David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

"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."