David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

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.