & prophecy); a future beyond time (resurrection & eternity); and a future that ends time (eschaton & apocalypse). Which did we find most attractive? he'd asked rhetorically, finally wiping the nastily critical poem off his green blackboard.

Three other things Dr. Ambrose told the workshop (that Mark Nechtr doesn't have in his tiny crabbed notes because his attention had strayed to the loveless pathos of the postmodern Drew-Lynn Eberhardt and the thing she'd scrawled before blowing off class):

"The subject of a story is what it's about; the object of a story is where it's going";

"Do not confuse sympathy for the subject and empathy with it— one of the two is bad."

"Yes, he, Ambrose, the author, is a character in and the object of the seminal Lost in the Funhouse; but he is not the main character, the hero or subject, since fictionists who tell the truth aren't able to use real names."

Since and as J.D. and DeHaven Steelritter are still arguing about whether it's more efficient to shut off DeHaven's growling car, out there in the pay lot, and since no one connected to today is in sight in the terminal or rest room (Mark went in and checked for collegiate cuffs and footwear under the stall doors) to guide them, still, the trio of Mark and D.L. and Sternberg are to be seen making their way toward the arrowed signs for Ground Transportation, their object being to rent a Datsun, Mark carrying both his light bag and D.L.'s bag, a stabbing sensation in his thorax which full hands prevent him from verifying as his special Dexter target arrow, which he's attached to, and hid from the LordAloft 7:10 pilot in his shirt, and is still carrying there, D.L. walking with arms crossed over a lime-green-jacket-enclosed chest whose dimensions remain, to Sternberg, disappointingly vague, her pelvis preceding her by at least a couple steps. Sternberg is lugging the bag his parents bought him, casting his castable eye this way and that for anyone with a gold parabolic nametag, an expectant expression, a clown's face— eye casting over a Semitically modest set of cheekbones but a rather snoutish Gentilic nose, a full if somewhat ill-defined mouth, his face itself unfortunately one big chaos of poison-sumac cysts, infections and scars, dimpled as a metal roof post-hailstorm; and of course a pleasant blue forward-looking eye and an unnatural dead-white backward-looking eye. Ironically, a good part of his anticor-poreal stance (it was his idea to call having a body Corporeal Punishment) derives from his nonfatal flaw, the skin trouble, the skin trouble itself deriving from a weekend years past, just before a cattle call for a Wisk spot he didn't get, a weekend of solo camping and getting-into-collar-soiled-character, alone, with a tent, in the Berkshires, West of Boston, during which he'd contracted a mild spatter of poison sumac, and had purchased a discount generic brand of poison-sumac medicine he curses now and forever (like most terse-labeled generics the product was untrustworthy, turned out in fact to be medicine for the sumac, not the sufferer therefrom, but if the label says MEDICINE FOR POISON SUMAC what the fuck are you going to think, standing there?) that had set his face, neck, chest and back aflame: pulsing, cystic, volcanic, allergic, clotted, almost sacredly scarred. The sumac is so bad it hurts — which of course is a constant reminder that it's there, on his body — and it won't go away, no sooner healed by brand-name antitoxin than reinfected. The whole thing's just pretty loathsome, and you can bet Sternberg loathes it. He's unhappy, but in that comparatively neat and easy way of those who are at least pretty sure they know why they're unhappy, and what to curse, now and forever.

They walk, with luggage, Mark bobbing slightly, D.L. loin-led and probably pregnant, Sternberg trailing and casting. Onto the escalator's shaver-head steps, down. Here's that Oriental again, with the tattered black bangs, ascending at them. The Oriental's still alone. Sternberg ponders: how often do you see just one Oriental anyplace? They tend to move in packs. The sun is early-to-mid-morning. Lots of Eastward windows glide diagonally up as they deescalate. The sunlight is both glaring and impure. Dew-turned-humidity rises as one slow body from the green sweep of corn, the mist breaking Swiss-cheesily into patches as it heats and ascends to mess with the purity of the light. Mark could tell Sternberg how most Occidentals don't realize that Orientals do often appear in transit alone, do often pronounce liquid consonants at least as well as your average airport P.A. announcer. That their eyes aren't any smaller or wickedly slanted than our own: they just have a type of uncircumcised eyelid that reveals slightly less total eye. The eyes in Mark's healthy face appear vaguely oriental; they have that boxer-in-the-late-rounds puffiness, especially when he hasn't slept. But he's occidental as they come. He's a third-generation-German Baltimore WASP, though lately converted, D.L. wrote Sternberg, by an insidious pedagogical Mesmer of an archery coach, from an ambivalent parental Catholicism to Trinitarianism, known also as Mathurinism or Redemptionism. D.L., who is postmodern, and so atheist, wrote bitterly to Sternberg during her then-just-friend's formal conversion: the whole thing was savage, medieval, cannibalistic, lust-ridden, "This bread is my body" transformed into factitive verbs and epithetic nouns, a linguistic bewitchment, a leximancical fraud: how can three things be both one thing and three things? They just can't be, is all. But Sternberg thinks he gets the idea. If you can just want something bad enough, "to want" becomes factitive. Sternberg wants to heal himself. To act. He wants it more than anything.

The opposing escalator carries the Oriental up at them. Mark declines to meet the man's uncut eye. D.L. actually walks down the downward glide of their conveyor, the sort of girl who treats escalators like stairs, behavior which has always frightened and confused Sternberg. Her ass is disproportionately wide, flat, ungentle.

But so they're in motion, at least, notice, though the going is slow. It's undeniable that they don't even yet have transportation to the Funhouse, and that it's awfully slow going, here. Not one of them would deny this, and they're tired, and D.L. coming off meds, and Mark hungry and his bloodstream crying out for coffee. And Sternberg needs a b— movement like nobody's business.

But and so things are slow, and like you they have this irritating suspicion that any real satisfaction is still way, way off, and it's frustrating; but like basically decent kids they suck it up, bite the foil, because what's going on is just plain real; and no matter what we want, the real world is pretty slow, at present, for kids our age. It probably gets less slow as you get older and more of the world is behind you, and less ahead, but very few people of our generation are going to find this exchange attractive, I'll bet. Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr, over beers and a blossom at the East Chesapeake Tradeschool Student Union Bar & Grill, that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch — and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience — that life, instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow.

Meanwhile, oddly, here's another of these well-dressed young guys, in the lower terminal, near Ground Transportation, young and bearded and groomed, giving away money like it's going out of style, checking things off on a clipboard so full his slim hands strain to keep it together. Mark approaches him. He wants to verify the scam; he feels like he's figured out who these guys are: they're Mormons, it's some irritatingly altruistic Mormon thing. He wants to check it out before giving D.L. their Visa card, but D.L. is edgy, coming off Dalmane, a member of the Valium family. And a surprisingly sharp-voiced argument ensues, about schedules and reliability and lateness and who's responsible for what, in terms of various fuck-ups. It's the kind of public-place argument between married people you don't listen to, if you're polite.

A REALLY BLATANT AND INTRUSIVE INTERRUPTION

As mentioned before — and if this were apiece of metafiction, which it's NOT, the exact number of typeset lines between this reference and the prenominate referent would very probably be mentioned, which would be a princely pain in the ass, not to mention cocky, since it would assume that a straightforward and anti-embellished account of a slow and hot and sleep-deprived and basically clotted and frustrating day in the lives of three kids, none of whom are all that sympathetic, could actually get published, which these days good luck, but in metafiction it would, nay needs be mentioned, a required postmodern convention aimed at drawing the poor old reader's emotional attention to the fact that the narrative bought and paid for and now under time-consuming scrutiny is not in fact a barely-there window onto a different and truly diverting world, but rather in fact an "artifact," an object, a plain old this-worldly thing, composed of emulsified wood pulp and horizontal chorus-lines of dye, and conventions, and is thus in a "deep" sense just an opaque forgery of a transfiguring window, not a real window, a gag, and thus in a deep (but intentional, now) sense artificial, which is to say fabricated, false, a fiction, a pretender-to-status, a straw-haired King of Spain — this self-conscious explicitness and deconstructed disclosure supposedly making said metafiction "realer" than a piece of pre-postmodern "Realism" that depends on certain antiquated techniques to create an "illusion" of a windowed access to a "reality" isomorphic with ours but possessed of and yielding up higher truths to which all authentically human persons stand in the relation of applicand — all of which the Resurrection of Realism, the pained product of inglorious minimalist labor in countless obscure graduate writing workshops across the U.S. of A., and called by Field Marshal Lish (who ought to know) the New Realism, promises to show to be utter baloney, this metafictional shit. . plus naïve baloney-laced shit, resting on just as many "undisclosed assumptions" as the "realistic" fiction metafiction would try to "debunk" — one imagines nudists tearing the poor Emperor's clothes to shreds and then shrieking with laughter, as if they didn't go home to glass-enclosed colonies, either — and, the New Real guys would argue, more odious in the bargain, this metafiction, because it's a slap in the faces of History and History's not-to-be-fucked-with henchman Induction, and opens the door to a fetid closetfull of gratuitous cleverness, jazzing around, self-indulgence, no-hands-ism, which as Gardner or Conroy or L'Heureux or hell even Ambrose himself will tell you are the ultimate odium for any would-be passionate virtuoso — the closest we get to the forbidden, the taboo, the odium, the asur. . — and so the number of lines between won't be mentioned, though its ass-pain would have been subordinate to and considerably more economical in terms of severely limited time than this particular consideration and refusal— there's to be, today, a Reunion of everyone who has ever appeared in any of the 6,659 McDonald's commercials ever conceived and developed and produced and shot and distributed by the same J.D. Steelritter Advertising that has sent myriad and high-technically seductive invitations, information packets, travel vouchers, brochures, and carefully targeted inducements and duressments (no maps, though, oddly) to everyone who's ever appeared. And get this: the Reunion's been so well conceived and promoted that everyone who's still alive has promised to show up. One hundred percent positive response is, J.D. knows, no accident. This Reunion's been in the works a long time. Besides things that spin, this gala's conception and arrangement have been J.D. Steelritter's central passion for years. He was predicting something like this right from the beginning. Converging on the sleepy, rose-scented town of Collision are close to 44,000 former actors, actresses, puppeteers, unemployed clowns: thousands of pilgrims from each of the great twelve market-determined classes of commercial actor: Caucasian, Black, Asian, Latin, Native American/Eskimo, plus finally those who wear bright mâché heads and costumes; with a dittoed six categories of child actors from child-spots aimed like cathode revolvers at the wide-eyed Saturday-morning and late-weekday-afternoon market. Free plane fare; complimentary LordAloft shuttle from O'Hare to Central Illinois Airport; clown-car transportation to the Reunion grounds (for the punctual); gold nametags, for keep-sies; access to the flagship discotheque of a franchise that promises to thrive like carcinomae, to be the place to be seen, in the millennium ahead; free food (natch); a chance to meet and pal around with J.D. Steelritter and Ronalds 1 and 3, to chuck baseballs at the targeted dunk-tank over which will be suspended Ronald 2, to engage in general orgiastic Walpurgisrevel that would have just shot Faust's rocks; and finally the appearance, at 12:00 sharp, directly overhead, of Jack Lord, star, with a bullhorn and plastic rifle, Jack Lord, a fucking icon, aloft, in a helicopter, waving. It's going, the glossy brochure promises, to be a Reunion to end all reunions. Exclamation point. And it's going to be made into the biggest McDonald's commercial of all time. And they're going to get paid all over again.

Besides, New Realism, being young, and realistic, is pretty slow, too. Ask Ambrose. Ask Mark; he's checked it out. It diverges, in its slowness, from the really real only in its extreme economy, its Prussian contempt for leisure, its obsession with the confining limitations of its own space, its grim proximity to its own horizon. It's some of the most heartbreaking stuff available at any fine bookseller's anywhere. I'd check it out.

At the point of a surprisingly patient parallel line, at the C.I. Airport Avis counter, a very big farmer, in overalls — so big he unconsciously treats the counter like a footstool, has his boot on the counter and his elbow on his knee — is trying to barter an entire thousand-bushel crop of prime Illinois feed corn, plus his '81 Allys-Chalmers thresher/harvester, for just three weeks' rental of anything foreign. Anything foreign at all, is what's sad. It's for his oldest kid, apparently. His kids and our kids watch the negotiations. The Avis attendant, who clearly recognizes a number-two's imperative to try harder, explains that while she doesn't make policy, and can only relate that policy to the public, and must decline the barter, she empathizes with the farmer a lot.

"Datsun or nothing," D.L. iterates to the two, and Mark Nechtr grits his teeth, producing a fine tight smile. D.L. is seen only in Datsuns. It's a neurosis, for sure, but one so powerful as to dictate acquiescence in many amusing instances we haven't time for. Stern-berg, all this time, is peering outward around the big farmer's thigh at yet another poster, this one for that Central Illinois bowling and family-fun center. Though Sternberg has lived with his parents all his life, and has in fact kissed only them, ever, he's puzzled by this term, "family fun."

The Avis representative's refusal of the big farmer's bartered offer has pity and empathy in it, however not compassion or sympathy. The absence of sympathy is probably due to the fact that her mouth is full of a sweet bite-sized Breakfast DoughNugget as she patiently explains Avis's unbendable remittance policy of cash, locally drawn check w/ guarantee card, and in any case at least data on a national credit card, which in this awkward age means MasterCard, AmEx, Visa, CitiCorp, or the new, convenient, and option-widening Discover Card. The farmer has only raw grain, and (weirdly) too much of it for it to be worth anything. And Avis's profit projections on thresher rentals out of airports are understandably bleak. Surely the farmer recognizes that the situation is no one's fault.

He does. The huge farmer.

Sternberg points the big poster out to D.L. "ENJOY A WHOLE NEW DIMENSION IN BOWLING" is its basic pitch.

He's puzzled about family-fun, and the poster makes him somehow fearful. "Bowling's pretty darn three-dimensional already, isn't it?"

Mark smiles. "Four-dimensional bowling?" D.L. laughs. Her laugh tends to sound like a cough. And obversely. Sternberg peers at the two-dimensional image, scanning the ad's family of models for flaws. Mark stands tiptoed, flexing his ankles, his arrow a little vertical wrinkle under his surgeon's shirt.

And they're all of a sudden at the counter's long line's front, Sternberg sees. What's happened to the big old farmer who's unable to trade a whole season's sweat and effort, in the tradition that made the U.S.A. — nay, the whole evolution from hunting-gathering nomadism to cultivation and community — possible and great, for a lousy three weeks of flashy transport? Has he gathered his flat-faced brood around him, raised the bill of his seed-company cap to rub his own tired brick-red face, and gone off to try even harder at car rental's number one agency? Mark feels as though he ought to be depressed about it: the car was for the farmer's eldest son's potential wedding to a loan officer's daughter. But Sternberg can see neither farmers nor broods anyplace, and his evacuation-imperative has now become a sick ache in his lower gut, and he draws out a fag, a 100, a type of cigarette he likes because it not only burns forever but also emits its light at a comfortable distance from his body. Again, the preceding generation of cripplingly self-conscious writers, obsessed with their own interpretation, would mention at this point, just as we're possibly getting somewhere, that the story isn't getting anywhere, isn't progressing in the seamless Freitagian upsweep we should have scaled by this, mss. p. 35, time. They'd trust, though, à la their hierophant C— Ambrose, that this explicit internal acknowledgment of their failure to start the show would release them somehow from the obligation to start the show. Or that it might, in some recursive and above all ingenious way, represent the very movement it professes to deny. Mark's fix on these Gamarahites is that they're basically a sincere lot — critics, really, instead of the priests they want to be — and that it's ironic that it's because of their very critical integrity that these guys get captured by the very pretend-industry they're trying to regulate. Mark Nechtr is unfashionably patient, in line. T. Sternberg embodies a different generational story. Gray clouds roll in slow pain against half his sight. As the nicotine becomes a bright blood-tide, crashing against sleep-dep, ugly ideas descend on Sternberg, and are recorded here w/o comment. Fucking pathetic farmer. Fucking pathetic Midwest Avis girl with anvil-shaped hair and a translucent wart on her brow and sugary-shit at the corners of her mouth. The black girl-hair on her arm, like, gleams. Fucking Mark with his hypnotized stare and sensitive lashes and stink of health and his lone aluminum arrow, attached to the phallic little guy or what, terrific hiding job inside his neckless effeminate surgeon's shirt so the tip shows just under his throat. The clot can't even tell how he looks to other people. Fucking D.L. with her trim trimestered belly and limbo pelvis and too-clever pout, her failure to match memory, a dog-eared copy of something Progressive held across her chest in lieu of the jiggle of any discernible tit. Fucking Tom, varnished with a light oily sweat in the absence of one lousy visible flaw on the poster of these bowlers having family fun in a new dimension. We just want to ride, dude. Gratis. To the Reunion. We just want to do the bare unavoidable minimum. Pay taxes, die. Sternberg has resentment even he can't see, it's so deep inside. So an ugly mood, and a desperate need to evacuate his body. It's loathsomely real, I'm afraid. But what's to be done?

Avis girl w/ translucent wart and glazed DoughNugget behind aluminum counter: "How can we help you, today?"

Across the lower terminal is the lower lounge, mostly empty, the plastic tables round sprouts supported by single central stems, atomic clouds with tops shaved flat, the bartender in his green vest hanging washed glasses by their stems beneath the huge TV raised to its tavern-height in a corner on the side Sternberg can't see out of — though his other eye is marvelously keen, the eye of a marksman, really.

"I feel we should tell you right at the outset we'll be needing a Datsun," D.L. says, the counter at what ought to be breast-level.

"Hawaii Five-O" and the bartender are both on their last of forty-eight straight hours. The bartender is grim, has to hear Danno being told to book somebody just one more rime. . But it's an episode Sternberg knows, moving his head to see. He just loves episodes he already knows.

"No more Datsuns? Mark, she seems to be saying there are no more Datsuns."

Looking at Sternberg and the distant elevated TV: "Datsuns are Nissans, now, Sweets. Ask if they have Nissans." Mark's broken this news to D.L. before. It never sinks in.

It's the first bit of violence, here, in this episode. Jack Lord's antagonists always get introduced through violence inflicted on the innocent and cameo. See these menacing oriental men enter a beauty salon where an occidental and male hairdresser is alone, putting receipts in order, soon to close. Menacingly they draw the shades and flip the window's sign over so its OPEN side faces Sternberg and the surprised hairdresser, who tries to explain that they don't do men, in this particular shop; one Oriental drawing a flicked stiletto, weltschmerzian end-lust aglitter in eyes far smaller than good old familiar occidental eyes, announcing, "We do"; and the revelation dawns on victim and viewer alike as "Hawaii Five-O" cuts to shots of an almost tidal-sized wave, a wave that conveys far better than realism the total disorder and — memberment taking place in that occidental Honolulu hair salon; as Mark, too, succumbs to the familiar enchantment of popular culture, leaves transportation negotiations to his bride, and drifts with Sternberg like flotsam toward the lounge and the syndicated television program "Hawaii Five-O." Numerous references to popular culture pervade the art which all three of these sexually mature children consume and aspire one day to produce and re-present. Popular culture is the symbolic representation of what people already believe.

But so they have a coccyx-hostile chair at a table's wood-grained circle, the boys, in a lower lounge almost empty, as morning lounges ought, Sternberg ordering a Jolt cola and fishing for fags in his shirt, Mark having to remove his arrow as he sits, since the tip's at his throat; and his throat wants coffee, and he can't believe the bartender's terse suggestion that he go up to the cafeteria, if he wants something hot. Meanwhile, across the terminal, in view of Mark but not Tom, who's into reruns, stands Drew-Lynn, edgy as only a tranquilizer hangover can make you edgy, trying to negotiate the legal rental of a Nissan, as the line behind her grows too long to really even be observed. Mark withdraws from a surgeon's shirt of surprising storage complexity a thick Ziploc bag one-third full of oily and darkly red things. Sternberg is witnessing Che, the Five-O M.E., trace a kind of chalk ectoplasm around the tastefully unfocused cadaver of the hairdresser; the first he sees of the roses is when Mark offers him one.

"Bit of fried rose, maybe?" reaching pale fingers in, bending as if to sniff coffee.

"Fried rose?"

Mark holds a petal so greasy it makes his fingers shine. "It's like a delicacy. You behead them and fry them in oil, and eat them."

Tom stares at both Mark and himself, lighting a 100 the way a cigar is lit, torching it, so that the end gets ravaged.

"Try one. I get them from somebody pretty trustworthy. They're better than they look. Try one. It'll pick you up."

He looks at it. "I think I'd rather drink bong-water than eat something that looks like that."

"Bong-water's a totally different issue."

"You're sure?"

"Just one. Try it. You look like hell. You can wash it down with Jolt, won't even taste it."

No inappropriate comestibles for D.L., though. D.L.'s psychic was dead-set against fried roses. Hors d'oeuvres to a meal you don't even want to think about, she'd called them. It was she who told D.L. she might be seen only in Datsuns. That the Death card was basically an OK card. But to consult her before ever leaving home. To wear amber resin instead of perfume, it's good karma, opens the third eye, plus smells good, like distant orange cake. D.L. wears amber:

"Excuse me? I heard only doughnut. A Nissan, then. We will, no, not be driving it out of state. We'll be taking it only to Collision, just West of here. Is Collision just West of here? Steelritter, yes. We're here for the Reunion of Everyone Who's Ever Appeared in a McDonald's Commercial" (caps hers). "The ultimate McDonald's commercial. A kind of logarithm of all other McDonald's commercials, a spot so huge the brochure, here's the brochure, the brochure says 'New equipment will have to be designed even to try to countenance the union of all the thirty years' actors consuming, to attempt to capture a crowded and final transfiguration that will represent, and so transmit, a pan-global desire for meat, a collective erection of the world community's true and total restaurant.' I know, Steelritter Advertising tends to talk that way. And Mr. Steelritter wasn't here to meet us. We were late. We. My husband and friend are both" — looking—"my husband is in the lounge, just across, facing the window, you can just see him. Mark Nechtr, spouse. With a ch and no vowel. He should go down first. Next D.L. Eberhardt, introduction of the McDonaldLand outdoor-eating and family-fun areas, winter, 1970. I sliding down a compactly curved slide, my possibly bare little bottom shrieking fric-tionally against very very cold metal. I innocently offering the Hamburglar a burger he doesn't even chew, swallowing it whole as I recoil. The poor man was bulging out of his costume by the time Steelritter was satisfied with the shot. He was a perfectionist.

He and the actors who wore costumes didn't get along well, was our impression. Our. A Thomas Sternberg should go down, too, as a possible driver. He's from the introduction of the Drive-Thru option, winter, 1970. He petitioning a smiley-faced intercom for a FunMeal while the actor at the wheel reaches down to tousle his hair. Relishing the break he'd deserved that day. That's probably more information than you need. It's just that we're tired, we've flown in all the way from the East Coast, we haven't had quality sleep, or been met, and we would so much just like to get there. With minimal hassle. We are late, and have transportation needs, and the credit to satisfy them. And our national credit card of choice is: Visa. You're right, that's not technically our name on the card. The card's technically in my husband Mark Nechtr's father's name. He's in detergent. Steelritter doesn't handle his firm, I'm afraid."

There is narrative movement. Sternberg sits, fearful, trying to lift his shoes from view. He fingers his forehead in further fear and indecision as the smell of what what he's consumed produces rises around him. Elsewhere, red-toothed, Mark idly flips his arrow up and over and down and into the lounge's round table, where the razor-sharp Dexter target-tip sticks. He's good at this — it's a lounge trick — just hang the nock and part of the cedar shaft over the table's edge, give it a carefully casual slap from below, and the thing goes up, end-over-end, and comes down straight, to stay. The bartender, who wouldn't be pleased at punctured tabletops, is however engrossed in what the menacing Orientals, now in leather, are doing to an occidental nun.

"Is this because J.D. Steelritter, who probably owns this whole airport and everything in it, doesn't handle detergent?" D.L. demands. "Well no I'm trying to tell you it is our card, it's just in his father's name. Wedding present. We're practically newlyw— but why does it need to be in our name? I'm over twenty-one, I'm twenty-five, for Christ's sake — look at the license. I'm pregnant. I have a spouse. No, Mark does not have a Visa in his own name.

He's just a graduate student. We're only just now establishing credit. Tom Sternberg I know doesn't have a credit card. He uses only money. Not even a checking account. He pretends it's a political idea, but really he's afraid he'll get confused, overextended."

The Avis representative chews empathetically as she explains that renters need cards in their own names. That she's only relating company policy. That there it is in black and white. Legal thing. Have to establish that you're accredited adults who can assume responsibility for someone else's high-velocity machine.

"But Miss this Visa has unlimited credit. Look — it's got 'LIMIT: SKY' printed right on it. Embossed."

On Mark's table are his upright Dexter aluminum, his Ziploc of Ambrose's fried roses, a tall thin bar-glass of cola, and an untended 100 that refuses to die in its ashtray.

