David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

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?