David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

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."