"Let me understand you," D.L. tells the anvil-haired Avis attendant as the mood of the line behind her moves beyond ugly and restless into something more like at peace and sort of awed, watching the exchange. "Though the credit is unlimited," she says slowly, "it's not ours, you're saying. It's unlimited, but it's not about responsibility, and so in some deep car-rental-agency sense isn't really credit at all?"

The Avis lady, whose name is Nola, chews a bit of chocolate glaze, nodding with the genuine empathy that got her the job in the first place.

D.L. turns to no one in particular: "This is an outrage."

And it is, sort of.

"Can I help, perhaps?" It's the young man with the soft beard, crisp bills and crammed clipboard, holding a vending machine's paper cup of coffee by its flimsy fold-out handle, exchanging pleasant nods with Nola, of Avis.

"Are you affiliated with the Reunion of Everyone Who's Ever Appeared in a McDonald's Commercial?" D.L. asks.

"No," the guy admits, sipping.

D.L. turns her lime-green back. "Then no," she says. "Miss," she says, "what then do you propose we do? Is there any sort of public transportation in Central Illinois? Don't laugh. We're in real trouble. We have a severely limited amount of time to get to Collision and the Funhouse discotheque that J.D. Steelritter, who just by the way does own this airport, doesn't he…?"

"J.D.?" the mild-eyed man asks.

"J.D.," D.L. says, not turning around, too pissed even to recognize recognition. "And we're not even sure where Collision is, from this airport. How far West of here is it? Is it walking distance? Is there a road? All we've seen is corn. It's been disorienting, windblown, verdant, tall, total, menacingly fertile. This entire area is creepy. We have transportation needs. I'll bet the insects here are fierce. Is your state bird the mosquito? Is this snake country?"

"Fears?" the man with the money to offer is saying, idly working those near the line's front. "Fears here?"

By the way, for whom would perpetual union with this person yammering bad-news-customer-like at Nola be fun, I'll bet you're asking. Perhaps the most direct and efficient and diplomatic answer is that a rented Datsun is not in the offing.

Mark looks up at what's raised to public view. Jack Lord's helicopter slowly ascends, wheeling gracefully into Hawaii's electric blue, Lord at the helm, in a fine and no-bullshit-whatsoever business suit, Danno riding shotgun with his marksman's rifle, in a slightly less fine but still all-business suit. Where is Tom Sternberg? He'll give Sternberg till the next commemorative commercial, Mark thinks, trying to swallow a second gulp of soda against the rising gas of the first. Something almost imperceptibly furtive about Sternberg discourages the idea of contact in bathrooms. Mark is enormously sensitive to these sorts of things, in general. There's still the tiniest bit of cooked flower between his teeth, which he works slowly with his healthy but sort of narrow tongue, in which irritated taste buds are visible as individual buds.

Well and then he sees the probable Mormon, the money-giver, with D.L. and the hairy-armed Avis girl, at the counter, across the terminal, past the totally superfluous lounge window, which is itself past the next table, now occupied by a blonde, orange-faced flight attendant and an effete narrow-faced man in an age-glazed corduroy suit. Mark rises in alarm. They don't need Latter-Day charity, Reunion or no. There's always a Mormon around when you don't want one, trying your patience with unsolicited kindness.

"Stop me if I'm wrong, but what I sense here is conflict," says the bearded man, who it turns out isn't a practicing LDS, but rather works for J.D. Steelritter Advertising in some research capacity unrelated to the McDonald's campaign or revel. "Stymied desire," he muses. "It's clear that there's something you want, and an obstacle, a what's the word a cheval-de-frise, to your actually having it." He's writing this stuff down on a clipboard whose poor clip is holding far too much print-out paper. "Doubtless in the confrontation and potential resolution of this conflict you'll undergo changes in experience, outlook, personality, possibly even in the makeup of the desires. ."

"Needs. We have transportation needs."

". . themselves. Maybe changes that'll be of interest not only to you, but to others. You'll have something to interest the Reunion, when you arrive."

"When," he emphasizes, his face like an ad for blind faith, happy karma.

"Maybe then you could get your own credit card," the Avis woman says helpfully, genuinely sorry that she does not fashion, but only communicates, company policy. The complimentary box of DoughNuggets is empty, its wax paper greebly and smeared. Honestly, though. Even bartering farmers are better than kids without real credit. And there is simply no way this person is only twenty-five, or pregnant, she thinks, as everyone else in the line all seems to lose his patience at once and she turns back to begin handling something that looks even worse than the commodities-trading center she'd left to get a job closer to her own family's roots. If ever a person has looked infertile, she thinks, why then—

* * *

J.D. Steelritter and DeHaven Steelritter are still out in the airport lot, if you will — their initial argument about ignition having me-tastasized into a really killer row about DeHaven's less than fastidious records of just which alumni have arrived when. Turns out they're missing three, not two, alumni. And is J.D. pissed.

"I said I was sorry."

"That's just it!" J.D. shouts over DeHaven's loud idle. "You say things. But you never show. Show me some pride, just once. Some desire. You have a job, shitspeck. Define for your old man what 'job' means. What does it mean to you: 'job'?"

"These things happen, Pop," DeHaven says, smoothing his yarn wig with a cotton-gloved hand as his malevolent car growls. The car can't ever be turned off, if it's to run right, was what started the row. "I'm sorry, and I'll try not to ever fuck up anything ever again" (pissed himself, DeHaven). "But I can't promise you I'll never fuck up, because these things happen, Pop. Maybe to everybody except a genius like you."

J.D. looks for sarcasm, but it's tough, what with sleep-dep and all; he can't read much in the ingenuous bloodshot flutter of the big clown's mascara.

Though, not to take sides, but sometimes things do happen. Even in reality. In real realism. It's a myth that truth is stranger than fiction. Actually they're about equally strange. The strangest stories tend, in a way, to happen. Take for example the single solitary piece Mark Nechtr has thus far been able to produce for discussion in Dr. Ambrose's graduate workshop at East Chesapeake Trade. Its conceit is lifted and carried off right out of a banner headline in the Baltimore Sun. Nothing as richly ambiguous as FIRM DOCTORS TELEPHONE POLES, but a simple MURDER-SUICIDE IN DOWNTOWN ELEVATOR BAFFLES AUTHORITIES. And details of the story are traceable directly to the voluminous correspondence between D.L. and Tom Sternberg, who's maybe about the most claustrophobic individual in the history of his generation.

The elevator at issue is in a mental-health professionals' building in downtown Baltimore. The setup is that a mental-health professional, the kind that can't write 'scrips, a Ph.D., is treating two different guys for debilitating claustrophobia. And the treatment of both patients starts at the same time and proceeds more or less in sync, though neither patient ever meets the other. Until, that is, it becomes that time in treatment for each of the guys to confront the true beak and claws of his phobia head-on. Yes it's elevator-time. They're to be put in the building's elevator and made to ride up and down repeatedly. But see now together, for support (the psychologist being a follower of the head-on-confrontation-but-with-support school of phobic treatment).

So in they both go, and they're riding up and down repeatedly. .

Except the elevator eventually stalls, possibly from all the phobic energy swirling around in there, and it gets stuck between floors, and the buttons don't work, the thing's just broken down. The two claustrophobes are trapped, together, in a tiny elevator in a thin shaft in an enclosed building in the center of a crowded metropolis. For a while, true, they support each other. But, in the fullness of time enjoyed by all stalled things, of course, they eventually totally lose it.

"YAAGH!" one screams at the other. "You're closing in!"

"No! No! You're closing in!"

"YAAGH!"

"GAAH!"

"Get very far away!"

"You're swelling! You're taking up the whole elevator!"

"Stop closing in!"

"GAAH!"

"YAAGH!"

"You're breathing both our air! You're consuming my air! Stop that breathing!"

"Leave me alone! Get away! Oh my God!"

"Nothing left! No more breathing!"

"YAAAAAAGHURGHLURGHLURGHLURGHL."

And so on. Their worst fears, which they'd slowly, supportively come to see were fiction, came true. The whole piece was kind of a go-figure story. Mark never showed it to D.L. D.L. had bagged the Program by then, and nuptials were closing in.

I think what it was was Mark felt guilty, the story being basically just a pastiche of truths and everything. Plus ghastly and loathsome. Dr. Ambrose was surprisingly receptive, though, considering it turned out he'd written a very similar story, way back when, one about a fire in the bungalow of an elderly couple who are both wildly pyrophobic and cripplingly agoraphobic. Mark claimed he'd never read that story of Ambrose's. The whole stuck-in-elevator thing had been his idea. With some help from the truth, admittedly. Ambrose had fingered the port-wine stain on his temple absently and told Mark that of course he believed him. He trusted Mark.

And there is something trustworthy about Mark Nechtr. Like, if he promises to do something, you know the only way it won't get done is if he just can't do it. Like, even if he's hooked up with somebody he doesn't really desire or want to be hooked up with, if he's given his word, the only way he won't stay hooked up with that person is if he just truly cannot do it. If he promises to get D.L. and Sternberg to this Reunion they've been looking forward to for so long, he'll try. Though it doesn't look like he's trying too terribly hard right now — his big flaw is that he's extremely easy to distract and fascinate, and now he's fascinated with this beardedly distinguished non-Mormon Steelritter janissary (who puts in a call to Steelritter Advertising's Collision office complex, where he says a Midwestern twang had promised they'd send an emergency van right over, J.D. and DeHaven Steelritter and Eberhardt 70 and Sternberg '70 and somebody down as Ambrose-Gatz '67 all being late, now, and the alumni getting restless, somewhat sloshed, and of course hungry) and who, he tells Mark, passes out free money as part of an ingenious J.D. Steelritter marketing-diffraction-test scheme.

As Hogan, the money-giver, tells the rapt Mark what the scam really is, Tom Sternberg is still in the men's room, just destalling, to give you some tantalizing idea of the laxative might of a quick-fried flower. Sternberg's now confronting the cracker-sized mirror stamped into the wall over an automatic airport sink. The sink spurts automatically at his approach. Step back and it stops. Saves water, but still. Disconcerting. Boy is he tired. Beyond tired — something behind that face in the mirror signals post-dire fatigue with the hissed whine of something inflatable in his head's center, inflating. D.L. would point to the obverse eye and ask what it saw, if it saw anything of the baggy thing slowly taking shape in his head. Well screw you, D.L.

Cause it's only dark, generally, back there in his eye's guts. Sometimes a spidery system of synaptic color, if he tries to move the bad eye too quickly. But usually nothing. But it'll heal, anyway. It'll come around. It's all in his head, he knows. Youthful-rebellion injury. Mrs. Sternberg warned from day one that the boy that does a forbidden thing, such as like for example crosses his eyes just to hurt a mother: that boy finds they stay like that. Well-known fact. Look it up in whatever resources orthodox mothers with lapsed sons access. Like early to bed: it's the sleep before dark that's most important. Like don't cry: you're better than whoever laughs at you. Like try this lotion, for sumac.

Here's the fresh sumac cyst, though, here, boy, between his eyes. It's darkened richly since the last cyst-check in O'Hare, matured from that tomato pink to the same plum shade as the airport lounge. The mirror does not lie.

Your average deformity sufferer has a love-hate thing with mirrors: you need to see how things are progressing, but you also hate it that they're progressing. Sternberg's not at all sure he likes the idea of sharing a mirror with a whole lot of actors. He's not sure he wants to rent a bureaucratic car and head West without sleep or soap for a Funhouse the brochure says is carefully designed utilizing mostly systems of mirrors. A crowded, mirrored place. . Sternberg ponders the idea as the automatic sink fills gurgling to the slit of the emergency drain at its rim. This sumac cyst between his eyes feels fucking alive, man. Pulses painfully with the squeak of his head's blood. The cyst is beginning to show a little bit of white at the acme. Not good. Clear evidence of white blood cells, which implies blood cells, and so a bloodstream. From there it doesn't take genius to figure out that you've got a body. A bit of white at an infected cyst's cap is pretty much embodiedness embodied. No way he's messing with the fucker, though. It would just love to be messed with. Would feed on it. And the stage after plum is eggplant, big and dusky and curved, like a new organ in itself, to be an ism of. And D.L. is here, after all. Who as a child he loved. Though what a personal letdown, in terms of D.L. Her being now married and knocked was OK — that was an attainability issue. The letdown is how fucking undesirable, how unlovable she's turned out, in person, after time. Three years of letters since his dreams got wet and he'd written her care of Steelritter Advertising, drunk with bright hormone, to confess to this girl whose whereabouts he didn't even know the effect she'd had on him as a child a whole decade back, during the filming of those spots at the very first McDonald's, in Collision, Ill., preserved and converted to a commercial soundstage. The little men's-room mirror's image does that blurred, swimming, memory thing. He nine, she twelve. She'd seemed so… well, developed. Her bottom had made the slide's iron sing. Her breastlets had been a maddening horizontal regularity in a jumper-top's wrinkle. Sternberg in shorts and black socks, agog, glands kick-started, though he then still only halfway to puberty (low pituitary function). A winter afternoon in Illinois, the dead fields' total snow like a well-ironed sheet, the sky blue as lit gas, shallow and broad as all outdoors, a saucer with ungentle black edges. The astringent classroom light of the elaborate McDonald's set, D.L. sharing something deep-fried with Tom under the aluminum counter as stage mothers twittered and children and clown and — Burglar were choreographed just so, for an indoor shot. A kind of Beatrice in saddle shoes, she'd given birth to some of Sternberg's first ideas. Her pubescent letters (she'd answered his letter, which was just plain nice) had started out so lilting, warm, putting-the-reader-at-ease. The poems and stories she later sent were less so; they seemed cold, coy for coyness's sake, he never forgot he was sitting in a chair in his parents' living room, reading print on paper; but they appeared deep and ambiguous and full of ideas in a way that, say, a Wïsk spot's cattle call sure didn't. And but the photo she'd sent him: was that supposed to be of her? If so, something damned unsavory's happened in the time between the taking and the looking. Now she seems so… well, underdeveloped. Like a total reversal. It's frightening. And has she really smiled once, yet, the whole time, since they met at M.I. Airport? Has she even once really looked at him when he says something? Nechtr looks at him, but that's almost even creepier: this Mark guy looks at you with the kind of distanced concentration you use to look at something you're eating.

Sternberg washes his hot face without soap. Way too much time has gone by in here, without question. Maybe everybody's out there waiting, deducing the activity and so presence of bowels.

He's got Nechtr pegged. Nechtr's that radiant distant type that it's just impossible to tell if he's putting you on, usually. So what the hell is he doing with this unsavory girl who looks way worse than her photo and says she's currently working on a poem consisting entirely of punctuation? Who has a face like a… a long face? Who wears synthetic green? Was it a planned pregnancy? Shotgun wedding? The shotgun has yet to be invented that could get Sternberg to marry the D.L. this D.L. has turned out to be, somebody one eerily fuck of a lot like Mrs. Sternberg, the sort of person who, if you visited her house, she'd smile the whole time you were there, then clean vigorously after you left. A cosmic nyet to that. Plus her tits it turns out can't be any bigger than they were that one childish day, that one single commercial either of them have ever been alumni of. Why didn't Nechtr just offer to pay for the abortion? Are Trinitarians pro-Life? Plus she smells weird— orangy on top and then a whiff of something dead and preserved underneath. Let's face it. She looks like her vagina would smell bad. He'd be long gone, personally, dude. Abortion or no. He'd be a red sail in the sunset by now if she tried—

The sink, with a gurgled sigh like almost mercy, overflows, emergency drain-slit and all, Sternberg's spent so unmercifully so much time in here. The water gurgles over the rim and onto the crotch of his gabardines. Great. That's just great. Now it looks like he's maybe wet himself. And what's he supposed to say. Or even if he doesn't say anything. Either way, explanation or interpretation, he comes out embodied. He demands compassion from a mirror he's backed away from, hoping to make the water stop. But it doesn't. Maybe it's been on too long. It's spilling onto the floor. Great. He demands compassion. Except of whom, though?

"J.D. bases the principle on the same principle animal researchers use to tag and track animals. Each bill is tagged with this teeny little silicon transmitter, see?" Hogan points out to Mark and D.L. what looks vaguely like a monocle over the eye that separates Annuit from Coeptis on The Great Seal. "Simultaneously," Hogan explains, "I ask the person who's taking the money to name, right off the top of their head, what they fear most in the whole world. Their one great informing fear."

Hogan, into it, extends the heavy clipboard, flapping it open to a plain print-out sheet headed simply FEAR. Mark goes down the page:

"Bomb."

"Meltdown or Bomb."

"Cancer — slow kind."

"Hyperinflation."

"The Greenhouse Effect."

"That my wife wife will scald me in my sleep."

"Hyperinflation and Attendant Fiscal Collapse."

"If the whole population in China all jumps up and down at once."

"Russian Bomb."

"Confusion."

"My father's voice."

"Ozone depletion."

"Apocalypse."

"That phone call in the middle of the night."

"Slow kind of cancer from Meltdown or Bomb."

"The dark."

"That I'll scald my husband while he's asleep."

"Nuclear Winter."

"If we get leaders over there in the U.S.S. of R. that are too young to remember what World War II was like, over there."

"Overextension."

"Fear itself."

"Bombs of all kinds."

"The Contamination of the White Aryan Race from nigger fag subversion."

"Scalding."

"The light."

"Nuclear terrorism."

"Confusion."

"Myself."

"That there's no God."

"Discomfort."

"My genitals."

"A sequel to Three's Company."

"That I die and get to go to heaven and I get there and it stops being heaven because I'm there."

"Death by Water."

"Bombs that can fit in metal suitcases."

"That there's a God."

'That the people who invented Max Headroom are busy now inventing something else."

"And so on," Hogan says, flipping the clipboard closed, "with some similar distributions on the Desire end, when we did Desire. J.D. figures this — that anybody who'll take money from a stranger, in an airport, for free, with no idea of who we are or what if any scam is at work, who'll reveal his number-one fear and desire to a clipboard, for money, is a born consumer, a micromarket all to himself, full of desire and fear and vice versa, the perfect target for the next wave of targeting campaigns. And we want some kind of targeting of his spending patterns. And so the bills are tagged."

"Jesus," says Mark, rapt.

"Mark darling," D.L. says through grit teeth.

"Relax. I told you I called a van," Hogan says, hiking over backwards to get at the paper cup's good but cold last drop. He hands the frantic Avis lady the cup to throw out for him and looks the two kids over. "You two've worked with J.D. before, right? The Reunion and everything?"

"Well," Mark starts, "I—"

"So you know this is a genius I get to work for. This man is a genius. It's an honor to even do market research for J.D. Steelritter. Even in this God-forsaken place." He looks around as if for eavesdroppers. "This is the man, this is the legendary man, I'm sure you two know, who eventually got Arm and Hammer baking soda customers to start pouring the stuff down the drain. As… get this. . drain freshened." He licks a bit of sweetener off the heel of his hand. "Is that genius? Is that textbook planned-obsolescence, or what? And all off fear. J.D. eventually figured out that anybody who'd buy a box of baking soda out of fear of refrigerator odor wouldn't hesitate one second to shell out for another box to prevent drain odor." He laughs a marvelous laugh. "Drain odor? What's that, for Christ's sake? It's just fear. Very careful research, fear, and the vision of a genius. The man is a legend. I even had a poster of him on my wall, in ad school."

D.L. spots Sternberg creeping curiously and furtively from the men's room with its broad-shouldered symbol back to the lounge, moving serpentine, shoulder-first, trying somehow to keep his back to everything at once, his hands cupped before him like those of the suddenly nude. She raises her arm to him, to fill him in on potential transportation developments, but he doesn't even look their way. He eases gingerly back down at their round table and now low-level cola and still-going cigarette just in time to hear "Hawaii Five-O"'s last Jack Lord give Danno his last instructions, ever, to book certain people, Murder-One. The nock of Mark's Dexter Aluminum arrow overhangs the round table's edge. The table's wood-grained surface is pocked with holes, from Mark's lounge trick.

"These all seem like adult fears," Mark is saying to Hogan. "Are any of those younger people's fears? Is there a different list for kids?"

Hogan's eyes go cold. He mashes down the clipboard's metal cover and latches it. "Not at liberty," he says shortly.

"Why isn't fear just fear? What does it matter whose fear?"

"And by the way," Hogan indicates the crisp treasury note D.L. is snapping into her wallet. "Can I get your fears, please?"

"You want our fears?"

"No such thing as a free lunch, kid," Hogan shrugs.

"That's just the kind of fear I'm talking about," Mark says. "I don't see why you—"

At this point somebody like Dr. C— Ambrose would probably interrupt to observe that it seems as though a pretty long time has passed since his last interruption on the general textuality of what's going on. But it seems almost like too little of true import has been going on to irritatingly interrupt and reveal as conventional artifact. Except but now some things really do start to go on. Two figures, one a long-awaited clown, round the broad carpeted curve of the lower terminal, passing the crowds at luggage roulette, bearing down. J.D. has gotten off DeHaven's slouchily apologetic good-for-nothing-shitspeck back, and has had a look at his watch, and they've rushed inside upstairs and had a look at the flight manifests for both the Lord Aloft 7:10 and the BrittAir 7:45. All three alumni and — ae are accounted for, in these manifest documents. J.D. and DeHaven have been scouring the whole of C.I. Airport. The last alumni are going to get a ride.

WHY J.D. STEELRITTER GAVE HIS SON DeHAVEN THE

RONALD MCDONALD JOB IN THE FIRST PLACE, "STAGE

FRIGHT" INCIDENT ASIDE

Because DeHaven Steelritter, son, has unwittingly given J.D. some of J.D.'s most creative and inspired ideas. It was DeHaven who first poured Arm & Hammer baking soda down the drain of the Steelritter farmhouse kitchen, in Collision, to try to erase the indelible odor of two marijuana roaches mistakenly washed down there along with the remains of something sweet. What happened to the fridge's baking soda? asks Mrs. Steelritter, who fears the noisomely oily smell of the fried roses that festoon the second-to-the-bottom refrigerator shelf. Where's my Arm and Hammer? she asks, as they sit down to a giant Midwest supper. DeHaven— who, like anybody who smokes dope under his parents' roof, is quick on his feet when it comes to explaining wild kitchen incongruities — delineates a deep concern for the impression the odor of the Steelritter drain could have made on the next houseguest who just might visit the kitchen and have occasion to get a whiff of a drain that, he declares, dry-mouthed, had smelled like death embodied.

The rest is ad history.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF HOW SOME OF J.D. STEELRITTER'S

MOST POWERFUL AND LEGENDARY PUBLIC-RELATIONS

CREATIONS ARE REALLY NOTHING MORE THAN A SLIGHT

TRANSFIGURATION OF WHAT REALLY JUST GOES ON

AROUND HIS OWN ROSE FARM'S FARMHOUSE

One fine winter morning, years back, J.D. Steelritter was getting ready to go off to work at the J.D. Steelritter Advertising Complex, just across the snowy, greenhouse-dotted fields and intersection from home. But anyway he's heading for the door, and little DeHaven, home from sixth grade (his second shot at it) with one of those mysterious feverless colds that just cry out to be nipped in the bud — he tells J.D., in complete innocence, the innocence of a child before a television, to have a nice day. The rest, as they say.

HOW, EVEN THOUGH J.D. STEELRITTER AND RONALD

MCDONALD ARE BEARING DOWN, FULLY INTENDING

SIMPLY TO MEET, GREET, FORGIVE ALL DISRUPTIONS OF

SCHEDULE, AND SHUTTLE THE AWAITED ALUMNI WESTWARD,

TOM STERNBERG THREATENS, TO THE IMMEASURABLE

CHAGRIN OF EVERYONE INVOLVED, TO DELAY EVEN

FURTHER AN AT-LAST DEPARTURE FROM THEIR AIRPORT

ARRIVAL AND A HOPEFULLY QUICK TRIP TO COLLISION,

ILLINOIS, AND THE STILL-ON-IMPATIENT-HOLD FULFILLMENT

OF THE PROMISE OF REUNION AND PAYOFF

Sternberg sees brown natives paddling against the final episode's tide of closing credits, listing all who've ever appeared. He sees Mark in deep conversation with a guy who looks a hell of a lot like Sternberg's personal idea of what Jesus Christ in real life probably looked like, while D.L. stands on one foot and then the other, green and diffident and unsmiling. Sternberg's crotch is still very wet, and now warm, and just not comfortable at all. He sees Mark's bag of fried flowers on the tip-pocked table. Funny thing about those flowers. Who'd voluntarily cook and eat a rose? It's like planting and watering a breadstick. It's perverse, and even sort of obscene, eating what's clearly put on earth to be extra-gastric. Didn't taste all that hot, either. And there's still a piece stuck with the intransigence of the flimsy between two molars.

Except, after he'd washed the thing down with a Jolt and a grimace, he suddenly felt like he could go expel what he needed to expel. He was still afraid, but it was as if the level scale that had held his desire to evacuate and his fear of discovered embodiment in a mutual and paralytic suspension had been not so much tilted as just yanked out from under consideration. He was still very afraid; but, post-rose, the fear had seemed somehow very tangent to his desire to go. His need to have gone. He feels empty, better. And gets cocky, as the empty will sometimes get.

