David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

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.