Basically what happens now is that he tries but utterly fucks up Mark's trick with the target arrow. He'd seen Mark do it a couple times, a nonchalant and perfect bar trick, the fucker. Sternberg, maybe barely even consciously, has always wanted to do a nonchalant bar trick, the kind involving spoons and eggs, glasses in pyramids, knives and spread hands, syringes and dip. And here's his fag and his cola and ashtray and the flowers, fried, and the arrow, extended over the table's edge. And before he even knows it the arrow's aloft. By his hand.

The thing is that the esoteric arrow-in-table trick requires that the overhung nock be knocked upward, from below, so that the arrow goes forward and up and down into the table before the nonchalant trickster. But however Sternberg, maybe out of ignorance, or pride, whacks the arrow's overhang from above: hence its parabolic transmission backward, over his shoulder and ass-over-teakettle into the air behind him, only to hit the thickly anomalous window of the indoor lounge, rebound, and land javelinlike in the pear compote of the effete, narrow-faced, corduroyed pesticide salesman who's wangled a tête-à-tête with the blonde orange-faced flight-attendant who served him on his commuter flight from Peoria and who'd let slip, en route, while making change from the coin-cartridge at her belt, that she had to stick around C.I. Airport after descent, waiting for a ride of some sort, and whom the pesticide salesman wants very much to ball, age- and face-color-considerations temporarily on hold, because things haven't been going well for the pesticide salesman, lately, at all, given that this year's generation of corn pests seems to have developed a genetic immunity to — worse, more like an epicurean taste for—his company's particular line of pesticides, cornfields soaked in this pesticide now sought out by the most discriminating-palated pests, who have been observed under research-laboratory magnification using their little legs and mandibles actually to spread the stuff with the even care of marmalade on a leaf or kernel before digging in, a horror, the pesticide company's best hope for salvaging the fiscal year now being to take a suggestion from their marketer at J.D. Steelritter Advertising and pitch the stuff as a pest-distractant, new brand name Pest-Aside, to be sprayed on unfilled or infertile fields as a red pickled herring to divert and so prevent entomological inroads into the more verdant and condiment-free cornfields; but it's a bit late in the game for this ploy to do more than cover some losses, and the pesticide salesman is angst-ridden and red-eyed and effetely low on self-esteem, and wants very much to ball this ageless but oddly sexy orange-faced stewardess, as further coverage against estimable losses. The stewardess is brittlely blond, her face orange, though stained port near the temple. She owns luggage that can be pulled instead of carried. Her name is Magda, with the g being silent and the a accordingly diphthongulated into something like the i in "child" or "lie."

And but so the narrow-faced pestidor, poised over his compote, reacts to the sudden and quivering and doubtless low-on-his-list-of-expected-appearances appearance of the big wicked Dexter target arrow with a shocked spasm that sends Magda the flight attendant's morning brandy straight into her lap.

"What the hell is that?" Sternberg hears the salesman cry behind him, and winces a why-him wince.

"Oh, gee," cries Magda, instantly up — trying, as the spilled-upon try, somehow to back away from her own clothes. Sternberg, who like most people of his generation tries to brush eye-averted and shoulder-first past whatever disorder he causes, and also not anxious to confront anybody right now, what with an ominously dark gabardine crotch — and seeing, right that very minute, a polka-dotted and loose-limbed Ronald McDonald come galumphing up to deposit a butt in the Avis ashtray and a golden-arched nametag to both D.L. and Mark Nechtr, the latter declining to be tagged and directing the attention of clown, Avis lady, guy who looks like Jesus, and holy shit J.D. Steelritter himself toward the lounge, toward him, Tom Sternberg — tries to brush shoulder-first past the little disorder Mark's arrow has caused. However, the understandably pissed-off pesticide man, compote punctured and love-object brandy-stained, arrests Sternberg's flight with a wedding-banded hand and aims an isoceles system of nose-pores at Tom's good eye.

Sternberg tries the brusque variety of a "Sorry about that," moving shoulder-first, hands cupped before him.

"I'm afraid sorry won't quite do, here, young sir."

"Young sir?"

"Look at my skirt." Magda sighs.

"You've. . stabbed my breakfast."

Though brandy in the lap isn't a completely downer-type sensation, really. Not on a par with cold water on the groin of the ambivalently embodied. Water from the automatic sink is still gushing defective, by the way, from a faucet below and just South of a woman whose white face, frozen in a photographically forevered climax, adorns the wall's condom concession; and the overflow is just beginning to shine at the base of the men's-room door, to spread a dark arc against the thin industrial carpet of the lower terminal.

"It was an accident, dude," Sternberg says, forehead aflame as Ronald's giant floppy tread lounge-ward sounds. "I'm late for this real important ride that's finally just here, so maybe we could just.. "

"I am not a dude, and you are not riding off anywhere without some kind of significant gesture of apology."

"What's up, gang?" the clown asks from the nearby lounge door, a cool clown, making a fist to look at nails that are obscured by cotton gloves. Behind and beyond, J.D. is illustrating some wide remark to Nola (she of the translucent wart) at the mobbed Avis counter.

"I said I was sorry, man," Sternberg says, deciding equally-pissed-off is the way to play this one.

"There a Sternberg and or an Ambrose-Gatz here?" DeHaven asks, nodding briefly over at the pouch-eyed overtime bartender, who's punching out, shedding his inevitable green vest as the elevated screen goes peacefully static for the first time in days.

"Yes that's just it you have said you are sorry, and only then when I stopped you." Red-eyed and somewhat blue-balled, the salesman, who manages to be effete in corduroy, no mean feat, hears his own night-flight sleep-dep signal, the sound of an infinity of mutated little jaws munching, little legs patting contented little thoraxes. "But you've made no gesture."

"I got a gesture for you, if you want a gesture."

"He's said, but not demonstrated," the pesticide man appeals to the stewardess.

"I'm Magda Ambrose-Gatz," says Magda, at herself with a moist napkin.

"And I'm Thomas Sternberg."

DeHaven's painted smile broadens over a smear of abortive beard, to which particles of pancake makeup cling, as he distributes the Reunion's very last tags. He looks Sternberg over. "Mean zit on the old forehead, there, big guy."

"It's poison sumac. It's not a zit. And this on my pants is water."

DeHaven has turned to the salesman, looking intimidating as only a professional clown can. He sizes the effete man up. "Think you're pretty hot shit, don'tcha."

"The temperature of shit doesn't enter into it. This. . apparition of a boy has deliberately spilled Rèmy on my date."

"It's not a zit."

"And I'm not a date," comes Magda's quiet-when-calm voice from Sternberg's inverted side.

Sternberg is struggling to restrain his rose-fed desire to jab the effete man's still-arresting hand with the fruity tip of Mark's arrow, which Magda, still on Sternberg's blind side, has removed and is inspecting. But the restraining hand is removed by the fine plump hand of J.D. Steelritter, who at this moment intrudes on Tom's sight as a cigar, a stomach, and a hand from above, freeing him. J.D. clears his throat.

Some people can ask whether there's any trouble here in a way that ensures a correct negative. Imagine the obverse of a greedy lover's midnight query:

"YOU AWAKE?"

The writer and academic C— Ambrose, with his birthmark and cheery smile and a maniacal laugh the whole workshop has decided we associate most closely with Gothic castles and portraits with eyes that move, exerts an enormous influence on Mark Nechtr's outlook. Even when Mark doesn't trust him, he listens to him. Even when he doesn't listen to him, he's consciously reacting against the option of listening, and listens for what not to listen to.

Ambrose tells our graduate seminar that people read fiction the way relatives of the kidnapped listen to the captive's voice on the captor-held phone: paying attention, natch, to what the victim says, but absolutely hanging on the pitch, quaver, and hue of what's said, reading a code born of intimacy for interlinear clues about condition, location, outlook, the likelihood of safe return. . That little aside cost Mark two months.

But Dr. Ambrose isn't immune to this kind of stuff either. He's clearly obsessed with criticism the way you get obsessed with something your fear of which informs you. He told us all right before Thanksgiving to imagine you're walking by the Criticism Store, and you see a sign in the store window that says FIRE SALE! COMPLETE ILLUMINATION, PAYOFF, UNDERSTANDING AND FULFILLMENT SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! PRICES GUTTED! And in you scurry, with your Visa. And but it turns out it's only the sign in the window itself that's for sale, at the Criticism Store.

D.L. claims Ambrose ripped even that obsessive little image off, that the professor's whole "art" is nothing more than the closet of a klepto with really good taste.

And yet the stuff exerts a kind of gravitylike force on Mark Nechtr, who distrusts wordplay, who feels about Allusion the way Ambrose seems to feel about Illusion, who regards metafiction the way a hemophiliac regards straight razors. But the stuff sits on his head. D.L. doesn't. It's really kind of a wonder he produces at all, back East.

In a related development, as you stand shoulder-first across thirty orthogonal meters between you and the red ring that encloses the gold chroma, and draw your 12-strand string to the tip of your nose, the point of your arrow, at full draw, is somewhere between three and nine centimeters to the left of the true straight line to the bull's-eye, even though the arrow's nock, fucked by the string, is on that line. The bow gets in the way, see. So logically it seems like if your sight and aim are truly true, the arrow should always land just to the left of target-center, since it's angled off in the wrong direction right from the beginning. But the straight-aimed and so off-angled target arrow will stab the center, right in the heart, every time. It is an archer's law that makes no sense. How is this so?

In a related fashion, occasionally a writer will encounter a story that is his, yet is not his. I mean, by the way, a writer of stories, not one of these intelligences that analyze society and culture, but the sort of ignorant and acquisitive being who moons after magical tales. Such a creature knows very little: how to tie a shoelace, when to go to the store for bread, and the exact stab of a story that belongs to him, and to him only. How to unfurl a Trojan, where on the stall door to carve BEWARE OF LIMBO DANCERS, how to give the teacher what she wants, and the raw coppery smell of a scenario over which he's meant to exercise, not suffer, authority. And yet occasionally the tale is already authoritatively gutted, publicly there, brightly killed, done by another. Or else menacingly alive, self-sufficient, organic, sounding the distant groan of growth, trading chemicals briskly with the air, but still outside the creature who desires to take it inside and make a little miracle. How is this so?

The explanation for the latter lies way beyond anyone presently inside DeHaven Steelritter's frightening car, unless you want to buy Tom Sternberg's post-Murphy axiom that life sucks, then spits you out into a Dixie cup, then you pay the tab, gratuity, and Massachusetts sales tax.

The explanation for the former is as obvious as the nose we look beyond: it lies in what happens to the well-aimed arrow when it's released; what happens while it's traveling to the waiting target.

Things roadside keep mangling and reconstructing the car's shadow. C.I. Airport recedes behind them, Southeast, still clearly visible, should anyone care to look back. Its control tower's light rondelles, shining with the pale weak quality the sun lends manufactured lights. They pass road-kill, a Corrections Facility sign interdicting any stops for hitchhikers, unmarked gravel roads, the odd mailbox, and the odder fallow field, cropless but boiling with pests in a frenzy Mark can't figure.

They do not pass so much as are entunneled by corn, two walls of green that loom right up flush against what Sternberg hopes is a straight quick blacktop shot to Collision and Reunion. DeHaven drives with just one wrist, his white glove tapping something brisk and martial on the top of the dash. He occasionally and for no clear reason exclaims "Varoom!" D.L. humps it between the clown and J.D. Steelritter, who's on shotgun. Magda has the hump in back and is flanked by Sternberg and Mark Nechtr, who's now so impatient with D.L. over the whole Datsun thing that he's afraid someone might lose his temper, here.

They were just past the pay lot's attendant's booth, J.D. flashing a voucher that raises any gate, when they got passed screamingly on the right by two young men and a blur of beard in something low to the ground and exquisitely foreign that treated the lot's speed bumps like moguls.

Mark comes to the sudden realization that he doesn't have his Dexter Aluminum target arrow. The one that's been under his surgeon's shirt, stabbing. Sternberg has left it back in the lounge, in that sad-looking guy's compote.

"What about the van?" D.L. is shouting into DeHaven's too-white ear.

"Whut?"

"Mr. Steelritter's money-and-fear man said he called for a van for us!"

"Huh?"

"He lied!" yells J.D.

"What?"

"He lied! Close that fucking window, kid!"

DeHaven complies. Sternberg whimpers softly as they're sealed in.

"He lied," J.D. says. "Also doing fieldwork in false reassurance. Strategems and effects."

"That guy who looked just like Christ lied?" Sternberg asks.

"He looked like a Mormon," says Mark.

D.L. turns. "Mormons don't wear beards, darling."

Mark doesn't even bother to mention Donny Osmond's new beard. He's close to feeling upset as hell. His best wedding present, erect in heavy syrup. His prized inexpensive possession.

"No vans left," J.D.'s explaining, crunching a Rothschild's tip with gusto. "No limos left. Everything's worn down, all down at Goodyear, with Mr. Wrench." J.D.'s head is fine and utterly round, his hair rigid, thick, fitted snugly over forehead and some very red ears, trailing close-clipped sideburns. His hair suggests the squat immovability of the best Romanesque facades. No telling, of course, about DeHaven's real hair, though his yarn has been window-blown the wrong way, slightly over its bright slight central part.

J.D.: "My own car, down with Mr. Wrench and company. We've been shuttling and shuttling. Everything's in the shop."

"Three straight days Varoom," says DeHaven.

"Three virtually nonstop days of supervising and shuttling, thousands of people, most of them personally," J.D. says. In enclosed spaces his voice is much smaller than he, utterly without resonance, and seems to issue from a smaller person in his pharynx somewhere, a square root of Steelritter.

"You were late as hell, you two," he adds, producing a lighter with a tall flame.

"Problems with LordAloft." D.L. sniffs.

"Hey, man, three miles," the clown says, squinting past the furry steering wheel's axis. "Three more miles, then the odometer rolls over. To all zeroes. That's two hundred thousand on this baby. That's a big varoom, when the odom—"

"Shut up, shitspeck."

"Shit, Pop." Voice of a whiny sullen hood, Mark thinks.

". . hate this car," growls J.D. He turns to those in back, his face a red planet impaled by a cigar, his eyes bloodshot. He's looking at Sternberg's bad eye. "On behalf of McDonald's I apologize for this car. This was our last car. Collision is not big on transportation."

"Plus try to get an alum to part with his car," DeHaven says.

"It's not that bad a car," D.L. says, smiling at DeHaven, whose lipstick dooms him ever to appear to be smiling back. He lights a cigarette with a complex nonchalance that confirms what Mark's suspected.

The car sat idling in a Forbidden Zone as the six approached. Sternberg pulled Magda's luggage for her. D.L, still groggy, was almost epileptically out of step with the other five, half hanging on her husband as he looked curiously at Magda and her stained skirt.

The car itself looked like a car for neither adults nor children. It was a huge, ageless, jacked-up, malevolent sports car — practically a car with fangs. Its crude paint job was the kind of gold-with-silverish-glitter-in-it one associates with postwar Formica. The interior was red. The car was a pastiche, home-assembled from scrounged parts, complex, rimed — much like the kind of cars assembled, maintained, and cruised in by Maryland hoods who roll cigarette packs into their sleeves and beat up sensitive heirs to detergent fortunes just on general principles. Mark narrowed his eyes at DeHaven: there may've been a pack up there in the polka-dot sleeve of that Ronald costume. One tough clown.

The deposit of a trunkful of heavy luggage didn't change the car's jacked-up posture one bit, either.

"This isn't a Datsun," D.L. had stated flatly, crossing her arms and advancing a foot to tap. Mark's now being in the back seat, and she in front, is directly traceable to this remark. Sternberg, whose tongue tasted metal at even the thought of riding six in a car, had rolled his eye. This girl was too damn much. On the plus side, his slacks had dried in the white sun almost instantly. Brandy being a tougher nut than automatic water, Magda's brown flight-attendant skirt was still stained. Also tight and slit, and sexy. J.D. Steelritter's walk resembled the noiseless glide of her pulled luggage.

"I'm seen only in Datsuns," D.L. said.

"This car's built from parts." Ronald McDonald slammed the loaded trunk hard, so that the dice suspended from the rearview did a jagged dance. "I built this baby from scratch. It's not technically an anything. It's a me, if it's anything."

"Shut up, shitspeck."

"I'm under instructions to avoid cars that aren't Datsuns," D.L. said firmly.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Sternberg moaned.

Mark now had his hands out before him, apart, palms opposed, his eyes cast upward.

Magda looked over at him. "Prayer?"

"Mosquito." He clapped, looked at his red palms. "Full, too."

J.D. Steelritter was looking D.L. over speculatively. They were all perspiring in the humidity by now, though Sternberg led the field in gabardine slacks and a forehead full of tributaries. His sumac throbbed in the sun.

"Let me guess," Steelritter said, looking D.L. over speculatively, supporting a big lower lip with a finger and that finger's elbow with his other arm's crook. "Artist," he speculated. "Free-form sculptor."

"Writer. Poet. Postmodernist. Regionally published."

"I'll take the hump," Magda Ambrose-Gatz volunteered. She got prettily in the back of the growling car and slid over.

"Tell you what, Eberhardt." J.D. Steelritter knows you have to know when to concede the easy concession. She'll get hers. "We write DATSUN in the shameful no-pride dust on the kid's rear window, here," scrawling a big NISSAN next to the WARSH me! that was already there. He made a voilà with his hands, one finger dark. "Now it's a Datsun."

Mark laughed. Pretty resourceful.

It both relieved Sternberg and gave him the creeps. "An instant Datsun?"

After an interval of further interpretation and persuasion, a kind of undignified scramble for places ensues, resultant positions appearing above. DeHaven grinds gears — the gearshift in this car is up next to the steering wheel, where Mark has before seen only automatic shifts. DeHaven's manipulations of the idiosyncratic shift summon images of fencing.

He guns the car, which, instead of shuddering or rattling the way home-assembled things are supposed to, seems rather to gather itself more densely into its wedged shape. He guns it. We seem to be minus a muffler.

"Varoom!" shouts the clown, rolling down his window and laying quality rubber.

"Hibbego!" shouts J.D. Steelritter, thinking how if the speck of shit says For Whom one more time he's gonna. .

To the Egress. To the Funhouse.

And as they drive more deeply into the Central Illinois countryside, which encases them in a cartographic obelisk, walled at the sides and tapered to green points at the horizons front and back, Magda Ambrose-Gatz — who, way back, newly divorced, just twenty-one, way, way back, before recorded history as understood by the four young people here, had represented the very first housewife on the then-embryonic McDonald's national campaign to realize and reveal through interpretive tap dance that, hey, she deserved a break from the vacuum and hot stove her equally tap-happy husband had remanded her to, a break, today — Magda starts up a conversation in back, that hard kind to carry on from the hump, flanked by boys, her head swiveling like a tennis spectator, in answer to Sternberg's awed remark that he'd no idea there was this much corn on the whole planet. She explains that the usually awfully generous U.S. government won't reimburse Illinois farmers for leaving their fields fallow — the soil's too rich here, and the macroeconomics of the nation's richest fields dictate maximum tillage — and but that, in the dark screw microecon drives into the agricultural picture, that very fertility produced so much corn — so thick and tall that DeHaven must (as was in a way foretold) downshift and pump distressingly vague brakes at every rural intersection they pass, slow way down, scan for vehicles whose perpendicular approach the crops' sheer size would obscure — so much corn that it's literally worthless, oodles (her term) of bushels of Supply that intersect the market's super-(Sternberg's term) elastic Demand curve down near the base, where Supply equals oodles and Price equals the sort of coin you don't even bother to bend over to pick up if you drop it. There's agron-ometric bitterness in her voice, which resonates even at low volume — the result of breasts of high caliber, Sternberg figures — as she sketches with broadly historical strokes the unworkable marriage that sent her West from Tidewater regions, postwar, in time to marry a speculator in Illinois land, and then but how the land got so fertile it's worthless, if that makes sense, but how the speculator — presumably a Mr. Gatz? — was married to the land, and wouldn't leave, even after a foreclosure that forced them to live in his car, a car with tailfins, cervically pink (embellishment Mark's), so that soon she was having to do commercials, in nearby Collision, to supplement income; and then but commercial offers withered up as she aged (gracefully), and her face got sort of orange (inference Mark's) — and the speculator's attachment to land and car got to be… well, she divorced the speculator, who now dabbles in pesticides, though not the unfortunate brand currently viewed by pests as incentive, and now she's a flight attendant — an aloft waitress, she terms it — for a commuter line, with turboprops and unpres-surized cabins, though she still cameos in the occasional Steelritter BrittAir ad, though always from the rear, a rear which is shapely and not at all orange (inferences and embellishments flying like unspoken shrapnel all over the inside of the menacing car), and is touching, ever so lightly, Sternberg's own gabardine leg through Magda's brown skirt, though there's a good-sized gap of red vinyl seat between her other ham and the leg of Mark Nechtr.

And, in a way, there's a sort of colored gap between Mark Nechtr and everybody else in DeHaven's homemade car. He has no historical connection to where they're going, has never appeared in a McDonald's commercial, has no connection to anything here except D.L., through a mistake and miracle and the ethical depth to try to do what ought to be right by her, although shouldn't she be showing by the end of six months? And but nobody at the Reunion will know him, or want anything from him, and he's left his equipment in an O'Hare locker and a dish of overpriced fruit. He feels unconnected, alone, sort of alienated, in transit, tightly enclosed, surrounded by a vast nothing that's alive.

He asks Magda the obvious question about to whom the remark about the unworkable Maryland marriage had been a reference, given her hyphenated name, but the question is forfeit in a great high-velocity wind as J.D. torches another Rothschild, and his cracked window positively roars, and also admits a lot of odd little gnats, and Sternberg behind J.D. lights a 100 in retaliation and also cracks his window, and D.L. coughs significantly and flips on the Heathkit radio DeHaven has built into the deep-red dash of the car, loudly. The static of the radio as D.L. scans for something contemporary sounds, to Mark, like Atlantic surf. The mixture of J.D.'s and Stern-berg's lit offerings is a kind of violet gas that swirls frantically around in the sunlight that lights the eastern half of the homemade jacked-up car.

Sternberg asks, with a barely hidden pathos, if they're almost there yet.

D.L. homes in on an audience-participation-call-in program on a crime-and-gospel station that identifies itself in three-part slide harmony as Wonderful WILL. The program, at near the top of DeHaven's 110-watt capacity, is something called "People's Precinct: Real-Life Crimes," today's installment entitled "Murder or Suicide: You, the Audience, Decide." A stormy Midwest love affair ends in the impalement and death of one of the lovers. The other lover was at the scene, but only the dead lover's fingerprints are found on the weapon. "You," the announcer says, "the Audience, Decide." Giving a 900-number. Certain evidence is presented, and Mark feels the stab of a story that is his own, yet true about others.

Sternberg is asking Magda just where they are. The car moans on turns and clicks on smooth tar. They've already turned onto small rural roads several times. The two open windows are yielding still more little insects as they pass a rare night-black fallow field. The insects are weird, small, have transparent wings, seem not to fly, but just sit there, all over the windows' insides, inviting squashing; and, when squashed, smell.

D.L. looks up from her notebook and poem — the only person Mark's ever seen who can produce anywhere, even when being jouncily propelled — assumes her mean-nun posture at the radio's presentation of hideous crime, and shouts into J.D. Steelritter's red ear that one of the best indications that some sort of apocalypse is on the way is the fact that violent public crime's scales of practice are tilting: how it seems like, each year, violence reveals itself less and less as the capacity, and more and more as just the raw bare opportunity, to harm. DeHaven responds by shouting that the only really sure sign of cataclysm's coming is if the Cubs actually win the pennant, as this year they're in danger of doing. J.D. asks him to shut up, waving irritably at a tailgating car to pass. The car does pass, a Chrysler, crammed with Orientals. It's doing about 100.

J.D. Steelritter says goddamn slopehead Orientals. They're taking over the planet. It'll be either them or insects on top, at the end. And precious little difference either, he might add. He smashes some of the gnats that sit stoically on the jouncing dash. Smells at his fingers. They're all over the place, he says: fucking Orientals. Doing their calculus at age eight and working their blank twenty-hour days. Realizing their only strength is in numbers. He asks when was the last time anybody in this car ever saw an Oriental alone, without a whole ant-farm of other Orientals around them. They travel in packs. The Chrysler that's passed them had a bumper sticker that asks you to be careful: baby on board. J.D. is able to talk, gesture with his hands, and smoke all at once.

Mark pinches a smelly gnat and gazes out his window. DeHaven's driving fast enough so the rural highway's broken center line looks almost solid. The corn is stunted right here a bit, and Mark's view goes sheer to the earth's curve: dark green yielding to pale green, to dark green, to just green, with some tight white farmhouses and wind-breaking trees clumped at the seam of the southern horizon. J.D. Steelritter, like many older adults, is kind of a bigot. Mark Nechtr, like most young people in this awkward age, is NOT. But his aracism derives, he'd admit, from reasons that are totally self-interested. If all blacks are great dancers and athletes, and all Orientals are smart and identical and industrious, and all Jews are great makers of money and literature, wielders of a clout born of cohesion, and all Latins great lovers and stiletto-wielders and slippers-past-borders — well then gee, what does that make all plain old American WASPs? What one great feature, for the racist, brings us whitebreads together under the solid roof of stereotype? Nothing. A nameless faceless Great White Male. Racism seems to Mark a kind of weird masochism. A way to make us feel utterly and pointlessly alone. Unidentified. More than Sternberg hates being embodied, more than D.L. hates premodern realism, Mark hates to believe he is Alone. Solipsism affects him like Ambrosian meta-fiction affects him. It's the high siren's song of the wrist's big razor. It's the end of the long, long, long race you're watching, but at the end you fail to see who won, so entranced are you with the exhausted beauty of the runners' faces as they cross the taped line to totter in agonized circles, hands on hips, bent.

In a related development, Mark Nechtr is now revealed by me to have professionally diagnosed emotional problems. He's actually been in and out of places, something that would astonish the kids at E.C.T. who value and love him. It's not that Mark's emotions are disordered or troubled, but that he is troubled in relation to them. That's why he usually appears cool, neutrally cheery. When he has emotions, it's like he's denied access to them. He doesn't ever feel in possession of his emotions. When he has them, they feel far from him; he feels disembodied, other. Except when he shoots, he very rarely feels anything at all. And when he is shooting, pulling slowly on his complicated bow, his statued hands in fingerless black archer's gloves, the 12 strands singing and wicked shaft whistling as it starts left of where it ends, he stands somewhere outside himself, eyewitness to his own joy.

I.e. either he doesn't feel anything, or he doesn't feel anything.

Magda Ambrose-Gatz's predicament is the obverse, and way more noble and tragic. And but no one can ever know this. Because where Mark's makeup is that of a subject, Magda's own character— female, and precontemporary — is that of an object. Mark affects that of which Magda is an effect. She has always been an object: of child Ambrose's prepubescent, femininely-rhymed longing; of adult Ambrose's cold postmodern construction; of the land speculator's need for läbemraum; of the unfeeling hand of agricultural mac- and microeconomics; of J.D. Steelritter's desire to sell desire; and now of Mark's own speculative machinery. There's neither claustrophobia nor egress for this ageless alumna, this lovely seaside girl whose errant trainer-strap built a flat Funhouse, who probably wouldn't know the betrayed taste of a cooked flower if it bit her on her ageless orange nose. But she never objects. She takes it awfully well. She never has to affect neutral cheer, or health. Unlike the young Mark Nechtr.

The sunlight gets quartzy, the sun Southward; its slant creeps across Magda's dappled Orion skirt, toward him. Mark Nechtr is just way luckier than she. He, silently, objects to just about everything. He has desires, though he doesn't yet know what for. He wishes he had the arrogant balls to just sit down and make up a story about the adult Magda, about the Reunion and the Funhouse franchise, Jack Lord, about Ambrose's supply of fried roses, his perverse reward for eating beauty, the special arrow he's lost but can't throw away. A song of tough love for a generation whose eyes have moved fish-like to the sides of its head, forward vision usurped by a numb need to survive the now, side-placed eyes scanning for any garde of which to be avant. In the story he wants to make up, the one that doesn't stab him, he'd be just an object—of irritation, accusation, desire: response. He wouldn't be a subject. Not that. Never that. To be a subject is to be Alone. Trapped. Kept from yourself. Nechtr and Sternberg and DeHaven Steelritter all know this horror: that you can kiss anyone's spine but your own. Make love to anybody or anything except. .

But Mark can never know that other boys know this, too. He never talks about himself, see. This silence, for which he is loved, radiates cry-like from his central delusion and contemporary flaw. If his young companions have their own special delusions — D.L.'s that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive, Sternberg's that a body is a prison and not a shelter — Mark's is that he's the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world. It's a solipsistic delusion.

"I'd describe my current thinking as a sort of progressive minimalism," DeHaven is telling Drew-Lynn, who's killed the radio drama to hear the clown's description of his ambitions as an atonal composer with a bitchingly expensive Yamaha DX-7, to replace his outmoded Moog. "What I'm aiming for is a kind of fusion of the energy and what's the word verve of popular music with the intellect of like a Smetana or a Humperdinck."

J.D. snorts, but is otherwise strangely quiet, as if brooding. The car roars and the wind roars. It's too hot even to mention.

"I detest any and all kinds of minimalism," D.L. says firmly.

DeHaven shrugs and removes the illuminated red nose and yarn wig, revealing a curved Steelritteroid nose and dark hair of surprising brevity and lustre.

"Well minimalism in music just means the repetition of these real simple chords. Except the minimal attractiveness comes from simplicity of the repetition and not the simplicity of the chords."

"Put it back on," J.D. growls, shifting the cigar in his mouth to indicate without looking at the red tangle that now lies, like a yarn wig with a glowing nose, resembling nothing, beneath the rearview's dancing dice.

"Pop, for Christ's sake—"

"Am I unbent? Did we not have a conversation just now back there? Did we not both make concessions? Did we not arrive at a negotiated settlement about what a job was?"

"But Christ Pop it's hot, and I—"

J.D. stares straight ahead. "Define for me, speck of mine, the negotiated meaning of the word 'job,' again."

DeHaven stares icily at a black highway he's long stopped having to see, replacing the red wig but leaving it askew. The red nose, heavy with AA cell, slides toward the defroster-crack between windshield and dash and is lost from view.

Between teeth DeHaven says: "A job is where, when you take on a job, you do things whether it feels good to do them or not, because you promised, by the fact of taking on the job."

"What a memory. Makes a father swell with—"

"I don't see how anybody here gives a shit if I wear a red wig or not."

"You represent McDonald's, shitspeck. It's not you who's driving. You represent the world's community restaurant."

"It is awfully hot, Mr. Steelritter," Magda says, leaning forward to make herself heard. Mark hears her. The only evidence of a bra is a kind of knob at her back's center, under her brown Orion blouse, over her spine.

J.D. ignores her. "Have some fucking pride, DeHaven."

"We there, just about?" Sternberg pipes up, his hands in his lap as he stares reluctantly at Magda's blouse's knob, where hooks that men can't undo and women can undo with just one hand behind their back lie engaged in complexly-imagined relations.

"No," says J.D.

"Umm, long way?"

"Odometer's just about ready to roll," says DeHaven, watching the numbered wheels' implacable spin.

J.D. broods, removes, crunches, and reignites. The red interior fills again with the green stink of cigar. Sternberg goes back to being ignored. D.L.'s cough sounds like a laugh, and is also ignored. A classy no-nonsense scarecrow of black woven iron, more like a decoration than a real scarecrow, right up flush roadside, messes nastily for an instant with the car's shadow. Mark's just as glad about the wig's being back on, not out of any special ill will toward this Ronald kid—

"Anyway, my music I want to do has affinities with the work of like a Glass or a Reich, but with more. . progression. Harmonically it's even more atonal, and rhythmically it's got this kind of fascist quality I'm drawn to, a kind of jackboots-marching-on-a-small-Polish-town quality."

"Hush," J.D. says absently.

"It's music that grabs you by the lapels and says give me all your land or I'll gut your livestock," DeHaven sums up quickly. "Though in a much more cerebral way. And with percussion out the ass."

— but because its removal had revealed that the clown's heavy garish makeup simply ended, right around the top of his neck and the curve of his round cheeks, yielding to regular red wind-burned Steelritter skin with an abruptness that Mark just didn't like at all.

"Don't you even remember?" D.L. has turned to address Stern-berg. "Don't you remember how out of the way the McDonald's set was, back then?"

"Collision's in the middle of nowhere, kiddo."

"C.I.A.'s the closest airport and helipad, but it's still no laughing matter, how remote Collision is."

"On purpose," J.D. says, balancing his cigar on his heavy lower lip. "You don't go to client. You make client come to you. That way the cap's in his hand. Client comes a complex series of long ways to see you, has a tough journey, encounters bad roads and no maps and detours: client's convinced already, en route, that your services have value, for him to be wandering all over hell's half acre like this just to find you." J.D. beams grimly. Mark notes that DeHaven can silently lip-sync his father's whole speech. Plus his summation:

"A-very-wise-guru-at-the-top-of-a-tough-to-climb-mountain strate-gem," J.D. says. "It's no coincidence it's the gurus on mountains who're wise. You get to the top: you're already theirs."

Everyone lets this sink uneasily in.

Sternberg clears his smoker's throat, directing this sound somehow at the flight attendant beside him. "Sorry about your skirt, and stabbing your date's fruit."

"It's all right," Magda says, smoothing yellow hair back behind her ears. "And he wasn't my date."

"Except what about my Dexter?" Mark asks flatly.

"He was just a passenger," Magda explains.

"My arrow, Sternberg," Mark says, leaning a bit to look across Magda's front at Tom's boiled-egg-colored eye, trying to feel angry. "You left it back there, didn't you."

"I have it," Magda says.

Mark shifts his gaze to her. A sudden jounce — pothole; "Shit," DeHaven exclaims — makes his stomach rise in that rapid-descent way.

"It's in my carry-on." She smiles. "In the trunk. I'll give it back to you when we're there."

Mark looks at her orange face. "Thank you. It's kind of my favorite. It's the only one I can get through Security. It's aluminum." He pauses. "Thanks again."

She laughs. "It looked pretty obscene, just sticking out of that compote. I thought one of you'd want it."

"Well thank you," Sternberg says.

"Yes. Thanks." The thing cannot be lost. Even shot it at the sea once. Off an old wharf. Except it floated, though, glinting; hung in the water by its cedar knock; came in on the sluggish tide within hours.

And Mark had waited for it. On the crumbled wharf that smelled of fish. The fact that the arrow can't disappear is both a comfort and a worry. It makes Nechtr feel special, true. But from special it's not very far to Alone.

Although we all, Mark would know if he bothered to ask J.D. Steelritter, who'd done solipsistic-delusion-fear research back in the halcyon days of singles bars, we all have our little solipsistic delusions. All of us. The truth's all there, too, tracked and graphed in black and white — forgotten, now that fear of disease has superseded fear of retiring alone — sitting in dusty aluminum clipboards in a back archive at J.D. Steelritter Advertising, in Collision, where they're headed. We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd. It's Steelritter's meat.

O the sadness of J.D. Steelritter, a man who brings crowds into being! A crowded planet would lie right down for love of the men who build what they want built. But for the man who builds their wants? A drink on the house? God forbid a pat on the back, ever? A hug? A television Movie of the Week, the "J.D. Steelritter Story," sponsored by his sponsors, J.D. portrayed as the type of hero who overcomes? A sensitive novel from C— Ambrose in which J.D., manipulator of image and sign, succumbs via epistasis to the bewitchment of the Mesmermaze he spins and is forced via resolution to transcend, to come of age, to see? Something, no? But no. TV about bodies politic and people with dying bodies or robbers and cops puncturing bodies or doctors resealing bodies. Novels about novelists writing novels about novelists, who never succumb. Cute stories that slouch, sullen, clever, coy, no hair on the chests forever.

Though let's not get a wild hair up anything: he has no real bones to pick with Ambrose-as-builder, — entrepreneur, — Consumer. And why think of anything except what's just ahead? The Reunion will be huge. Larger than life. Beyond belief. Forty-four thousand actors, endorsers, celebrities, former actors, returning. 44,000 who will — photorecorded — reunite, greet, meet and eat. Eat. An irruption of ninety-nine-and-forty-four-one-hundredths percent pure consumption. The cameras' shots will be panoramic. You'll need the side-placed eyes of a deep-depth fish just to even hope to take it all in. The enormous crowd J.D. hath wrought over thirty years of time purchased second by expensive second will come together, lose the supplicants' courtesy that atomizes crowds, and desire past all earthly care the rendition of fat, the sigh of oil, the sparkle of carbonation, the consumption of government-inspected flesh. They will revel in meat, lips stained purple with the fried blood of Steelritter's floral tonnage.

Still-distant Collision is a madhouse. Frantic, clotted, teeming with alumni begging to stay. The obverse of Saigon's fall. The townspeople, descendants of an accidental market, have learned to change big bills — everywhere there are souvenirs, homemade concession stands. Twin arches of plated gold have been erected, each the size of St. Louis's Gateway, and below their giant twin paraboloid zeniths a gemmed altar that demands, recorded, to let it give you a break. The predella itself a lawn-sized golden patty. And everything that's been built — arches, altar, predella — has been perforated and filled to spurt and shower U.S.D.A. Grade A blood at the ecstatic moment of Jack Lord's helicoptered approach. The sight will be halcyon, chialistic. He will watch desire build to that red-and-gold pitch, that split-second shudder and sneeze of thirty years' consumers, succumbing, as one. And this is the one secret of a public genius: it will be the Storm before the Calm. Gorged with flora and the fauna their money's killed and shipped frozen to serve billions, the alumni will give in, reveling, utterly.

And that, as they say, will be that. No one will ever leave the rose farm's Reunion. The revelation of What They Want will be on them; and, in that revelation of Desire, they will Possess. They will all Pay The Price — without persuasion. It's J.D.'s swan song. No more need for J.D. Steelritter Advertising or its helmsman's genius. Life, the truth, will be its own commercial. Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that's been its object all along. And, in Death, it will of course become Life. The last commercial. Popular culture, the U.S. of A.'s great lalated lullaby, the big re-mind-a-pad on the refrigerator of belief, will, forever unsponsored, tumble into carefully salted soil. The public, one great need, will not miss being reminded of what they believe. They'll doubt what they fear, believe what they wish; and, united, as Reunion, their wishes will make it so. Their wishes will, yes, come true. Fact will be fiction will be fact. Ambrose and his academic heirs will rule, without rules. Meatfiction.

And Steelritter, in what he's foreseen? He'll retire to the intersection where everything started. At peace in the roaring crowd's center. Maybe have a long-needed nap, stretched out on the intersected road, each limb a direction, cigar a sundial. He'll relax and feel the great heavy earthspin beneath him stutter, flicker, oppose.

He will be the object of appreciation. He will be not just needed. He will be loved. Beloved. Because he will Re-Present the Product.

He broods, riding shotgun. He's smoked his cigar down to the point where he feels the heat of the thing on his lips. The woven-iron scarecrow recedes in no time. He pegs his butt out the window and, because he wants it so, ceases to brood, his great forehead smoothing like a smartly-snapped sheet. Soon they'll make the last turn West.

They're passed by a chicken truck in a tremendous hurry. Its sides are like the sides of a crate. Its passage is a spray of feed and feathers against DeHaven's windshield. The action of the homemade wipers (furious) sends the clown's redly pulsing nose all the way inside the crack between glass and instrumentation. The nose falls completely out of anybody's notice, resting somewhere inside the dash.

Our six in turn pass an enormous old farmer who's hitchhiking on the barely-there shoulder of the county road. You can see his old harvester disabled and listing tiredly to starboard in the waving corn behind him. On the moving car's other side, the very tops of the two giant arches glint, just visible, inclined like a child's severe eyebrows just over the countertop line between land and the baby-blue iris of a sky that looks down all day at food. J.D. is the first to make out the arches' tops — give that man a cigar, he smiles— because the other five are all looking at the big farmer, hitching, motionless, a statue rushing toward them. He's huge; his thumb casts a shadow. The malevolent clown's car sprays him with gravel.

"Not enough room for a farmer that big in here, dude," DeHaven says.

"You don't usually see big old men," D.L. says speculatively. "Big men seem to die young. Have you seen many big old men? It's rare. Usually they die."

This is kind of thoughtless. Both Steelritters are pretty big. So's Mark Nechtr.

DeHaven uses maybe two fingers to turn the car left, his other white hand scanning the FM dial. The car moans on the turn. A bit more of the giant blond arches appear, now dead ahead, still distant but revealing more of themselves, the Nordic eyebrows spreading, getting less severe, as the jacked-up car moves toward them. The intersection's road sign had said 2000W. All roads seem to be identified only by numbers and directions out here in the country. J.D. coughs richly. The car's six panes of glass are still speckled with some surviving but still motionless little insects— unkilled, Mark figures, killing one, because they make the killing uninteresting, plus loathsome.

A neglected fact is that a black line — obsidian, really — appeared when they turned truly West on straight-shot 2000W. These are possible storm clouds. They appear as a Semitic hairline above the golden brows.

In a development, DeHaven's gloved fingers have plucked from the tides of daytime static the FM avatar of that same Wonderful WILL station, now deeply into a mid-morning Pentacostal old-time gospel hour. The preacher — you can tell he's a charismatic, a Revivalist, because he can do to English what the Swiss can do to French: every syllable gathers to itself a breathy suffix — the preacher addresses himself to the issues of eyes and motes and beams. Alludes to the seasons that inform rural spirituality. Makes reference to tight cycles of life, passage, death, passage, life. He holds a mono-tonic high-C idiot note throughout, repeating one or two very simple themes. The high steady whine and breath ring wincingly against the sleep-deprived tuning forks of everybody in the car except Magda, who nightly sleeps, unmedicated, the sleep of the dead. The only variation at all is in the preacher's audience-response; he repeats each epithet three times. His tone is almost frantically laconic, if that makes sense. Mark cops an image of Camus on speed.

J.D. Steelritter, whose own spirits now vary inversely with the car's distance from the still-distant but at least now visible and spreading arches, from the idea of the revel beneath them, tries absently to recall where and how he hired these particular troublesome, late-to-arrive kids, as children. Eberhardt he remembers spotting as he'd toured, with a guide, the gutted ruins of Ambrose's Ocean City Park. She'd been with her father, a really solid, sturdy-looking man, a Volvo of a man, in a crew cut, muscular under a black satin jacket whose back showed a blue Southeast Asia encircled by a red Kek-ulian serpent, sucking at its own sharp tail, with the white legend I DIED THERE below. It was the way she touched the melted lurid shell of the ruined Funhouse's Fat May, palm to its big sagged forehead, a tiny mother with a giant fevered child, that had excited J.D. — here was a kid at her gentlest with the luridly disclosed. The father had proffered his amputee's hook as J.D. introduced himself. Eberhardt'd been a well-developed, attractive kid. The Sternberg kid he couldn't remember just where he picked that kid up, or why, though he remembers all too well the metal twitter of his mother's voice, the way she kept fucking with the kid's hair and clothes, smoothing him into something seamless and false after J.D.'s time and care had gone into fashioning him as the kind of sad, rumpled kid who orders from intercoms and then eats while he plays.

"I see arches!" D.L. sings out.

The odometer gets extremely close to rolling all the way over.

"Varoom," says DeHaven, watching the dash's numbers. Then he sees something else.

The arches tumesce with maddening slowness, and above the golden rainbows the West's black line has grown to a broad smear. Possibility of rain.

DeHaven's being passed again, this time by a cylindrical fuel truck positively flying toward Collision. Its big silver tube of a rig veers and falls in ahead, wobbling from side to side, red signs on its ass advocating flammable caution and telling exactly how many feet long the thing is. It recedes.

One reason it recedes so quickly is because DeHaven has slowed a bit, because the dashboard's oil light's little red eye is now on.

This is a pretty dreadful development. D.L. sees the red, too. J.D. doesn't. But D.L. doesn't say anything about it to anyone in the car. Why not? Why not? Maybe she likes DeHaven Steelritter, since he's told her about his atonal ambition. You'd have thought ambition like that would sound absurd, exiting the red mouth of a clown. But it didn't, somehow. DeHaven and D.L. now share a bit of a sidelong look that Magda Ambrose-Gatz sees, using the rear-view from the rear. The car seems to roar even more at this new, slightly lower speed.

J.D., even from shotgun, can see the solid line of the rural highway's broken line break up a bit, now.

"Thump it, kid. We're late. What are you doing? We're aiming for noon at the very outside I said. Here, I know. Take 'em in from the North. We'll shave ten minutes. But thump it. Pedal, metal. Go." He runs both hands through his hair, which is unaffected by hands.

DeHaven turns abruptly right onto something dismally tiny and shoulderless, something called 2000N that looks to Mark almost freshly invented: new tar and mint-white gravel that clatters maniacally on their big sticky tires and hot wells. The big twinned arches reestablish themselves, after a clump of wind-breaking trees, out Mark's own window. He sees them, not surprisingly, as an initial.

Sternberg's voice, shrill and barely controlled: "We're going North?"

"Pop's going to bring you guys in from the Northeast, to save time," DeHaven says, eyeing the red oil light. "Whole South part of Collision's fucking mobbed. Traffic beyond belief. Fuel trucks, chicken trucks, Coke trucks, tourists, concessions, meat trucks, blood trucks. You name it."

The car seems to roar louder the slower it goes. Sternberg thinks the roar plus the clatter of gravel might drive him mad.

D.L. sniffs. 'This car is louder than any Datsun."

"What is this with you and Datsuns?" DeHaven says, shooting his father a sidelong look and again removing his sweaty wig. Mark looks to J.D., but Steelritter seems to have something on his mind.

"Datsuns are all hype," DeHaven continues — looking, once again, different and abrupt. "Chickenshit engines. Plastic and alloys. No steel. No soul. And you have to like take the whole engine apart to get at anything to fix it if it breaks down. Which it does. They're cars for what do you call them Yuffies."

"I think you mean Yuppies," Mark says.

"I mean Yuffies, man. Young Urban Foppish Farts, is what we call them out here. Yuppies without the taste for quality that's maybe a Yuppie's one redeeming quality. We've heard about Yuppies and Yuffies. Illinois isn't another planet, man."

And for the first time Mark can hear a Midwestern twang in DeHaven's sullen voice.

"Not to mention even credit cards, in terms of young fartness," J.D. says. "You all none of you have one lousy credit card? That's what Nola said, over at Avis."

"Credit cards aren't toys," Sternberg says loudly. Assertively. This can be explained very briefly. Sternberg's emotional state is now officially one of panic. And the panic is on top of the claustrophobia. Source of panic: the car's jouncing, and the almost prosthetically firm push of Magda's right breast — they're that close together — have given him the sort of erection that laughs at the restraining capacity of gabardine the way a hangover laughs at aspirin.

"Credit cards aren't toys, to be rushed right out and bought and played around with," he says aggressively, but with a kind of deliberate calm and adult gravity, the sort of tone you use when grandparents ask about plans for the future.

"We have use of my father-in-law's Visa card," D.L. says.

"But we pay the bill when it comes," adds Mark.

"Credit cards need to be thought about," Sternberg insists, hunched, hand a little too casual over his tented lap. Mark sees the anomaly in the gabardine, and Magda seems diplomatically to be avoiding looking down at all. Sternberg closes his good eye, looks deeply within, and battles all-out with an autonomic function that has always defied his will. And obversely. Basically, of course, what he tries to do is sublimate, and he does this the best way kids who don't do sports or abstract oils or major CNS depressants know how.

"Credit is political," he pronounces. "It's a tool of the elite. You use credit without thinking, you're unthinkingly endorsing a status quo."

"Oh, Jesus," groans DeHaven — also, interestingly, sublimating his fear of a different mechanical function, one out of his control. "Another one of these politically correct ones, Pop. We've had it to here with this correctness shit from alumni, the past few days."

"Ease off, boy."

DeHaven produces a blank dime of a frown, turns a half-human and half-Kabuki cheek to Sternberg's tight corner. "You are one of those correct ones, aren't you. Do you pronounce 'Nicaragua' without any consonants? Pronounce 'Nicaragua' for us."

"I told you to leave the kid alone, shitspeck."

In a development that turns out to be pretty dramatic, Mark brings the Ziploc bag (which he didn't forget and leave in the lounge, which gives one pause) out of his complex surgeon's shirt. J.D. sniffs the interior's air almost immediately. The blackness to their left, West, now covers a good half the sky, a lid over something set just on simmer. It could be his imagination, since he's pretty intent on what he's holding, but Magda seems to be looking at Mark with a kind of orange horror. As if in response to something dire.

"And of course that's a zit on your forehead, dude. What is that sumac shit? Can bet you won't be in the front row when they start shooting the thing, am I right?"

"Where do you live," Magda says.

Mark looks at her, half-confused. "Baltimore. North Baltimore. Hunt Valley."

She opens her mouth slightly.

"Everything's got political implications, for crying out loud," a disgusted J.D. aims loudly sort of halfway between DeHaven, who's wanting to kick somebody's ass on general rural principles, and Sternberg, who's hunched in his corner, sublimating like mad.

"Not anymore," D.L. disagrees firmly.

"Amen and varoom." DeHaven's grin becomes voluntary.

Sternberg, right on the edge, sees Mark's Ziploc, too. Magda has gone a bit yellow. Ideas now blow through Sternberg's high-pressure sleep-deprived head like chaff, a kind of beveled lattice of roses, oil, bodies, amber, sumac, hamburger, shit, Nechtr, Magda, sex, erections, will, and, yes, politics.

"You're full of it, Drew," Sternberg says. "Mr. Steelritter is right. Politics is everywhere. Except thank God in stuff like popular culture. That's why entertainment's so important. That's why TV's the total balls. When it's vapid. Like it's meant to be. Screw PBS. Right, Mr. Steelritter?"

"It is pretty much the only escape," Mark agrees quietly.

There are nods from everyone but J.D. and Magda. DeHaven has slowed the malevolent car a bit further.

J.D. turns, smoking, shaking his fine head, disgusted. "I don't know who of you's more full of what, kid. TV's not political? What about that "Hawaii Five-O" Nola said you two were watching all slack-jawed, so taken in you weren't even blinking?" Hiking an elbow onto the front seat's back to level a centered face and heavy cigar-supporting lip at Sternberg and Nechtr. "You saying there's no politics going on on that show?"

The boys' response is immediate and unanimous and negative.

"Pure entertainment."

"Like a blanket so old it's falling apart. Soothing."

"Like blowing bubbles with your saliva. Mindless. Fun just for the sake of fun."

"Especially in reruns, syndication, that you've seen before," Sternberg says, into it, feeling, feeling disembodied, other, flaccid. "Incredibly comforting. You know just how the universe is going to be for the next hour. Totally secure. Detached but connected. A womb with a view."

Steelritter just cannot believe the naïveté of these cynical kids. He'd trade looks with the older flight attendant in the rearview if D.L.'s slender head weren't in the way. D.L. and DeHaven are watching the odometer finally roll all the way over. It's exciting and gorgeous. There's a slot-machine feel about it, which they share, together, and know they share it. The oil light has settled into a kind of stuttered flicker, which is even more dreadful, if you know your oil.

"I cannot believe these kids today," says J.D. " 'Hawaii Five-O' is not political? We're talking about the same show? The show that ran from '65 to '73? That had helicopter imagery in every episode? Helicopters full of wooden-faced, purposeful white guys in the kinds of business suits capitalism's all about? White guys flying around in helicopters restoring order to this oriental island that can't seem to govern itself, that's overrun with violent and bad and indigenous Orientals? The cop show where all the head guys are white and all their lieutenants are good Orientals in suits, and they all cooperate and co-prosper shooting at the bad Orientals out of helicopters? With this constant reference all the time to a 'Mainland' that seems close to the island and in peril from the island's disorder and in need of what's the word immunization, but which calls Jack Lord's every shot, and justifies all the shooting of natives out of helicopters?"

"Are you trying to draw a Vietnam parallel?" Mark asks.

Disgust and disbelief wrestle for control of J.D.'s big face. "Christ, you poor shitspeck, that show was the most blatant piece of politics ever," he says, imagining just how the Reunion will be, pegging his thick Rothschild, feeling at a crinkling pocket, trying to decide between a petal and a slim Dutch Master.

"He might have an idea there," says Sternberg to Nechtr. "Like those Clint Eastwood Westerns, with the Man with the Gun called back from the Wilderness to save the same threatened Community that out of fear chased him into the Wilderness in the first place?"

"The Deliverer-Hero, with a Weapon, on a Horse?" says Mark.

"The tough but loving tutor who tempers him like fine blue steel? The Bush? Kinobe? Yoda?"

D.L. is utterly silent throughout this exchange, watching the odometer begin slowly to lose its magic. There is a reason for her silence that is in a way parallel to the historical U.S. conflict in Vietnam. For her, Vietnam does not exist except as complicatedly cancelled letters and hissingly connected phone calls, a completely flat-eyed father whom she first met on a tarmac at nine. Who had a hook. Who dropped at automobile backfires (Datsuns never backfire — too little power), who gazed dully and accepting at the mosquito feeding at his one big bicep. Who's long gone, now. Who left a note.

LANCE CORPORAL LYNN-PAUL EBERHARDT'S NOTE, THAT HE LEFT

Dear Void:

The chances of living in the present seem good today.

Yrs.,

From D.L., Mark Nechtr knows only that Lieutenant Colonel Eber-hardt is long gone to unknown locales. Never pressed her for details that clearly pained her. Actually, D.L. had started to tell her first and only lover all about it, that night, that time they'd gone (protected) to bed. But Mark, postcoital, had fallen asleep. She's never forgiven him for it. Will never. She was forced to do the whole rehearsed dialogue mono-, playing both parts, Ophelia-like: the only time in her life she's laughed so hard she had to bite her arm to stop:

"My Daddy's long gone. He's whacked. Looned. Zoned. Where all rooms are white and all shoes noiseless. My father has left the planet.

"Well as long as he waves, occasionally.

"I think the only thing he waves at is his food.

"Well, as long as it doesn't wave back. .

"I think that's why he waves in the first place."

Took her exclusively to ruined amusements. Liked boarded windows and walks chocked with crabgrass. Read her Moby-Dick at ten. One sitting. Whale trivia and all. Told her to call him Lynn.

Bought her a forest-green classic 70s fashion outfit she's had altered and cleaned so often it's lime. Told her she was loved. Would sit only with his back to walls.

He's never once asked for painful personal details, Mark. He'll take what you give him and just nod. He sees and won't cross uninvited this unbroken center-line between your business and his. Keeps his own counsel. Never ever presses. It's one reason he's so universally loved. Plus it's why, within a year after the time when the little miracle should appear but won't, she's going to scald him in his sleep. Bad business. But assault or defense? You decide.

This has, yes, been a digression. But if it's irrelevant, then ours is that part of town you want to make sure you drive through quick, windows sealed and doors locked tight, oil thoroughly checked, and nothing fishy in the dash.

Great lover, though, Mark. Healthy fucker. Energy right out the bazoo. Can fuck her into a sleep only the Dalmanated usually know. Tireless. Hard or flaccid at will. Comes only when he wants, like a cat. D.L. thinks she knows: it's the fried roses the tactful old klepto gives the pupils he's decided to gather to his arbitrary wing. The hors d'oeuvres her psychic pukes at the thought of. Healthily evil. Marries desire and fear into a kind of privately passionate virtuosity.

Mark has kind of a problem with the roses now, she thinks. She sees him getting dependent. They don't talk about it, Mark keeps his own counsel, but the problem with the flowers, she thinks, is what, ironically, keeps him from producing the way he wants.

D.L. simply refuses to eat beauty. It's defilement. A kind of blasphemy for atheists. Aesthetic Murder-One. D.L.'s got some desires, but says no thanks to eating what stands outside you, red and eternal, shouting that it's not food. She won't do it. Not even to be a better postmodernist. This makes her kind of heroic, in a tight-assed, grad-school way. Old fashioned, ironically. She does like the word virtue. Honor is even a noun to her, sometimes.

"I thought you knew Jack Lord personally," she says, seeing through DeHaven's windshield what looks like imperfect tint. They are thunderheads. "Yet but now here you are, talking down his show. So why represent LordAloft?"

"I never talk down, Missy. And I do know Jack." J.D. flicks the dice with a finger while DeHaven keeps his arm on the gearshift, between J.D. and the stuttered red oil light, his face under the happy face grim. The oil light's red stutters when the car jounces. The sound of the gravel is unendurable.

"But Jack is a complex man," says J.D. Steelritter. "I've known at least three different historical Jack Lords, since I've been in this business. That was the first Jack Lord, up over paradise in a helicopter, firing blanks at underpaid natives. Then there was a retired, artsy-fartsy, politically correct-type Jack Lord, back in the Seventies, who sculpted free-form and did gratis spots for Easter Seals. The new present Jack Lord doesn't fuck around. He's a businessman. A professional pilot and franchiser. A kind of ideal Yuppie with start-up capital and entrepreneurial drive and more balls than are presently in this whole entire rotten car, which by the way did or didn't I say to step on it, shitspeck. And don't think I don't see that oil light. Quit with the elbow in my face. Screw the oil light. I don't trust homemade instrumentation. Go. You've got till noon. Our shadows get short, I want these folks to be reveling."

"Varoom," DeHaven says, but without conviction. The car leaps forward a bit, quieting. The golden arches are sort of toward the rear of Mark's window now. The homemade car is definitely Northeast of Collision. Mark would like a rose, but his stash is low, and there's nothing he especially wants, except arrival and several cups of coffee and a shower and sleep. And arrival is not a scenario anybody can influence, it's starting to seem. It's unbearably slow.

"And shut up with that For Whom business," J.D. growls at his son. "Gives me a pain." He extracts and unwraps still another green Rothschild and crunches the tip and stows it in the wadded plastic wrapper, all with one hand. The other hand is inflicting absolute entomicide on the mass of dull, slow, stoic gnats that sit on the cracked red dash. Those gnats are creepy. Lemming-like. Nihilistic.

Plus dull. An old hand, an actual chain-smoker of cigars, J.D. can also light a cigar with a match (lighter out of fluid) forefingered from its Ronald-emblazoned book and thumbed against the flint paper without being detached, all the while crushing tiny insects. This is not a safe procedure for ignition. Close cover before striking. Why not just use the dashboard lighter DeHaven fashioned out of a high-resistance iron mattress spring?

Because the lighter flies out. It gets way too hot, and suddenly'll just pop out, into J.D.'s fine lap. His son the atonal engineer. Defectively effective homemade dashboard lighter. Represents a product, won't keep a nose on, lets the nose fall into the dash, then whines about red oil lights. J.D. sometimes looks at DeHaven with this sort of objective horrified amazement: / made that?

"What do you mean, 'For whom?" DeHaven is saying to J.D.

"You've been saying it. Repeating it. Two solid days. Back and forth. For Whom. Gets in my head. Gives me a pain. Quit with it."

"Varoom, I've been saying, Pop. Varoom. It's something atonal I'm composing. It's gonna involve engines, speed, lightning-war. It's a title. My title."

" 'For whom' are the first couple words of Dr. Ambrose's best story," Mark Nechtr says. D.L. snorts. J.D. draws at his cigar. The car is Cubanly redolent and greenly fogged. Mark is subjected, via crosscurrent from J.D.'s cracked window, to the main exhaust path of the stogie, but does not object. "It's the first bit of his Funhouse story. 'For whom.' "

J.D. grunts the noncommittal grunt of a father who's been mistaken about a son in front of that son. Even a violently rouged son.

"I compose my own stuff, man. I don't go around using other people's stuff. That's for bullshit artists. I'm no bullshit artist."

D.L. nods over her notebook in support.

"Half right, anyway," J.D. chuckles. His chuckle is like neither Ambrose's maniacal cackle nor D.L.'s mucoidal laugh. Has Stern-berg laughed yet, ever?

Mark has been more comfortable with the general drift of a conversation before, lots of times. What if the stories that really stab him are really other people's stories? What if they're bullshit?

What if he alone isn't clued into this, and there's no way to know? He's afraid he does want a flower.

Plus he has other obvious troubles coming. Magda is asking to have a look at his Ziploc. Her hands are hairy-knuckled, but not orange.

"Varoom, I was saying." DeHaven shakes his head, lighting an unfiltered with the same nonchalant ease as his father. He holds the cigarette between thumb and forefinger as he drags, which looks pretty suspicious. Sternberg, too, lights a 100, which because of the eye trouble appears to the side of where it is. And Magda is holding Mark's smeared baggie up to the way-back window's southern light. The light through the NASSIN and!em HSRAW is clean and penetrating. The arches, too, are now completely behind them.

There's the sort of silence in the loud car that precedes a small-talk question. Conversations between adults and kids tend to be punctuated with these silences a great deal. Then adults ask about present or future plans.

DeHaven, hurrying gingerly in the face of unreliable lubrication data, is no longer even bothering to slow at the dangerous corn-obscured intersections. (There's still lots of corn, by the way.) He fishtails suddenly West onto a 2500W. Again the golden M lies left, now fully revealed above a fallow stretch of soil.

"So then what are you kids doing now?" Steelritter asks, smelling the proximity of the last shuttle's end, doing something oral to the great cigar in his mouth so that it recedes, protrudes. He flares the slim nostrils of his hooked nose. A splatter of distant thunder sounds. The air through the cracks cools noticeably. Magda is looking at the side of Mark's face. J.D. manipulates his burning protrusion:

"Any actors left among us?" he asks.

"Me," Sternberg says, swimming briefly into J.D.'s rearviewed ken. DeHaven snorts something about horror movies, and D.L. gives the padded shoulder of his costume a rather over-familiar hush-pinch.

"I'm still in the business, Mr. Steelritter," Sternberg says, voice up an octave as he tries to be casual but courteous. Sometimes J.D. Steelritter actually uses Clout as his middle name, when he signs contracts.

"Well good for you, kid."

"I'm based in the Boston area."

"Damn nice area."

"You bet. I like the area a lot."

"Working steady? Who've you got representing you? Do I know any of the people you're under?"

"I'm kind of still in the exciting breaking-in stage," Sternberg says casually. "I'm waiting for a callback on a Bank of Boston gig. I'm up for the part of a really helpful teller."

J.D. exhales at his own tip, holding the thing up, inspecting it coolly for an even burn.

"I have call-forwarding, for callbacks."

J.D. smiles to himself. "Maybe I can introduce you around to some of the more important folks, while you're all reveling."

"Gee."

"The way I see this business going, after this McDonald's thing, you could have a real future."

"Hey, that's really encouraging to hear, sir."

"Bet your life it is, kid. That's what I do."

"What do you mean that's what you do?" Sternberg asks, confused.

Magda clears her throat demurely against the oxides of three different brands and asks about Mark Nechtr's plans.

"Yeah, Nechtr," J.D. says. "You look like the acting type. Photogenic. Natural. At ease in designer jeans and that doctors' wear. Any acting in your future? Your father's in laundry, Nola said back there?"

Needing very much to exhale anyway, Mark explains that he's really just a graduate student. When DeHaven laughs and asks what in, Mark gets really interested in the floor. Sort of English, he says.

"In creative writing," D.L. amends, mostly to DeHaven, who still holds his cigarette like a joint, squinting against smoke between dashlight and road. D.L. turns slightly on the front hump. "He's actually embarrassed to tell people what he really studies, when they ask. He actually lies. Why do you do that, darling?"

J.D. chuckles that chuckle. "Hell, Nechtr, no need to be shy about it. A lot of writing teachers make good solid incomes from teaching creative writing. There's a demand for it. Sometimes over at Steelritter Ads we get copywriters who're just coming out of creative programs. Ambrose himself makes good solid steady money over at East Chesapeake Trades."

"That's where Mark is. Mark's under him."

J.D. ignores this girl. "Creative programs are one reason the whole Funhouse franchise thing's finally gotten off the ground. Writing teachers don't press. They know when to concede. They defer to people who know what's what in an industry."

"Technically part of English Department. . technically a degree in English," Mark mutters indistinctly into the roar of the window he's opened. Smoke is drawn out the big crack, sliding like the last bits of grainy stuff down a drain. The combined smokers' smoke is the same general color as the clouds that have drawn past the Westward arches and are moving visibly this way. Threads of bright light appear and then instantly disappear in the clouds' main body— filaments in bad bulbs. The air cools further, and there's that rain's-coming smell through the window's crack. Magda leans a bit over Mark with the flowers and breathes deeply at the roar of the crosscurrent:

"Rain," with a sigh.

And they pass a sudden and alone farmhouse, right up next to 2500W, with its trees and little skyline of silos, and tire swing, and rusted machinery at angles in the dense grass of its limitless yard. The fields around the house are full of odd grass-or-hay material. A big-armed woman in a lawn chair waves from the gray porch, a wet scythe and styrofoam cooler at her feet. The house's mailbox has a name on it and is yawning open, waiting for mail. The woman waves at the growling jacked-up Reunion car. Her wave is deliberate and even, like a windshield wiper. She's a storm-watcher. A spectator sport in rural Illinois. Obscure elsewhere. But storms move like the very wind out here, no fucking around, building and delivering very quickly, often with violence, sometimes hail, damage, tornadoes. Then they move off with the calm even pace of something that knows it's kicked your ass, they move away, still tall, bound for points East, behind you. It's a spectacle. Mark would normally be more interested in the implications of the lawn chair and wave. He'd kind of like them to stop at the house and try to get some definite directions. Surely they can't be lost. The Steel-ritters live around here. And if they've been shuttling for three solid days and nights, as J.D. says, the precise way to go should be a deep autonomic wrinkle in DeHaven's brain by now. But they're circling. They are not, by any means, creating for themselves the shortest distance between C.I. Airport and Collision, 111. Mark does know about straight lines and shortest distances. Maybe J.D. and DeHaven are the kind of people who can't navigate and talk at the same time. Mark feels in his designer hip pocket the giant key of the O'Hare rental locker.

"Except he never writes anything," D.L. says. "He doesn't produce. He's blocked. He's thinking of leaving the Program. Aren't you, Mark."

J.D. directs his scimitar and ember at Mark with real interest. "You're paying to go to school to write and you don't write anything?"

"Varoom," says DeHaven.

"I'm not terribly prolific," Mark says, wishing he could wish harm to the back of D.L. 's tightly knotted head.

"He only produced one thing all year," she tells the Steelritters. "And it was so bad he wouldn't even show it to me. Now he's blocked. These things happen in programs. That's why I've decided I detest all—"

"You're blocked?" Sternberg asks Mark.

Mark decides on maybe just one petal, to tide him over against arrival.

"Probably a standards problem," J.D. says, nodding as at the familiar. "I get a creative type under me who's blocked, it always in the end turns out to be just a problem of unrealistic standards. Usually."

D.L. and DeHaven snort together at the use of the word realistic as yet another foil-bright fuel truck banshees past in the left lane, a spigot in back, next to its signs, dribbling amber fluid.

"So what do I do I call them in on the carpet and bitch them out about how all they've got to do is adjust their standards," J.D. says, his cigar now just protruding, staying there, saliva-dusky, balanced on his lower lip, so that it moves with the nonchalant grace of his speech, on that lip. "Adjust themselves downward and forward," he growls. "Adjust their creative conceptualization of, what's the word attainable felicity."

D.L's head snaps up at this.

"That art-school crap's bogus, man," DeHaven muses. "Only bullshit artists move in packs."

"Silence and speed, shitspeck," says J.D., hiking an elbow again to look back at Mark Nechtr, the unconnected kid, for whom J.D. shows a strange but genuine fondness. He gestures paralytically, if you will: "Adjust this paralyzing desire they have to create the perfect and totally new ad, is what I tell them," he says. "I ask them — and remember this, kid, it's free advice — I ask them, do they think it's any accident that 'perfectionism' and 'paralysis' rhyme?"

DeHaven rolls his mascara-circled eyes. Gravel clatters. A number of blank looks are exchanged. D.L. begins:

"But—"

"But they're goddamn close enough, is what I tell them," J.D. laughs, the laugh of a small enclosed person, his forehead again snapping clear. DeHaven lip-sync'd this whole thing. J.D.'s laughter sends his cigar pointing in directions. There's a perilous tilted mountain of ash. His laughter becomes a meaty coughing fit.

Mark, too, laughs, liking this man, in spite of his tough son.

Sternberg deposits his smoked filter in a back-of-the-front-seat ashtray you do not want described and clears his own throat:

"Nechtr, could we maybe discuss the possibility of some of those flowers, you think, for a sec?" gesturing with his forehead's extra organ at the Ziploc Mark and Magda somehow both hold below J.D.'s headrest-limited view.

Steelritter's whole face lights up. The arches are now extremely near. He's starved.

"You a flower man, kid? What kind? Violets? Roses, maybe? I manage a little rose-bush farm of my own, back home. We get there — which we will — you alumni are going to see a greenhouse to end all—"

Magda quietly interrupts, trying to point out that they haven't heard about Drew-Lynn's present or future yet; but and then D.L. interrupts her, telling DeHaven and J.D. and Magda that she, D.L, is no longer a graduate student but now a real struggling artist. A postmodernist.

"A postmodernist?" DeHaven grins.

"Yeah, well, we handle Kellogg's," Steelritter says gruffly. "I say get out of here with your Post products."

"Specializing in language poetry and the apocalyptically cryptic Literature of Last Things, in exhaustion in general, and metafic-tion."

Puzzled, DeHaven scratches his scalp with the furiousness of the recently de-wigged. "Who'd you meet?"

Mark is embarrassed for Drew-Lynn. Figure someone has to be.

"In fact I rather wish Dr. Ambrose were coming for his discotheque's opening today, too, although I must admit I no longer believe in him as a true artist. But I used to believe in him, and I'd like to see him cut his own ribbon," D.L. says, yawning groggily.

Magda coughs, feels at her pretty throat.

"A genuine and pleasant guy," J.D. nods in agreement. "Never any client-trouble over the whole long protracted Funhouse process. Doubts yes, but never an aggression, a press; never a real cross word. Seldom an ego. Also a flower fan, photogenic kid back there, by the way. You're under him? And he's got this wife who just can't stop smiling," he says. "Ever met that lady? So pleasant all the time it hurts. Dimples like bullet holes."

Behind a barbed-wire tangle can now be seen the Correctional Facility whose sign, way back at C.I.A., had said not to give rides.

The Facility has slit windows, is low and squat except for guard towers on stilts, and anyway is just on the whole huge, taking several seconds to pass. Another sign, this one in red, says the area is Federal and Restricted. There's no sign of movement Mark can see. The wall of towering storm clouds is now flush up against the (very) late-morning sun, giving the Southwest sky the appearance of a nighttime wall, but with a night-light. Sternberg is gesturing persistently for one of Mark's fried roses; Mark ignores him, listening, rapt.

"Gotta tell you, in confidence, though," J.D. says, craning to see the sun finally get taken. "Never could get all the way through a single one of those things the guy writes. Not one of them, and we're friends. Sent me the whole load of his stuff. Couldn't even lift the box. Figured that was a bad sign right there."

There's thunder.

"And sure enough," J.D. says. "Un-get-throughable. Troubled marriages all over the place. Hard as hell to read."

"Marriages?"

"Sometimes boring, too," D.L. says, nodding as if in admission. "Indulgent. Cerebral but infantile. Masturbatory. A sort of look-Dad-no-hands quality."

"Hey, now, Sweets."

"Or, in the opposite concept, too," J.D. Steelritter says, butting his cigar in another clottedly ghastly ashtray, hearing in the corn's pre-kick-ass-storm hiss that idiot-high For Whom he'd thought was his son's idiocy; "too smart. Too clever for its own good. Makes it too coy."

"Almost Talmudically self-conscious?" Mark says. "Obsessed with its own interpretation?"

Magda has pressed against Mark in the asexual way of a stranger next to you at a really scary film, her left shoulder muscular and port-wine birthmark bright.

"Personally I'm a hundred percent behind your basic phenomena of interpretation," J.D. says. "Interpretation is meat on my table and burger coupons in you kids' wallets. But for instance this story we had to use to blueprint the franchise campaign off of… that For Whom story, in Sixty-Seven. Liked the concept. Did not like the story. Do not like stories about stories."

D.L. snorts softly to herself.

Steelritter looks down at her. "Because never did and never will do an ad for an ad. Would you? A salesman selling salesmen? Makes no sense. No heart. Bad marriage. No value."

Mark has leaned forward, smelling cannabis and talcum and carbolic and amber from DeHaven and D.L.

"Stories are basically like ad campaigns, no?" J.D. says. DeHaven isn't lip-syncing this one. "Which they both, in terms of objective, are like getting laid, as I'm sure you know from trade school, Nechtr" — looking briefly back. " 'Let me inside you,' they say. You want to get laid by somebody that keeps saying 'Here I am, laying you?' Yes? No? No. Sure you don't. I sure don't. It's a cold tease. No heart. Cruel. A story ought to lead you to bed with both hands. None of this coy-mistress shit."

By way of a weather report: the dark fingers of scout-clouds have reached past the sun and are groping at the malevolent car's broadly shallow sky. Shadows fall in county-sized stripes, making gray bars in dull-green terrain, an oriental watercolor whispering muted color. And Tom Sternberg, whom Mark has been studiously ignoring, and whose debilitating claustrophobia you've probably forgotten because he's been just strength embodied, so far, in the speeding crowded enclosed car, has that erection, still, sees no way politics can be brought into the above discussion, is now dreadfully afraid of himself, wants one of those scale-of-stasis-yanking fried blossoms, except now can't get the distracted, rapt Mark's attention. And is clubbed between the eyes with an idea. He asks J.D. Steelritter whether his own rose-bush farm grows the roses the Maryland academic Mark trusts cuts and fries and turned Mark on to. This is a cataclysmic development: Magda's yellow silence is that horrified public kind of one whose seatmate has farted at the ballet.

FINAL INTERRUPTION

Mark Nechtr has taken a keen personal interest in J.D. Steelritter's informal criticism of Dr. C— Ambrose's famous metafictional story, "Lost in the Funhouse." He thinks J.D. is wrong, but that the adman's lover/story analogy is apposite, and that it helps explain why Mark has always been so troubled by the story, and by Ambrose's willingness now to franchise his art into a new third dimension — to build "real" Funhouses. He believes now that J.D. Steelritter and the absent Dr. Ambrose have not just "sold out" (way too easy an indictment for anybody to level at anybody else), but that they've actually done it backwards: they want to build a Funhouse for lovers out of a story that does not love. J.D. himself had said the story doesn't love, no? Yes. However, Mark postulates that Steelritter is only half-right. The story does not love, but this is precisely because it is not cruel. A story, just maybe, should treat the reader like it wants to… well, fuck him. A story can, yes, Mark speculates, be made out of a Funhouse. But not by using the Funhouse as the kind of symbol you can take or leave standing there. Not by putting the poor characters in one, or by pretending the poor writer's in one, wandering around. The way to make a story a Funhouse is to put the story itself in one. For a lover. Make the reader a lover, who wants to be inside. Then do him. Pretend the whole thing's like love. Walk arm in arm with the mark through the grinning happy door. Shove. Get back out before the happy jaws meet tight. Reader's inside the whole thing. Not at all as expected. Feels utterly alone. The thing's wildly disordered, but creepily so, hard and cold as windshield glass; each possible sensory angle is used, every carefully-taught technique in your quiver expended, since each "technique" is, really, just a reflective surface that betrays what it pretends to reveal.

Except the Exit would never be out of sight. It'd be brightly, lewdly lit. There'd be no labyrinths to thread through, no dark to negotiate, no barrels or disks to disorient, no wax minotaur-machina to pop out on springs and flutter the sphincters of the lost. The Egress would be clearly marked, and straight ahead, and not even all that far. It would be the stuff the place is made of that would make it Fun. The whole enterprise a frictionless plane. Cool, smooth, never grasping, well lubed, flatly without purchase, burnished to a mirrored gloss. The lover tries to traverse: there is the motion of travel, except no travel. More, the reflective surfaces in all directions would reflect each static forward step, interpret it as a backward step. There'd be the illusion (sic) of both the dreamer's unmoving sprint and the disco-moonwalker's backward glide. The Exit and Egress and End in full view the whole time.

But boy it would take one cold son of a bitch to write such a place erect. A whole different breed from the basically benign and cheery metafktionist Mark trusts. It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict. The story would barely even be able to be voluntary, as fiction. The same mix of bottomless dread and phylogenic lust Mark feels when he bends to the pan's sizzle to see what. .

Except Mark feels in his flat young gut, though, that such a story would NOT be metafiction. Because metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love, a night-light on the black fifth wall of being a subject, a face in a crowd. It's lovers not being lovers. Kissing their own spine. Fucking themselves. True, there are some gifted old contortionists out there. Ambrose and Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme can fuck themselves awfully well. Mark's checked their whole orgy out. The poor lucky reader's not that scene's target, though he hears the keen whistle and feels the razored breeze and knows that there but for the grace of the Pater of us all lies someone, impaled red as the circle's center, prone and arranged, each limb a direction, on land so borderless there's nothing to hold your eye except food and sky and the shadow of one slow clock. .

Please don't tell anybody, but Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart.

That pierces you, makes you think you're going to die. Maybe it's called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn't know. He wonders who the hell really cares. Maybe it's not called anything. Maybe it's just the involved revelation of betrayal. Of the fact that "selling out" is fundamentally redundant. The stuff would probably use metafiction as a bright smiling disguise, a harmless floppy-shoed costume, because metafiction is safe to read, familiar as syndication; and no victim is as delicious as the one who smiles in relief at your familiar approach. Who sees the sharp aluminum arrow aimed just enough to one side of him to bare himself, open. .

But here's a development. Recall that the regulation competitive arrow, at full draw, is aimed a bit left of center, because of the dimensions of the bow — the object that does the shooting, and which gets in the way — but which, in the way, resists, is touched, moved, irritated by, the shaft's stubborn rightward push. Because, irritated, it resists, quite simple premodern laws come into play. The uncentered arrow, launched leftward by the resisting bow, resists that leftward resistance with an equal and opposite rightward shudder and spasm (aluminum's especially good, for the spasm part). This resisting shudder again prompts a leftward reaction, then a rightward reaction; and in effect the whistling arrow zigzags, moving — almost wriggling, really — alternately left and right, though in ever diminishing amounts (physics, law, gravity, stress, fatigue, exhaustion), until at a certain point the arrow, aimed with all sincerity just West of the lover, is on line with his heart. Someday.

Yes: it sounds less erotic than homicidal. Forget Renais-sancemblances between fucking and death. In today's diseased now, everything's literal; and Mark admits this sounds deeply nuts. Like slam-dancing, serial killings, Faces of Death Parts I–III, civilian populations held hostage by their fear of foreign target areas. It is neither romantic nor clever, Mark knows. It is cold. Far colder than today. Colder than killing people because you need what they need. Colder than paying someone just what the market will bear. Than falling asleep while your bloody-armed lover weeps that you fall asleep instead of ever listening. Than splattering gravel on someone who's too big to fit.

And, worse, it sounds dishonorable. Like a betrayal. Like pulling out of what's opened to let you inside and leaving it there, fucked and bloody, tossing it away like a stuffed animal to lie twisted in whatever position it lands in. Where's honor, here, in what he sees? Where's plain old integrity?

I LIED: THREE REASONS WHY THE ABOVE WAS NOT REALLY

AN INTERRUPTION, BECAUSE THIS ISN'T THE SORT OF

FICTION THAT CAN BE INTERRUPTED, BECAUSE IT'S NOT

FICTION, BUT REAL AND TRUE AND RIGHT NOW

If this were fiction, the cataclysm that prevents the six people in DeHaven's homemade car from ever actually getting to the promised Reunion in Collision would be a collision. DeHaven, out of a sullenly distracting attraction to the terse minimal girl beside him, or out of some timelessly Greek hostility toward his father riding shotgun with his big wet cigar, would close his eyes and put the accelerator to the floor at the very most verdant and obscure rural Illinois intersection — say, 2000N and 2000W — and collide three-way with the Oriental-crammed Chrysler and the foreign flashy car full of the big old farmer's corn-fed children. The Orientals, being expendable through sheer numbers, would be toast. The two cars full of shaken but unharmed Occidentals would end up somehow on top of each other, facing opposed directions, windshields mated like two hypoteni come together to blossom a square of chassis and crazily spinning wheels. Our six and their six would sit there, upside-down, looking at one another through patented unbreakable glass, their faces illuminated against the darkness of approaching rain by the flaming toaster of a foreign Chrysler.

If this were fiction, Magda would turn out in reality to be not Magda Ambrose-Gatz, but actually Dr. C— Ambrose in disguise. It would turn out that Mark Nechtr had long ago been chosen by Dr. Ambrose as the boy who would inherit clever academic fiction's orb and gown, and that Ambrose has historically tracked and kept tabs on and encountered Mark in any number of ingenious disguises, à la Henry Burlingame of the seminal Sot-Weed Factor. Magda/Ambrose would illustrate, via an illuminating and entertaining range of voices and dialects, the identities in which s/he has kept atavistic watch on Mark's progress toward adulthood:

'Faith everlastin' me lad but you're growin' like the very hills' heatherrrrr.'

'Father Costello? Mom's old priest, who heard her confessions, and came for dinner every month?'

'Left at the next corner, please.'

'Officer Al? The officer who gave me my first driving test, in my old Datsun?'

'Oh, that's not it. Not there. Let me. . oh, there. Oh, yes. See? Oh, God.'

'Charlene Hippie? From the YWCA? The archery coach who took my virginity?'

And so on. Dr. Ambrose, who values the selflessness possible only in the disguise of a voyeur, would be on the way with the five, less to see the Funhouse open than to see the unfolding of the Reunion — which he, like J.D. Steelritter the adman, views as the American fulfillment of a long-promised apocalypse, one after which all desire is by nature gratified, people cease to need, and enjoy value just because they are. In the best kind of Continental-Marxist-capitalist-apocalyptic tradition, the distinction between essence and existence, management and labor, true and false, fiction and reality collapses under the unrelenting dazzle of Jack Lord's aloft searchlight.

If this were fiction, the fried roses that unite J.D. as cultivator, Ambrose as distributor, Mark as consumer and disciple, D.L. as Manichee, Magda as apostate, and Sternberg as supplicant would be rendered — by the magical process of quick-frying — all the more lovely, as roses: crimsonly brittle, fine-spun red-green glass, varnished in deep oil and preserved in mid-blush for unhurried inspection, as trapped in flight as a gorgeous pest in amber. But the roses J.D. Steelritter has demanded that Mark Nechtr fork over this fucking instant are sootily dark, bent, twisted, urban, dusty, ugly and oily in the kind of smeared big Baggie junior-high dope comes in.

"What's the deal with these," the best in the business asks flatly.

"What deal?"

"You're saying Ambrose gave you these, aren't you."

Magda is giving Steelritter a look almost as steady as Mark's.

"I didn't know I was saying anything at all, sir."

DeHaven glances over with a son's special fear as J.D. gives suddenly in to an anger as total as the corn they drive through:

"Listen you little speck of shit these are mine. I plant them and care for them and kill them and prepare them. These, for you, are for later. Part of the whole Reunion package. That professorial fart and I had a negotiated gentlemen's agreement. These are for his fears. Not for him to pass out on streets. I'll ask you again. He gave you these?"

"Nechtr did say he got them from somebody he trusted a lot, Mr. Steelritter," from Sternberg's corner.

"I'll stamp him out. He's through in the industry. In every industry. Ambrose is dinked. He's zotzed."

"Of course he got them from him," D.L. says, her tone weariness over glee. "Just tell him, love."

"I got them under the condition I don't say where, if asked," Mark says quietly.

"That rat," J.D. says, his voice high with disbelief. "That hairless arrogant puss, that I brought up from a franchised nothing."

"Pop, this oil light's flashing kind of bright, right here."

J.D. is rapping his big forehead with the heel of his hand. "How fucking untidy."

"Nechtr said they give you an odd sort of self-control, sir," Sternberg says. Which Mark did not. Mark doesn't even look at him. He's staring at J.D. Steelritter's fine face.

"These things are the violent end of American advertising, kid,"

J.D. grimaces critically at the dusty, well-traveled crud in the blurred Baggie. "Advertising embodied."

Sternbeg horrified for real: "What?"

DeHaven's own distracting confusion sends a plume of talcum from a well-scratched scalp. "But we eat those suckers all the time," he says. "Fridge's full of them. Mom has to buy extra baking soda. They don't taste great, kind of corny. Mom says creative geniuses have perverse tastes, is all." He looks down at D.L. "What's the deal?"

DeHaven's oil light flashes OIL, illuminating redly each time the clown's lit nose is jounced with the car on the shittily maintained county road.

"They're obscene," D.L. says without expression. "That's the only deal they're part of."

'They make certain wishes come true, sir, don't they," Sternberg says.

Magda looks at Sternberg as if he's about five.

"Don't be an idiot," J.D. shouts, as they nearly sideswipe that Chrysler, which has fishtailed out of a blind verdant intersection's gravel and is now going East, the wrong way. The sunlight's color through the clouds is that of quality licorice, and the air is chill. Lightning convulses in the sky's western flank.

"Make wishes come true," J.D. snorts. There's no cigar in his mouth. "They make wishes. There's a difference, no?" Yes, he thinks. Until the Reunion.

"They're obsce-ene," D.L. says in the singsong of the ignored.

"Take what you fear most and turn it to wishes. Ambrose doesn't know what he and you are into, kid back there."

Mark says he has no idea what Mr. Steelritter is talking about.

What Mark Nechtr fears most: solipsistic solipsism: silence.

What Tom Sternberg fears most: whatever he's inside.

What Drew-Lynn Eberhardt fears most: as yet unbetrayed, thus unknown.

What Dr. C— Ambrose fears most: the loss of his object and interpretive wedge: stained skirt, prostheses, pretend-history, blonde wig off its stem.

What DeHaven Steelritter fears most: see below.

"You think an ad's just a piece of art?" J.D. is saying. "You think it's not about what life's really about? That your fears and desires grow on trees? Come out of nowhere? That you just naturally want what we, your fathers, work night and day to make sure you want? Grow up, for Christ's sake. Join the world. We produce what makes you want to need to consume. Advertising. Laxatives. HMO's. Baking soda. Insurance. Your fears are built—and your wishes, on that foundation." He raises above his headrest Mark's stash, and his own. "These were my own Pop's. From a funeral, back East. They bring the two inside each other. Marriage of violence. Shotgun wedding."

"Cooking flowers is supposed to get you off?" DeHaven says. His half-and-half clown's profile pivots between creepy confusion and complete fear of his own instrumentation.

"They're a drug?" Sternberg says. "Except organic? An anti-fear pro-desire drug?"

"They're wrong," D.L. says in the strident voice of her Tarot tutor. "They stand for the fact that they're wrong. They're not only obscene symbols, they're clumsy symbols."

"Steelritter…" Magda begins huskily.

J.D. waves the rearview image of her orange face and askew wig aside, now so into what he's bet his life on that he's almost sublimated his utter dread about rain diluting the Reunion. Fucking Midwest weather. He says, "The Post-product missy's right, on this one. They're just symbols. They're about as subtle as a brick, for Christ's sake."

"Eating symbols?"

DeHaven's looking at the steady red light. "Pop?" J.D. cannot believe the back-stabbing innocence of a man who'd pass out symbols like they grew on trees. He addresses the back through the rearview. "And you think how you appear, how you feel, are your adman's only levers? Your only source of fear? That Today has gone on forever?"

Sternberg's affirmative is ear-splitting.

"Then you've got some coming of age to do, Mr. Always-looks-at-himself-half-the-time. 'Cause the ad business goes way, way back. You've got fears so deeply conditioned they're ingrained. Built right in. Hidden in plain sight. You know you feel it, back there. This feeling it's so conditioned it's part of you. As in there's certain things that, no matter what, one doesn't do those things. You don't kill your father. You don't betray your lover. You don't lie. Except when absolutely necessary. You don't aim a loaded weapon. Except in self-defense."

You don't disappear," D.L. says tonelessly. "You don't scald people in their sleep."

"I'd go ahead and put those up there, too," J.D. nods seriously, grim. "And another one, see. You don't put what's beautiful inside you, as fuel, when the whole reason it's beautiful is that it's outside you. Supposedly certain things are in the world. To see. Not to chew up and swallow and expel."

DeHaven's point of view on all this is diffracted. He's thinking of the probably several tons of roses he's consumed, at the farmhouse, over his childhood; and experiencing a growing affinity with D.L. Eberhardt, who's looking, as she hears the confirmation of her psychic's sagest advice, more and more like a cat hissing at the big shadow of some nameless and total threat — and has pretty well-developed canine teeth to begin with — and he's getting more and more afraid that a sleep-deprived J.D. is maybe off his fatherly nut, a bit, about the roses that have no, and I mean zero, historical effect on DeHaven; and the de-nosed clown is afraid that J.D.'s going to make him drive his malevolent car, that he built and lubricated with his own two ungloved hands, right into oil-depletion and seizure and breakdown; and begins to wish very much that they could simply stop, idle a bit, let J.D. calm down about what're only after all snacks and commercials, let DeHaven have a look at his own dipstick. . that they could simply stop to check how things are, under the glittered hood; that they could suffer a brief interruption that would maybe probably ultimately save time; wishes they—

"Pop."

"But those deep-in-your-bones feelings are conditioning, too," J.D. says. "You know what the first real ingenious timeless ad campaign even was?" He sees in the rearview two blank stares flanking two closed eyes. "Jesus," he shakes his head in disgust. "But the boredom, at least: even you kids know you feel the boredom in your gut, right along with the fear. 'Do not do what is not right.' Tired image. Hackneyed jingle. No marriage, anymore. Obsolete. Conditioning has obsolescence built right in. Like the Jew what's his name and his bells and dogs that drool. Dog hears the ching of that fucking bell over and over, plus his pups, generations of dogs, ching, ching, till the sound is like the sound of the dogs' own blood in their heads — they can't hear it anymore, don't listen — they after a while stop the drooling over meat the bell had started. Give them enough time and enough bells and they start yawning, at the ching. Over at Steelritter Ads we've done conditioning research up to here," holding one hand like a blade to his fine head's top, gently squeezing the flowers with the other, in the bag.

"Not doing what you know deep down is wrong to do is boring?" Mark says, feeling the stab of a particular numbness he associates with qualities that ought to make him glow.

J.D. hears nothing but his own small voice and For Whom: "So thus the same fears that inform your whole what's the word. . "

"Character," murmurs Magda Ambrose-Gatz.

"'. . character: can't hear them, can't be moved by them, they're such old hat, by today," J.D. says. He turns, hiking an elbow. "Your adman's basic challenge: how to get folks' fannies out of chairs; how to turn millennial boredom around, get things back on track, back toward the finish line? How to turn stasis into movement, either flight or pursuit?"

"Make the listening unfashionable?" Mark says.

J.D.'s tired eyes widen as he nods. "But how to do that? How to do that? With symbols, is how. You make a gesture. You show you desire not to hear the ching."

"You behead an unsubtle image of what beauty is and fry it in lard and consume and digest and excrete it?"

"Turn your biggest fear into your one real desire?"

"Sounds pretty damn political," Sternberg suggests.

"Except what's everybody's biggest fear?"

"That Mormon researcher had whole lists of them."

"Pop."

"No no no," J.D. shakes his head impatiently, gesturing with a cigar he does not hold. "The one big one. The one everybody has. The one that binds us up, as a crowd."

"Death?"

"Dishonor?"

"I'd go with death, darling."

"My vote still goes to having a body, dudes."

"Pop."

"You gesture," J.D. says. "You sell out the squeak of your own head's blood. You sell out, but for selling-out's own sake, without end or object" — he looks above right, at the storm clouds, which are getting spectacular—"change the tired channel from life, honor, out of nothing but a desire to love what you fear: the whole huge historical Judeo-Christian campaign starts to spin in reverse, from inside."

"A campaign spins?"

"We're bored animals" — J.D. makes a summing-up gesture. "Even the naive ones know that. Bored numb with the sound of bells, the taste of meat. But ring meat," he says, "and you can bet your life you'll eat a bell. And like it."

The unmuffled engine dies, the jacked-up car coasting in a sudden roaring absence of homemade sound and halting in the shoul-derless space between rural blacktop and bare fallow field, by the field's ditch, in dirt, maybe a quarter-mile from where the road they're on takes its last curve left, West, dead into Northeast Collision. All that's there to hold your eye up ahead are three tiny rural shacks, shanties, up by the big broad leftward curve. The shanties keep you from seeing exactly where the curved road goes.

The complete silence in the quiet car, as it rolls to a crunching stop in the dirt, is like whole minutes of that second right after loud music stops. "Like it" ricochets around in the red interior as the malevolent car gives up the ghost in the roadside dirt, coming to rest perpendicular to a barbed fence between a lush verdant healthy cornfield and a rich black fallow field, boiling with confused pests lured by a taste for quality.

"Varoom," the clown says to himself weakly, squashing a placid gnat.

J.D. is suddenly very calm. He has a wristwatch. Jack Lord is scheduled to arrive over Collision soon. He is afraid. Sadness and anger and disgust at Ambrose's not-worth-it betrayal are scattered like the dust the car's halt has made, all before the great cold wind of a genius's fear. J.D.'s two great sheet-wrecking nightmares are missing his own Reunion and being stalled in someplace sweeping and panoramic and unenclosed and ever-growing.

There's a great ripping fart of thunder.

"Fix the car, please," he says softly as the first fat drops hit the windshield.

DeHaven is out with a stiff whimper. The windshield yields a sudden view of glittered hood.

"Could we just walk?" asks D.L.

"Not getting out of the car," J.D. says calmly. "Still two total miles or more. Rain. My suit will run. I can't preside wet. We'll stay here. The kid's got a way with machines."

Streaks of DeHaven's real face can be seen through the trademark face as the clown slams the hood shut in the spattered rain. The dice under the rearview jump at the slam, and the oil light pulses.

"Filter's a gem," he says, reentering. "My dipstick's clean as a whistle."

"I'll let that pass," J.D. says coolly.

"The lubrication seems totally OK," the clown sums up in a voice that makes you think he wishes it weren't.

"So start the car," J.D. says, managing at once both to clap his hands and look at his watch. "Hibbego. Let's go. Couple more miles. It'll be tit."

DeHaven shakes his head miserably, his lipstick rained into something sad. The trashcan clatter of more thunder is now indistinguishable from echoes of that thunder. Big Midwest drops start hitting the car's roof in that rhythmless, tentative, pre-serious way.

"Start the car!" Sternberg screams, so that Magda jumps on the hump. Mark closes his eyes, silent, lost in his own counsel.

DeHaven hooks a begrimed wrist over the fuzzy wheel and lights an unfiltered with maddening deliberation. He shakes his head:

"This car doesn't just stop and start. The engine's Detroit and the ignition's foreign. It's an admittedly ad hoc combination. You'd call it a bad marriage, Pop. But those were the parts I could get deals on. So I have to just keep it running all the time. Can't let it stop. A motherfucker on gas. You wouldn't let me park it by the greenhouses, Pop, remember? Because of the exhaust? It doesn't even need a key, see?" — pointing a grease-tipped glove-finger at the empty slant of an ignition receptacle where a key should be. "Because if it stops, when you try to start it, the engine goes like out of control." He exhales smoke with force. "Plus it was the oil light made it stall, Pop," indicating the little plastic window that covers his costume's nose. "I'm sure we've got internal problems somewhere. I'll fuck up the belts."

"Try it, please."

"I'll make the timing belt jump if I do. We'll jump time. We'll fuse cylinders."

"Give it a try, please, son," J.D. whispers, as roof-rain sounds.

The empty ignition screams to life. And, true to the clown's word, the car's idle is now wild, tortured; the engine revs crazily, way too high, so that ancient needles flap spastically in the dash. The malevolent car stalls the second the clown reaches up by the furry wheel to put it in a forward gear. It shudders.

"Great," Sternberg yells, having cadged the Ziploc J.D.'s left on the front seat's backrest. "Great. Fix the car, you shitspeck rotten clown." He feels too enclosed to bear.

The adman is looking through the shield's angled rivulets at the three wharf-gray shanties up where the last road takes its final Westward curve. The ancient askew shacks are interconnected by a system of corrugated plumbing pipe. J.D. breathes deeply and counts the three shanties out loud, willing the Reunion to remain temporarily on hold. They'll wait for him. Jack, aloft with his bullhorn, above a sea of red smiles, the cameras sweeping panoramic, looking for what to latch onto. The rain can be worked in somehow. Could enhance the whole conceit. Funhouse 1 will be opened and used, then 'dozered. J.D. Steelritter gets stabbed in the back by a client exactly once. No Funhouse franchise. No erection of memory for Herr Professor C— Ambrose, rat. No angled systems of mirrors Windexed nightly by anally compulsive teams in white. No barrels and disks on the dance floor. No happy fellatory door. No parts that shine, burnished to reflect and refer to every other part. No whole new dimension in alone fun.

It's going to rain one fuck of a lot, they can all see. 2500W steams. The stuff seems to fall in bright curtains that close and part at the discretion of gusts. The rain threatens to enclose the stalled car. Sternberg's bad cheek is right up next to his smeared window, pressing against it, bloodlessly white. He's sure he's going to puke. The clouds before the curve and car are huge. They have an almost Trump-like architectural ambition. Mark can see still more rain coming, off to the West, but coming, braids of it hanging from the sky and whipping back and forth like tinsel in wind, the real meat of the thunderstorm now probably over Collision and the now-obscured giant arches and the sheltering tight-roofed Funhouse club, where all the adults and former kids are in out of the elements, waiting, raising flashcards emblazoned with the word GLASS, drinking the symbolic health of the very idea of toasting itself. He's sure now they've got it all backwards.

"Look, kid. Three shanties up there," J.D. points. He squeezes his son's pastel shoulder pad. "I want you to go have a look and a knock, see if anybody's home. Somebody rural, with a way with a homemade idle."

"The car's going to go down in this mud, Pop," DeHaven sniffles across D.L. "We'll get stuck sure, anyway. The fucker's already level, in back." He wipes clotted talc off his cheek. "God am I sorry, Pop."

"Hush, kid. Not your fault. Just go have a look. Please. Here," handing him the noseless yarn tangle from the dashboard. "Wear the wig. Keep your head dry. Don't catch cold. No sniffling Ronalds."

DeHaven keeps his chin up. "Right." He's out of the car and behind the silver curtain of serious rain — you can hear the hiss as his cigarette's hit and extinguished — and he's off up the road, his orange yarn held to his scalp like a hairnet, riding-habit hips jouncing under his orange trousers, big red shoes sending water everywhere, up the steaming rural blacktop road and out of sight into the breath-mist that collects on the windshield of the utterly enclosed, sheltering, rained-upon car.

This is pretty much the climax of the whole journey, by the way, pending arrival. The final impediment — reimbursement and revelry and meat and fried roses, all the roses anyone could want, roses right out the bazoo, just up ahead: past the impediment.

Drew-Lynn Eberhardt can tell DeHaven Steelritter and J.D. love each other, deep down, and this affects her. She is enormously sensitive to who is loved by whom.

While J.D. Steelritter settles back cigarless, letting condensation collect unwiped over a watch-face which why worry if worrying won't serve purposes; while D.L. flicks at the dice that hang from the rearview; while Tom Sternberg snacks, watching his gabardines go up and down like a derrick at his discretion alone; Magda uses an initialed cotton hankie to wipe at Mark's window, and they look out at the fallow field to the left of the fence, the black muddy field fallow and empty right to the skyline but for Pest-Aside-maddened pests and one old, rickety, blue-collar, and totally superfluous scarecrow. The scarecrow looks somehow both noble and pathetic, like a stoic guard standing sleepless watch over an empty vault. Mark and Magda both look at the field and scarecrow and all-business Illinois rain like people who are deprived. Magda feels an overwhelming — and completely nonoracular — compulsion to talk to somebody. Mark, a born listener, right from day one, feels nothing at all.

ACTUALLY PROBABLY NOT THE LAST INTRUSIVE INTERRUPTION

Mark Nechtr's ambivalent artistic attitude toward his teacher Dr. Ambrose — the fact that Ambrose is warm and tactful and unlov-erlike aside — and the fried-rose business completely and totally out of this picture altogether — really derives from Mark's new Trinitarian distrust of the fictional classifications that Ambrose seems to love and has entered, curling, looking for shelter from the very same cold critical winds that, in the fullness of time, had carved Ambrose's classified niche in the first place, see.

See — Mark tells the orange-faced flight attendant as they part a briefly-open-anyway curtain of water and enter the rain comparatively unseen, she shoeless and brown-skirted, his fashionable surgeon's shirt soaking quickly to a light green film over much health — dividing this fiction business into realistic and naturalistic and surrealistic and modern and postmodern and new-realistic and meta- is like dividing history into cosmic and tragic and prophetic and apocalyptic; is like dividing human beings into white and black and brown and yellow and orange. It atomizes, does not bind crowds, and, like everything timelessly dumb, leads to blind hatred, blind loyalty, blind supplication. Difference is no lover; it lives and dies dancing on the skins of things, tracing bare outlines as it feels for avenues of entry into exactly what it's made seamless. What Ambrose's "different" fictions do are just shadows, made various by the movements of men against one light. This one light is always desire. This is a truth so true it's B.C. If you're going to make lists to hide inside, he tells the stewardess — referring now to the D.L. he would love to hate — if you're going to classify everything, you might at least divide by the knife of what is desired, of where in the sky to look for the nothing-new sun. Divide from inside. Hom-iletic fiction desires peace. Eleemosynary fiction desires charity. Iconodulistic fiction desires order. Prurient fiction desires desire. Apocalyptic fiction desires the inevitable change it hides behind fearing.

Mark, if he were ever a real fiction writer, thinks he would like to try to be a Trinitarian writer. Trinitarian fiction, distinctively American, desires that change which stays always the same. It's cold as any supermarket — probably more economics than art — tracing the rate of a rate of change's change to a zero we pretend's not there, lying as it does behind Newton's fig leaf. It's an art that hides, tiny and fanged, in the eyes of storms, the axes of spins, the cold, still heart in the lover's pounding heart. It is triply subject, and good.

(Another reason Mark tends to keep his own counsel is that he can be a crashing chattering flap-jaw, once he lets go. His real friends suck it up, though, out of a kind of blind loyalty I'm afraid I can't help but admire.)

Yes Mark as Christian sees himself as would-be artist seeing himself as archer; baby Cupid; sick, bit Philoctetes, lover beyond time or compare. It is, he says, his one desire, the one beyond conditioning or obscene cuisine.

Except he tells Ms. Ambrose-Gatz it's beyond him. When he shoots, he feels it so. He feels, in his guts, that it would take three archers really to pull it off, to leave the reader punctured and spent and red. And American children shoot alone: it builds character.

"Three?" she asks, whole stewardess uniform now dark as her stained lap, shoes in a hand that balances her path through mud so fertile it stinks. Gorged insects have drowned in the milky Pest-Aside runoff, and bob.

One, he says, to aim just left and so impale the target's center. Another, he says, to betray the perfection of his comrade, to split the first arrow in two, with his own shaft.

And the third?

To be the beloved. The willingly betrayed. To wear the bright bull's-eye, and dance, under one light. To invite the very end we object to, genuflecting. To be aimed at: the at-long-last Reunion of love and what love loves.

Well and this old not-at-all-classy scarecrow is on the job: there are no crows in the rain. The malevolent car is visible through the undulating downpour, above, past a roadside ditch roaring with runoff. Sternberg's hands are at his window, and his face, looking out. J.D. and D.L. are fogged from sight. The colorful clown is on the crooked porch of the third and most distant shanty, knocking at an open door.

The potent abandoned scarecrow they stand by is just a crude cross of slapdash timber dressed up in faded military fatigues. It has no subtlety at all. The name on the military jacket's breast is obscured. The scarecrow wears a sodden Chicago Cubs cap on the not-fresh pumpkin that serves as a head, and, since it's a cross, has its arms straight out to the sides, though the arms' timber has been jaggedly broken, to simulate elbows, so that the fatigued sleeves droop earthward. The broken arms afford shelter, a bit, for the Magda who stands under an empty sleeve.

Mark can tell that Magda Ambrose-Gatz is smart. Not brilliant or witty or well-read. Not an idea man or a creative genius. She's just smart, the way simply hanging in there, as you, through all kinds of everyday tribulation and general shit can make you smart. She was in that story of Ambrose's, she tells Mark, though in there she was disguised and misrepresented, because even then her face was kind of orange. She had, yes, united with Ambrose, for a while, in holy matrimony. She still cared for him. Although they hadn't been in contact for a really long time. But she wished to speak to Mark Nechtr, here, she said, in the scarecrow's absence of shadow, because she thought she sensed underneath Mark's affected cool exterior a boy hotly cocky enough to think he might someday inherit Ambrose's bald crown and ballpoint scepter, to wish to try and sing to the next generation of the very same sad kids.

This storm's not a really bad Midwest storm, she remarks, as they stand by the scarecrow in the horizontal rain. Too windy to be really dangerous. The bad storms always hide behind a dead calm and a yellow-green sky. That's when you head for the cellar.

Mark should keep off the fried roses, in Magda's opinion. Not because they're fatal, or evil. Magda claims she'd used something similar, both with her Maryland lover and after, to preserve her orange face and voluptuous history against time's imperial march though a Depression, three recessions, a War, a Police Action, a Conflict, nine droughts, three plagues of mutagenic pests, twelve corn harvests so bountiful they were worthless, one airline deregulation, three (whoops, make that four) Presidential scandals, and the eventual erosion of agricultural price supports under pressure from the grocery lobby. And not because the dead snacks are advertising embodied, or clunky symbols, or obscene; or that they block Mark, shut him up alone inside the silence he dreads.

But just because they're not right. And right means more than ought. It also means direction. To try to digest fear into desire is to go backwards. Fear and desire are already married. Freely. One's impaled the other since B.C. What you're scared of has always been what moved you. And where you're heading has always been your real end, your Desire.

(This is all a summary, a what's the word a synopsis, and admittedly not in Magda's real voice, which cannot be done justice by me.)

That what unlocks you, even today, is what you want to want. In what you value. And what you value's married to those certain things you just won't do. And here's a cliché that's earned its status as a cliché: whether you're free or locked up depends, all and only, on what you want. What you have matters about as much as the color of your sky. Or your bars.

The rain makes the sound of rain. DeHaven's homemade car whines and roars above the flooded ditch and bare shoulder. The car's big rear wheels spin, screaming, sinking deeper into the mud. The car's acclivated shape is now a declivated shape.

Why using beauty for fuel is bad; why it's clumsy: it's superfluous: we already ache with desire for what we fear.

This sounds to Mark troublingiy familiar: it's a seamless wave of muscular Anglo-Saxon ideas, it smacks of Dr. C— Ambrose.

Whom Mark no longer quite trusts, obviously.

Magda'll give Mark examples, then. Sternberg is obviously a big-time claustrophobe — she can always smell claustrophobia on a passenger — so why's he still inside the steamy enclosed car, eating? J.D. Steelritter desires, more than anything, to be happified, at peace; so why, though he consumes enough roses to color a Tidewater spring, does he spend his whole life worrying, planning, conceding, debating, persuading, interpreting, manipulating a faceless Crowd into backward ideas of what it wants? Why is he trying to bring about a Reunion that will silence the very clamor whose whine in his head is that head's life and bread?

And Mark's bride. D.L. wanted to be pregnant, miraculous, so that Mark would love her, do her virtue honor; so why didn't she seduce him when fertile, instead of constructing a coy and obvious lie whose lifespan can't possibly exceed three seasons?

The rain on Mark, though violent, feels good, familiar, like the tattered imagined bedroom breezes of pre-sleep. It seems OK that this alive woman who'll live forever only as an object in Ambrose's story about passion should know the secret D.L.'s mother knows, Mark's parents know, Mark knows, that only D.L. still believes he does not know. Why she lied about the little miracle to this boy, who was loved.

"Because she's infertile; she cannot produce," Magda says. "She will tell you, when you ask, that it has to do with a past. With a father. She'll invoke Electra, Vietnam, amputation, Laing, Freud. But the truth is that — inside, where push comes to shove—she wants it so."

The rain reveals both their bodies, and the skeleton under the scarecrow's clothes. Magda is really not at all pretty, facially, except for the utter and unconsciously expressed pleasure she takes in the water's feel, the overhung sleeve's fungal smell, the milky mud between her toes.

"How do you know this?"

"Because it's true, Mark. Everybody who really wants to knows what's true. Most people just don't want to. It means listening from deep inside. Most people just don't want to. But the special people listen. You can hear what's true, inside. Listen. You can always hear it. In the rain. In the static between stations. In the magnetic whisper on tapes, right before the music starts. And in that sound that utter, complete silence has, in your ears — that glittered tinkle, like tiny chimes at great heights. I believe I know you, and that you're probably special. The chances are good that you're a born listener."

Mark listens. It's true: he's special. They're both special. (But I'm not special, and chances are you're not — shit, we can't all be special, obviously; not enough room for a crowd that big in here. Suck it up.) So but he's special, it's true. Magda's right. He's a born listener.

But he can't hear anything out of the ordinary, anything that sounds especially true.

Magda laughs at the sight of DeHaven galumphing back to the screaming car, his wig still clamped tight as a skullcap, leading a big old farmer in a military-surplus slicker. The farmer leads a big horse by a heavy chain.

"I'm afraid I can't hear anything, Ma'am. I hear rain, and the car, and the car's horn, and clopping, and a chain clanking. I can't hear anything that sounds especially true."

"You will. I promise. Trust me. I know. What's true never changes its tune. He heard it, once."

"Ambrose heard it with you?"

"And you're wrong about why he's wrong. You and Steelritter are both wrong. I'm no postmodernist, or artist. I can't lie. But I still know the center you want isn't in classes, or categories, or even in what kind of religion you choose to genuflect to. It's here." She doesn't gesture. "Wherever you are. It's all around you. Every minute. That sound you hear when it's quiet, without sleep. Or awake, listening. A great silence." Her eyes roll up toward her receding hairline, toward memory. "He used to love that silence. He'd just surrender, listening." She looks at Nechtr. "That was before you were even born. Before he wrote anything anyone but he and I would ever buy."

"Before Mr. Steelritter turned him on to meat and oil and metabetrayal?"

She smiles orangely, smooths her limply askew hair with a fatigue-sleeve.

"And what's true never changes, is what he said. From B.C. to this Very End you kids seem to worship. I believed in him, as an artist. I loved him very, very much. Enough to trust him even now.

"If you want," she says, "your whole life in the adult world can be like this country. In the center. Flat as nothing. One big sweep. So you can see right to the edge of where everything curves. So everything's right in front of your nose. That's why I sometimes throw cards. To show me my nose."

"You throw cards?" Mark says, making a face with his rosy face. "Jesus, D.L. throws them." Mark distrusts thrown cards: all those arcane categories, vague meanings, wish-fulfillment as prophecy. "I don't trust them," he admits. "They just tell her what she wants to hear. They're just vague enough so you can make them say what you want to happen or are neurotic about happening." He almost sneers, if there's such a thing as a numb sneer. "And then you and her psychic call it prophecy. It's obscene, is what it is."

Magda looks at him baldly from her side of the broken-armed cross in military surplus. The rain around them is letting up. The real heart of the sudden storm has moved off East, seeming coolly to strut, a bit tiptoed.

"Your lover doesn't throw cards," Magda laughs. "She carries them around probably wrapped in silk, probably even with a souvenir crystal; and she shuffles them and closes her eyes and spreads them out, afraid to look, the way people who make wishes are scared to tell you the wish, for fear the magic is fragile, sensitive to light."

(Again, I feel an obligation to say that this is synopsis, and not true to a voice I'm afraid I just can't do.)

"She tries to use them," Magda (more or less) continues. "She invests them with a power to change what they can only reveal. She wants shelter, a structure. A house of cards, with tiny furniture. Not the kind of great blind sweep you get when you throw" She makes a throwing gesture that's surprisingly deft and slight. "Not a mirror, that just shows you your nose." She looks at Mark. "When's the last time you saw your nose?"

FOREGROUND THAT INTRUDES BUT'S REALLY TOO TINY TO EVEN SEE: PROPOSITIONS ABOUT A LOVER

Maybe because she's never, never once, been made to be anything other than what others see, Magda Ambrose-Gatz has vast untapped resources of virtue and smarts and all-around balls. D.L reads painted Elkesaite cards, knows her own rising sign, and consults media. Magda, who's been seen so often her face is pumpkin-colored, is never called on to see others, or to speak from the heart. So she listens. And sees, inside. Never called on to speak, she can actually love her own tongue, as those born to subjection may love their skin, ears, eyes. She can count the hairs in your head, hear the cries of my cells expiring. She can see. She can spread the whole outside flat, inside, throw the kind of colorless cards that reveal what cannot change. She does so for Mark, and does not condescend when the boy protests that she has no Tarot cards, only a regulation flight-attendant's skirt and a faded fatigue jacket taken from the superfluous figure suspended above them and wrapped around her against the bland chill that always follows a storm's third act.

I am sorry. I have such respect for this woman that I just cannot show her to you in the light her shadow deserves. I am lovesick, and ungrown, and know no trope or toponymic topoi, no image worthy. I have to play the supplicant here; ask you simply to eat some raw bare propositions I can't prepare or flavor enough to engage your real imagination. We're all quite tired, and deprived, and it's getting pretty clear that we'll probably be asleep by the rime the actual revel gets started; so I'm going to cease all fucking around and just tell you what Magda tells Mark — what she knows, from just her senses, which are never in demand.

Magda knows that the water D.L. finally boils will not be for any labor. Magda knows that D.L. will emerge, in time, unMarked, as the single best copywriter J.D. Steelritter Advertising has ever used. She will rise through the adman ranks, assume a management position, eventually marry J.D.'s atonally ambitious harlequinned son (who'll be a sensitive and surprisingly gentle father), and be the lone female pallbearer when the most creative mind in the history of American advertising finally succumbs to carcinoma of the lower lip and is buried in a plot that requires no floral embellishment. Drew-Lynn will, in time, become J.D. Steelritter Advertising, and discover that the key to all ingenious and effective and original advertising is not the compelled creation of all-new jingles and images, but the simple arrangement of old words and older pictures into relationships the consumer already believes are true. She will take root, blossom, and mature in an environment of responsibility, and will do her late mentor true honor in continuing the masterful orchestration of the two long-term, brand-building campaigns J.D. will die proudest of. She will live to see Ray Kroc's one little Collision concession stand truly become the world's community restaurant. She will see to it personally that Dr. C— Ambrose's one flat gutted Maryland Funhouse comes truly to offer a whole new dimension in alone fun, become the discotheque where America can be themselves. She'll impose her will on awed, sleep-deprived, travel-weary clients with a dispassion born of an oracular instinct for What the People Want. A grown D.L., cardless, will divine a nation's post-postmodern economic future. Funhouses will eventually allow patrons to toast the idea of toasting with actual drinks: the consequent rise in patronage, consumption, Demand, and thus price of admission, will meet the Supply curve at profit. McDonald's will eventually suspend its free-food-forever-for-com-mercial-alumni policy, unmoved by scattered reports of hungry former actors wandering, pressing gaunt noses to windows warm as flesh — and will, in consequence, suspend its emblazoned pronouncements about how many trillions of burgers have been served since the beginning of franchisee! time. The public will interpret McDonald's new silence about the number of meat patties served as the kind of modest reticence only the world's true community restaurant could afford to display. P.R. And it shall be good.

Magda's Tower- and arcana-dominated reading of Thomas Stern-berg I'll skip, out of respect for limitations of time and a general repulsion for all those like us. Know, though, that he'll eat what cannot be food, be prurient, have ideas, believe he wants to heal and act, neither heal nor act, will putter all his adult life around the house his dead parents leave standing, and generally become the sort of Back Bay neighborhood presence with whom you Do Not Fuck.

Mark's field of time is harder to survey; because, since he is, at root, still an infant, his future is not yet something that cannot change. He believes there's some simple, radical difference about him. He hopes it's genius, fears it's madness. Magda knows it's neither. She knows that in truth Mark is just a radically simple person, wildly noncomplex, one of the very few men she's read for who's exhaustively describable in fewer than three adjectives. She predicts he will, in the Eleemosynary period following a scarred divorce he wants to be depressed about, give away a detergent fortune to the United Redemption Charities Corporation. That he'll travel without cease — not in the way of his father or J.D. or Ambrose, who steer exclusively by their rearview mirrors, but with the forward simplicity of a generation for whom whatever lies behind lies there fouled, soiled, used up, East.

But since J.D. Steelritter is the type of parousia whose advent leaves exactly zero to chance, the bloody, chocked field of the Reunion's next five days cannot change. And Magda sees that, in that time, Mark, his complicated bow exchanged for a bulky rented key, will shut the Funhouse franchise doors against the reveled babble, sit his ass down, and actually write a story — though it'll be one he'll believe is not his own. He'll see the piece as basically a rearranged rip-off of the radio's "People's Precinct" episode they've heard just now, and of the whole long, slow, stalled trip in general. It'll be a kind of plagiarism, a small usurpation; and Mark will be visibly embarrassed about the fact that the Nechtr-story Professor Ambrose will approve best, and will maybe base letters of recommendation on, will not be any type of recognized classified fiction, but simply a weird blind rearrangement of what's been in plain sight, the whole time, through the moving windows. That its claim to be a lie will itself be a lie.

The story that isn't Mark Nechtr's by Mark Nechtr concerns a young competitive archer, named Dave, and his live-in lover, named L—. Dave, who is not nearly so healthy as Mark, believes that the only things that give his life meaning and direction are his competitive archery and his lover, L—, who is a great deal more attractive and sympathetic than D.L., with cheekbones out to here and a zest for life Dave cannot but share, through her.

L— is pretty much an emblem of Dave's generation, is deprived and aimless and mildly wacko, with moods that change like the shapes of the moon that obsess her. Dave stands witness to all of her faults, though only some of his own, and but anyway loves L— anyway. It's implied that he's dependent on her, for support; she stands in the hushed tournament galleries when he stands perpendicular to targets and shoots competitively with his complex fiberglass bow and Dexter Aluminum arrows. Dave is a solid young competitive archer, but by no means the best, even in his age division, and at the piece's outset he feels like a true, born-to-be archer only when L— is standing there, in the gallery, watching him stand and deliver.

But they fight, as lovers. L— is self-conscious, neurasthenic, insecure, moody, diffracted. Dave is introverted, self-counseled, and tends to be about as expressive as processed cheese. When the hottest darkest mood in L—'s weather collides with his cold white quiet, they have violent arguments that seem utterly to transform them. Dave had never even raised his voice to a girl before he fell for L—, and hates confrontation's habit of making his hands (which he values) unsteady. But when she slips into the worst of herself, they scream and fight and carry on like things possessed. Pointy personal shrapnel flies. The air gets coppery with violence.

In truth, Dave is often afraid to turn his back on L—, especially in their kitchen, when sharp things are handy; and he's ashamed of this, and of the fact that after a fight he's often afraid to go to sleep when she is awake and malevolent and boiling water is only a stove and kettle away. Nevertheless he loves his lover, and cannot understand the dark heat that fills him when they fight, or his need to lick his lips while she lists real and imagined grievances — or that his only really true deep concern during the screaming matches is that the neighbors in their community might hear her screams, or his screams, or her different screams as they reconcile, always via violent union. Though callow and beardless and not experienced, Dave loves L— enough to maintain the form of excitement throughout broad stretches of heated lovemaking; and L— believes, wrongly, that he is a born lover. She loves him physically with an intensity that is informed by her zest for a life she consumes. But the intensity of her loyalty to Dave is shot through with streaks of what can only be called a kind of greed. When she loves him, and cries out through the thin ceiling to maybe the whole neighborhood oh just how much she loves him, he fears that she means only that she loves what she feels. And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

The workshop and Ambrose approve this overture, this setting-up, though they do point out that it goes on a bit longer than absolutely necessary, limitations of space and patience being a constant and defining limitation, these quick and distracting days.

And but yes there is something self-obsessed about L—'s love, we can feel. For example, she wishes Dave to tell her, instead of that he loves her, that she is loved. Her father used to say it as he tucked her gently into his USMC-surplus poncho-liner at bedtime, she explains; and it made her happy. That she was loved. That she is loved. Dave feels like not he, but rather her desire to be loved, to be beloved, is what gives L— 's life its direction and meaning; and some tiny targeteer's voice cries out inside him against telling her that she is loved just because the fact that he loves her isn't enough to stave off insecurity and self-consciousness and dissension and row.

Etc. etc. Dave, pretty darn stubborn when it comes to his tiny archer's cry, refuses, inside, to use the passive voice to articulate his love. And one fine day he actually articulates this refusal, and the reasonable arguments that lie behind it. He does this at significant personal risk.

For, articulated-to, enraged, L— blows off her appearance at the most important junior archery tournament of the Tidewater shooting season. Dave shoots alone, unwatched, afraid — and but he overcomes, shoots so surprisingly well that he places an overall third in his age-division. His best finish yet. When L— bursts into their loft at nighttime, darkly transformed by both his articulated refusal to use the passive voice and his subsequent failure to fail without her, Dave wills himself to appear cool and distant and emotionally mute, but is actually licking his lips furtively as a dusky heat inside him dawns and breaks into tributaries and attendant falls, spreading. Maybe the loudest fight in the history of this generation's verbal love ensues, with broken valuables and threats of a very great stabbing.

But L— hates herself more than she loves or hates Dave, it turns out, is the thing. Which makes her climactic lover's thrust at him sort of perfect in both directions. Having de-quivered and brandished Dave's best and unlosable Dexter Aluminum target arrow, as if to stab her lover, L— turns it shaft-backwards and, with a look on her Valentine face past all belief — a look that communicates perfectly her three true selves: the blindly loyal, the greedily past-impassioned, and the self-imprisoned hating — with this look, reflected bulgingly in Dave's TV's dead green eye, she unfortunately puts the Dexter arrow through her own creamy oft-kissed throat, right up to the nock. She falls and lies there, victorious and pierced, her pelvis moving and life a bright fountain around the boy's unlosable shaft.

So far it's a good graduate-workshop story, the rare kind that imposes the very logic it obeys; and plus it has the unnameable but stomach-punching quality of something real, a welcome relief from those dread watch-me-be-clever pieces — or, even more dread, a fashionably modern minimal exercise, going through its weary motions as it slouches toward epiphany. What "works least well" for Dr. Ambrose and Mark's colleagues at the E.C.T. seminar is the part that deals with why this guy Dave is subsequently arrested and incarcerated and tried and imprisoned for L—'s murder. The section's chattery, and about as subtle as a brick, but the gist is that picture this: L— lies twisted and punctured and spent and moving and red before the mute Sony in Dave's shared room, losing blood with every pulse, self-stabbed with the high-tech arrow that had placed Dave third alone. She's clearly near death, and looks with supplication and a trust born of true love's blind loyalty at Dave, waiting for him to obey basic human instincts and leap to remove the wickedly intrusive shaft. But Dave, come suddenly of age, hears no ching of instinct's bell; he feels only the kind of numb visual objectivity that makes a born archer mature. He takes precious time out to look at the big picture, here. He takes the long view. He: sees that L— has pulled crunchingly into death's gravel driveway, that no way can she be saved in time (tourniquet pretty obviously impractical); fears that their community's collective ear has heard the violent row he didn't start; concludes that if he takes hold of the aluminum shaft to remove the weapon, the whorled oil his fingers exude will establish itself as his forensic mark on the Dexter arrow; and then his lover will die anyway, and the whole thing will maybe be interpreted by others as exactly what it will look like. Crime of passion. Murder-1. Dave licks his lips absently as he tries to anticipate interpretation. This goes on forever, narratively speaking. L—, her eyes never leaving her lover's, finally, to pretty much everyone's relief, expires.

The workshop objects especially to two things, here. The first is the story's claim that all Dave's self-conscious caution about fingerprints is for naught, because the whorls of his oil are already on the arrow anyway — he had fletched, held, fitted, nocked, and shot the special arrow three times in that day's competition. Since explicit and verisimilitudinous mention is made on Mark's mss. p. 8 of the skin-thin leather gloves all serious competitive archers wear, though, the believability of Dave's fingerprints being on the shaft depends on an awareness that an archer's glove covers only the wrist and palm (protecting them from the shaft's explosive reaction to the bow's leftward pressure): the nakedness of an archer's fingers, Dr. Ambrose argues reasonably, is not a piece of information Mark can expect the average reader to have in the arsenal average readers bring to bear on average stories. Basically what you're doing when you're writing fiction is telling a lie, he tells those of us in the seminar; and the psychology of reading dictates that we're willing to buy only what coheres, on some gut level, with what we already believe.

Weaker still, Ambrose claims (though with tact and cheer), is the story's claim that the Tidewater coroner's inquest reveals that the cause of L—'s death, as she lay horizontal with the wicked shaft protruding, was neither trauma to aspirate organ nor loss of bodily fluid, but rather. . old age. A collective"?!?" greets this move of Mark's. Though it's done lovingly.

Do some very simple cost-benefit analyses, Ambrose advises Nechtr, rubbing the red commas his glasses have imposed on his orange nose's bridge: Why compromise the tale's carefully crafted heart-felt feel and charming emotional realism with a sudden, gratuitous, and worst of all symbolic bit of surrealism like this?

Especially since the real meat of the story lies ahead, in the Maryland Facility for Correction, where a numbly shattered and even less healthy Dave awaits trial and a judicial retribution he cannot deny he deserves. The epistatic twist of the knife here is that Dave is Not Guilty, yet is at the same time guilty of being Not Guilty: his adult fear of the community's interpretation of his prints and shaft has caused him to abandon his arrow, to betray a lover, to violate his own human primal instinct toward honor. How ethically, craftedly clever is this double-bladed twist, Ambrose tells us as we take notes; and how charmingly unfashionable to hear honor actually used as a noun, today.

Meanwhile, inside the story we have all, as part of the class requirement, read and put copious comments in the margins of, we're told that exactly nothing in Dave's sheltered experience prepares him for the hellishness of the Facility where he awaits trial. He lives in a tight gray ghastly cell. And he is not Alone in there. He has a cellmate. His cellmate is horror embodied. A hardened career criminal awaiting sentencing on a counterfeiting conviction, the cellmate who licks his wet lips at Dave's arrival is a "Three-Time Loser," and under Maryland law can expect to receive the same Life Dave expects. The cellmate's body is loathsome, flabby, puke-white, fat-spider-like, flatulent, pocked, cystic, and carbolic. Dave finds him disgusting, and the evident fact that the counterfeiter, whose name is Mark, loathes his own body, resents the cell's two-thirds its confined storage requires, and is revolted by the sounds and odors that issue whenever he moves, breathes, or makes his unceasing use of the cell's elimination bucket — this Mark's self-loathing only increases the young archer's disgust. Plus horror. The cellmate is so cruel, bestial, hard, terrible, sadistic and depraved and repugnant (he actually sits on Dave's head, requiring that Dave play the part of bidet or else face the consequences) that Dave calmly considers suicide as maybe preferable to the possibility of Life in this cramped fetid cell with this hellish counterfeiter; but not for a moment, the story claims, does Dave feel ill-used by the universe in general, or doubt that he is not somehow precisely where he belongs: he cannot close his eyes without being subjected to the diplopic double image of his lover's steady, supplicating and aging (!?) eyes, and then his own eyes vertical above her, darting from side to side, more concerned with how he is seen than with what he sees. Yes, when he's not being savaged, violated, sat and shat upon, Dave has time to think; and he grows up all over again, in the Facility. He is, the story takes a risk by saying, "repentant" — which in its Franco-Latinate etymology, Ambrose reminds us from his station at the green blackboard, denotes a process, not a state. Dave accepts, numbly but not passively, his unacceptable confinement.

Yes but the counterfeiter, Mark, hates the tiny cell even more than Dave, though suicide never enters spider-minds unviolated by naïve romantic thoughts about things like honor or betrayal. But Mark does (does) have Ideas. He believes — and whispers, over and over, as Dave falls asleep brown-nosed and bloody in the violated bunk below — that if he, Mark, can just work out the kinks in his counterfeit key, can just escape, leave the tiny gray cell and the barbed, guarded Facility complex behind, return to the mythic and fertile Tidewater marshland he'd roamed as a ghastly child, he can be happy, whole, human. An idea man, he posits that the whole purpose of confinement in barred cells with tiny barred windows— the latter all the worse for the prisoner's ability to see a striped Outside which the bars render both visible and impossible to reach— the whole point is to "dehumanize," and that he, Mark, as minimally human (Dave, no idiot, holds his peace on this point), has a right to escape analogous to any attacked man's right to defend, to kill for what he must have or retain.

Data: Mark has spent most of the latter portion of his life behind bars, in the Facility, and presides over a whole predatory school of demoralized Lifers who are the whole Facility's basic mandate for erection. Mark has underground tentacles that extend into even the blackest markets. He and his school of followers do unspeakable things to Dave, force themselves on the weak sickly repentant archer in complexly depraved ways that Nechtr, quite frankly, hasn't the nerve or dark imagination yet really even to describe. This lack of facility, though, is interpreted by a sensitive instructor and loving workshop as disciplined restraint, and is duly applauded.

Etc. etc. but so eventually, one night, after Lockdown and the muffled screams of pre-sleep rape, Mark makes good his prophecy of flight. Dave wakes from his one familiar diplopic nightmare to see, against the striped light of the cellblock's hallway, his bulbous cellmate manipulating a counterfeit key, one Mark has spent two months tempering in the Facility's license-plate metal shop, into their cell door's Lockdown mechanism. The key, which is surprisingly simple in shape and serration, nevertheless gives the hardened counterfeiter total control over the movements of all the Facility's state-of-the-art automated doors. The key, as key, doesn't look like much of anything: Mark's had the thing in plain sight by the elimination bucket for weeks — only Dave, he said, had been told what it really was, or what, if willingly used, it could do.

The barred door slides silently open on its reliably-oiled track. Dave hears Mark cock his floppy puke-white ear for sounds: there is only the distant whimpered symphony of unfree dreamers.

And in that familiar moment of hesitation, the one before all leapers leap, Dave's tormenting mate turns to survey the space he has filled and now would empty. The keen archerlight of Dave's open eye is reflected in the counterfeit absence of the bar-shadow that usually shades him. He, supine, and Mark, erect, stare at each other across that silent moment. Dave does not know, right then, whether what is spoken is aloud.

"You've known what I've made. You've heard me whisper. You see what I'm doing."

Dave nods.

"And you know where I'm headed."

Dave does.

"Don't rat. Do not rat."

Dave nods.

"Rat and I'll kill you."

Dave hears.

"Rat and I'll have the whole place up your ass. They'll fuck you bloody and feed you your cock. They'll dink you. Your weak little body'll be found in locations. Note the plural. Shitspeck."

"I hear you," Dave says, so flatly there's no hint of echo.

But Mark's voice always echoes. "Rat and you're a late boy. As in zotzed. Klapped. This is a promise. I have tentacles, and rights. I'll defend myself against you."

"I don't rat," Dave says.

"Poppa!" cries a compulsive exhibitionist down the cellblock.

"Don't rat."

"Go, man." Dave's glad Mark's going, who're they kidding. "Bon voyage. Godspeed. Wear a hat. Don't try to hitchhike."

Further echoed connections between ratting and violent death recede with the counterfeiter, who holds his key before him like a candle in the bright cellblock hall.

Understandably, though, the M.F.C.'s professional penal authorities are not at all glad that the three-time counterfeiter has gone. Is at large. Penal helicopters chop and chuff all night, aloft. Dave turns his back to the still-unlocked door, holds his window's bars in his fists, and watches searchlights shine from clouds to play the land outside; hears the whiny petition of eager leashed hounds, the sinal rhythm of the Facility's escape siren; stands there, watching, till the gradual Maryland dawn, when he's led by uniformed hands to the spare, spartan, no-nonsense office of the Facility's Warden.

Here a narrative risk is gauged and taken. The Warden is Jack Lord, of fame. With the sort of apparent inconsistency that makes creative writing professors such delightfully puzzling pixies, Ambrose approves this particular unrealistic/symbolic touch. Some of the rich ambiguity of realism is, he concedes, sacrificed. But since Nechtr's whole story is interpreted by the workshop as about a whole new generation's feelings of amorphous but deserved guilt, confinement, fear, confusion, and, yes, the place of honor in the general postmodern American scheme of things, his fictional use of a popular icon, forged in the medium that is (sadly? sadly?) this generation's unbreakable window on itself, this rings somehow true, Ambrose tells us. It also ties in with the vivid post-escape helicopter imagery, which creates a sense of unity, craft, care. Which is good.

Also good is the fact that Lord needs little description, since he is an image of fame. His hard square face — white as the face of a man keeping an iron grip on ever-recalcitrant reins — his improbable overt jaw, barely-there lips, black eyes and high dark hair, one lank askew, are stamped on the consciousness of a whole post-bellbottom generation. Dave needn't even raise his eyes to know his gaoler's mettle as he listens to Jack Lord, listens, and then lies, denies that he knew of Mark's plans to escape, or that he witnessed the escape, or that he knows anything at all about the counterfeiter's means of exit, or destination, or route, or rate of travel. Mark, Dave says, did not confide in him. Mark repelled, terrorized and violated him. He is, to be honest, glad the Three-Time Loser has gone, yes, but knows not where to; cares less. If he'd been privy to the whole thing, wouldn't he be gone, too? Don't all, facing Life, given the chance, flee?

Not if they're guilty, Lord replies. Not if they're one of the special few here who know just where they belong.

Jack Lord always knows more than those he questions suspect that he knows. It is the nature of his character. It is law.

Another law of character is that an escapee always blabs to his cellmate about where he's going. And Mark, like all confined compromisers of the Mainland's order, like all loathsome men whose every movement is not toward but away, is a chatterer. A born talker. And Dave here, Lord can tell just by looking, is a born listener. Jack Lord's pointing finger is that of a potent and manicured God. His eyes burn dark. He may not smile. Dave knows, and he must tell. The truth.

Dave stands there and lies and lies and lies.

"And even if I did know," he says finally, voice even as cheese, "I don't rat. I will not rat. And you cannot make me. I've got Life, coming. The community heard my lover's screams. Fluids from my body were on the shaft that killed her. I'm going to be sentenced to Life. I'm trying to accept it, and this Facility. I'm coming of age. It's a hell beyond Bosch's worst nightmares here, and I'm headed for tenure. What more can you brandish? There's nothing you can do."

Mark Nechtr's dialogue does tend to get a tad flowery, when he's carried away. But what the fuck. You know?

But Jack Lord is smiling his one permitted smile: the smile that finds no humor in what may not change. The ordered world he lives by steering is black-and-white. Dave's face yellows as Lord breaks the basic news. It's not a question of what the penal authorities can do. It's what his cellmate, even though absent, can do. Dave is the one stray thread in the counterfeit escapee's seamless weave. And this counterfeiter's a hardened pro: he knows one sleepy mumble could unravel months of craft. Perhaps — no, undoubtedly—Mark threatened Dave about what happens to those who rat. Omitted from his presentation, though, Lord advises, was what happens even to those who do not rat. Dave represents an untidiness. A loose thread. An aesthetic problem. And counterfeiters are compulsive about the aesthetic integrity of what they've wrought. Lord makes a prediction. Mark is going to have Dave exterminated. Dinked. Zotzed. Jobbed. Mark has a circle, a ghastly following, here in the Facility. They will come, Lord predicts. Dave's only option is to rat, to reveal, to Jack Lord, Mark's means and route and velocity and end. Then and only then may Lord, who does not make the rules he only enforces them right up to the hilt, be allowed to shield and protect a helpful witness, Dave, an asset, with penal value. Only then will Jack Lord be empowered to preserve Dave's life. Let the archer eat and bathe, exercise and evacuate alone, in private, under trusted guard, away from Them. Perhaps even be able to work toward having Dave transferred to a different Facility. Let him make a fresh start, inside. Elsewhere. Clean penal slate. But Lord promises that all that, nay just plain old bare hand-to-mouth survival, can come to pass only if the archer reveals what Lord knows he knows. If not. . well, things don't need spelling out in this sort of environment, do they. No one is Alone in a Facility.

Jack Lord smiles that monochrome smile we know. The matter's in the archer's hands, not the Warden's. Dave is invited to give the whole matter some unleisurely thought, back in the general population. In the prison community.

Sure enough. In no time, things come to pass. They come for him in the exercise yard, the shower, the license-plate shop, the cell. Dave is assaulted, savaged, violated, punctured with homemade weapons the more fearsome for their being homemade. The Word is out. The grapevine sings. Vague drums beat low. Something has been offered. A bounty beyond measure. A hundred cigarettes.

Jack Lord explains to his teutonic new Assistant Warden — in a narrative interruption Ambrose says he'll let slide, just barely— that the price of life in the penal system is low, because the Facility is overstocked with lives, lives that wear only numbers, lives without honor or value or end. There is no demand for them. The market's invisible hand hefts a finger, damning the guilty to an existence of utter freedom, freedom to choke and starve, alone in a riot.

Didactic little fucker, too. Nechtr. But Ambrose was being indulgent that seminar day. We could tell he loved the kid, deep down.

But so here's the weak, sickly, and badly damaged archer, in the run-down Facility infirmary, looking like death incarnate, a black-eyed mummy of gauze, fed by tubes, relieved by tubes that often run red. Jack Lord appears bedside, dressed all in black. That his black pants are bellbottoms symbolizes what we already know: this is a man above ridicule.

Lord asks Dave how's life in general, down there, these days. It's the cold sort of question that is its own answer. The logic of Lord's prophecy has been immaculate. Mark, who's still at large, outside, though probably just long enough for someone in the population to accommodate his tentacled demand, has put a hundred-cigarette price on the archer's bandaged head. A hundred 100s. The good kind. The kind that burn forfuckingever. Word's out, kid. Not even this infirmary is safe, what with Dave's life as simultaneously worthless and valuable as it now is. Lord invites Dave to have a look at that Trusty of an orderly over there, grinning a Grinch-grin and filling a blunt syringe with something that just doesn't look promising at all; while out the hospital window's mesh a fag-hungry population waits, implacable, patient, pounding their own palms with socks filled with sand.

It's a matter of time, kid down there. Jack Lord won't waste it repeating himself. He's terse; it's well known. Dave can get dinked, or he can rat on the counterfeiter who sees him as a flaw, a smudge, who has the capacity and capital, and his suppliers the opportunity, to do the archer grievous and final harm. The Warden's helping hands remain penally bound. Dave must let him help. He must give, to receive. There can be lunch, but it is never free.

Ambrose tells us that this conversation, this dialogue between Dave in white gauze and Lord in black fashion, is handled with a deftness that earns our approval, a lengthy economy born of a precision that promises Payoff. That it "rings true." And that the story's end, "like all true apokes' tragicomic climae" (which I'm still damned if I can find in any dictionary or thesaurus anywhere), is not the less triumphant for its pathos.

OK, Ambrose concedes — he's no pedant — the story here bends over backwards a little too far — limbos, almost — to argue that Dave's climactic refusal to rat has nothing to do with his guilty innocence in the impalement and death of his one true love. That there's way less self-hatred than selflessness being performatively rendered here. Selflessness is, of course, horror embodied; but the argument here is that it keeps safe in its ghastly silent center the green kernel that is the true self.

Ambrose concedes that there are some technical fuck-ups here, because the story cuts its own argument's legs out from under, viz. when Dave admits that his refusal to rat to Jack Lord, still, is deeply selfish in a way. That it has to do with Desire. That he, Dave, covets something, some one thing, even in the depths of injury and cut-rate anesthesia above which Jack Lord's famous and logical image swims.

It has to do with honor, see, the prisoner says.

Dave tells an icon of popular culture that he feels like his own experiences and fuck-ups and trial and tribulations and anguish, both on the Outside and in the Facility, have given him some insights — some sight-ins — that have helped him on his way, a way less toward "coming of age" than toward just plain old living in the adult world. The adult world, in Dave's opinion, has turned out to be a basically shifty, shitty place. It's risky and often sad and always wildly insecure. It beats him over the head, just how insecure and fragile is his place in his own lifetime. He knows, now, that nearly everything you call Yours in the world can be taken away from you by other people, assuming that they want it enough. They can take away your freedom of location and movement, if there's judgment. Men you didn't vote for can take your life with one red button, Jack. The world can take your loved ones, your love, your one beloved. Your dreams can be taken. Your manhood, integrity of cock and bum: vapor before a gale. What's his, then, that he can hold tight, secure?

This is the one thing, he says. He's had time to think, and he's no idiot, and he's been able to come up with just one thing. They can't take your honor. Only that can be only given. And it can be given — with good reason, without good reason. But only given, that. It belongs to him. His be-longing. The one arrow he just can't lose, unless he lets it fly. His one thing.

Dave's thought it over, and he's decided he just does not rat. He does not betray. Not even Mark. Dave is going to be greedy. He's going to refuse to give away his last thing.

Get ready, because Jack Lord is… nonplussed. This weak kid's own life worth less to him than some idea? The Warden, were he younger, would be able to move his face's image into a surprise Dr. Ambrose confesses he'd like to see shown. 'Cause there's no logic here. No instinct. No sense. Some imaginary debt to a minimal human who'd job you over a matter of freaking aesthetics? Jack Lord's white face does move, a bit. What manner of beasts, these kids today? Our future? Tomorrow's Mainland? This boy would eat cock and die to honor some wacko abstract obligation to a person with no, and here Jack Lord means zero, value?

The supine murderer would sincerely like to make the erect peace officer understand. It is no matter, this To Whom the debt is owed. Dave's just too fucking selfish to do it. He feels like his bludgeon-blurred sense of obligation is all that's him, now. As much what's him as his past and present and future. His past is spent, cannot change; it's not in his control. God knows the future sure isn't. The present is, yes, probably just waiting to get zotzed by a market for endless flame. O Mr. Lord, but the fact that he does not rat: this is his self's coin, value constant against every curve's wave-like surge. Dave covets, values, hoards, and will not spend his honor. He'll not trade, not for anything the cosmic Monty's got stashed behind any silver curtain.

(So OK, it goes on a little long. Nechtr's lover-cold passion, unleashed, will admit no minimalist imperative, Magda knows.)

But so no. He apologizes. He'd love to buy lunch. He'd love to see the counterfeiter who sat on his head hopping up and down on something pointy till the end of time. He'd love to help Jack Lord maintain order. The famous Warden may have anything but what is his. This is his.

This last number is, believe it or not, a monologue, a ring-tailed kitty of a bitch to pull off, made somehow more powerful for us in class by the pathetically unself-conscious sentimentality with which a healthy but simple and kind of fucked-up boy reveals to us colleagues, and to his teacher, Magda's old lover, J.D.'s crafty client, something as obviously hidden as a nose, today.

Except but so does Dave rat? is the question Mark Nechtr's unfinished and basically unfinishable piece leaves the E.C.T. workshop with. Does the archer maybe rat, finally, after all? Sure doesn't look that way. But Ambrose invites us to listen closely to the kidnapped voice here. This Dave guy is characterized very carefully all the way through the thing as fundamentally weak. It's the flaw that informs his character. Is this the real him, bandaged, prostrate before ideas so old they're B.C.? That shit with Jack Lord: that was just words. Could a weak person act so? Debate, before the bell rings, is vigorous and hot. The ambiguity is the rich, accidental kind — admitting equally of concession and stand.

Well and understandably Mark Nechtr wants to know, too. Does the archer who's guilty of his lover rat? Doesn't he, Mark Nechtr, have to know, if he's going to make it up? And how can he in good conscience just rip off, swallow, digest and expel as his what an alumnus with a streaked orange face and removable hair has clearly seen first herself? Would that be honorable, or weak? Don't make light of it. Don't laugh. Look at him, beseeching, soaked, scalded. He looks like a supplicant, one of us, the unspecial who burn without ever getting to ignite, as he lies, stabbed for real, finally, by this one gift that always returns, in Pest-Aside-milky mud, among gorged little corpses, before a scarecrow stripped of fatigues to reveal what it's been revealed as all along: two planks, opposed; a rotten orange head just stuck there, topped by a cap-usurping wig; and a power to strike contemporary fear into just those crows who've no stake or interest in a dead black lacuna between two fertile fields of greenly dripping feed.

And, in a related relation, Mark Nechtr won't rat. Will never tell of the realistic or sentimental compassion the poorly hidden and obvious Dr. Ambrose, warmed by fatigues whose sun-dried breast reveals only a suffix and number, arms strong as pine, fleshy of head, thin hair plastered across under the cap of some Chicago Cubs who this year just might do it—Nechtr never once will rat about the genuine feeling the cold genius used to cradle an infant's thick healthy neck, to bear an exhausted but replenished but still deprived detergent heir from an unenclosed place, toward the possibility of transport. Night crawlers boil confused at their feet, pests marching back into the fray like men with a mission, bearing tiny straws into furrows lactic with runoff from Pest-Aside, the Brand that Lures to One Side, as the academic man straddles a double, trampled path marked by impractical pumps, fruit-stained skirt, corporate jacket, fried petals, prosthetically engorged blouse. He is just nice, to carry both arrow and archer, and not even to mention about ratting.

Not that he's not irritating, of course. A born talker, he reminds my classmate of various obvious facts. That they have left the East Coast, have left the world's busiest airport, have left the world's least busy C.I.A. and its inevitable pay lot; that they've driven here and there and but are now not lost but only stalled, idled too high by a fearsome plastic nose, on the last road, one whose in-sight curve Westward leads straight to Collision. That the storm's worst has, once more, taken itself off East, where they've been. That they've left some awfully sore folks in a machine that's now dead-level in mud, but are returning via the path they've taken from them who sit bunched tight in a clown's car washed clean of plea or foreign brand, a homemade machine, attached even now by a

length of chain to the chestnut mare of a big old farmer, harvester down, who'd wanted to hitch a lift only to the curve's third shanty, since his eldest kid's got the rented car; who has a surplus slicker, a flat-faced brood, a way with physics and chains, and the bare animal charity to pull a malevolent car from the earth and set it back on the road. That here's the public representative of McDonald's, pastel hips jutting and legs bowed atop the foaming mare, which heaves and steams and gallops, muscles in bunches moving like whole corn-fed waves under a tight hide. That it all looks at once mythic and familiar, set against the new same sun's dripping green noon: J.D.'s perfect profile at the furry wheel, under hanging dice, cigar unlit, his window clean and down, while those of Stern-berg and D.L. are up, since they like to feel what they look through, four hands on two panes; and the laboring horse game, galloping without purchase in the glassy mud, the enormous farmer pushing at the mare's ass, except without any friction for his big boots, so he is, yes, OK, in a way, walking in place; the car, J.D. Steelritter's accelerator pushed flat, the big car's idle screaming, higher and higher, its big rear Goodyears' hubs popped and spokes awhirl as the soaked earth, by not holding on, will not let them go.

That, tired, but in time, they'll arrive at what's been built. That it's way too late to go back on anything. So to the Reunion of All Who've Appeared, to the Egress, to the Funhouse, Ambrose's erect Funhouse, designed to universal standards to be — past all the hype that will support it — just that. A house. That, though Dr. Ambrose would rather be among those for whom it's designed, he'll eat with sad cheer the fact that he, as builder, is not among: not a face in the crowd of those for whom it's really there: the richly deprived, the phobically unenclosed, the in-need-of-shelter. Children.

Just a tad too long? Lovesick! Mark'd! I have hidden exactly nothing. So trust me: we will arrive. Cross my heart. Stick a needle. To tell the truth, we might already be there. The gleaming tar reflects our state's lidless noon. We can see ourselves in what we walk on. Jack Lord's promotional LordAloft chopper can even now be seen, reflected, aloft, in and out of the last of the clouds, probing with a white finger for all who are astray, stalled, behind schedules.

The light of his image's sun illuminates our homemade machine's rear tire, spinning in place, as the mare gallops in place, as the big old man shoves in place, without purchase. But the wheel! Bound by nothing, the Goodyear spins and spins, has lost its ringing hub, has disclosed a radial's spokes. Hold rapt for that impossible delay, that best interruption: that moment in all radial time when something unseen inside the blur of spokes seems to sputter, catch, and spin against the spin, inside.

See this thing. See inside what spins without purchase. Close your eye. Absolutely no salesmen will call. Relax. Lie back. I want nothing from you. Lie back. Relax. Quality soil washes right out. Lie back. Open. Face directions. Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines' noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It's a love song.

For whom?

You are loved.