David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

"Cooking flowers is supposed to get you off?" DeHaven says. His half-and-half clown's profile pivots between creepy confusion and complete fear of his own instrumentation.

"They're a drug?" Sternberg says. "Except organic? An anti-fear pro-desire drug?"

"They're wrong," D.L. says in the strident voice of her Tarot tutor. "They stand for the fact that they're wrong. They're not only obscene symbols, they're clumsy symbols."

"Steelritter…" Magda begins huskily.

J.D. waves the rearview image of her orange face and askew wig aside, now so into what he's bet his life on that he's almost sublimated his utter dread about rain diluting the Reunion. Fucking Midwest weather. He says, "The Post-product missy's right, on this one. They're just symbols. They're about as subtle as a brick, for Christ's sake."

"Eating symbols?"

DeHaven's looking at the steady red light. "Pop?" J.D. cannot believe the back-stabbing innocence of a man who'd pass out symbols like they grew on trees. He addresses the back through the rearview. "And you think how you appear, how you feel, are your adman's only levers? Your only source of fear? That Today has gone on forever?"

Sternberg's affirmative is ear-splitting.

"Then you've got some coming of age to do, Mr. Always-looks-at-himself-half-the-time. 'Cause the ad business goes way, way back. You've got fears so deeply conditioned they're ingrained. Built right in. Hidden in plain sight. You know you feel it, back there. This feeling it's so conditioned it's part of you. As in there's certain things that, no matter what, one doesn't do those things. You don't kill your father. You don't betray your lover. You don't lie. Except when absolutely necessary. You don't aim a loaded weapon. Except in self-defense."

You don't disappear," D.L. says tonelessly. "You don't scald people in their sleep."

"I'd go ahead and put those up there, too," J.D. nods seriously, grim. "And another one, see. You don't put what's beautiful inside you, as fuel, when the whole reason it's beautiful is that it's outside you. Supposedly certain things are in the world. To see. Not to chew up and swallow and expel."

DeHaven's point of view on all this is diffracted. He's thinking of the probably several tons of roses he's consumed, at the farmhouse, over his childhood; and experiencing a growing affinity with D.L. Eberhardt, who's looking, as she hears the confirmation of her psychic's sagest advice, more and more like a cat hissing at the big shadow of some nameless and total threat — and has pretty well-developed canine teeth to begin with — and he's getting more and more afraid that a sleep-deprived J.D. is maybe off his fatherly nut, a bit, about the roses that have no, and I mean zero, historical effect on DeHaven; and the de-nosed clown is afraid that J.D.'s going to make him drive his malevolent car, that he built and lubricated with his own two ungloved hands, right into oil-depletion and seizure and breakdown; and begins to wish very much that they could simply stop, idle a bit, let J.D. calm down about what're only after all snacks and commercials, let DeHaven have a look at his own dipstick. . that they could simply stop to check how things are, under the glittered hood; that they could suffer a brief interruption that would maybe probably ultimately save time; wishes they—

"Pop."

"But those deep-in-your-bones feelings are conditioning, too," J.D. says. "You know what the first real ingenious timeless ad campaign even was?" He sees in the rearview two blank stares flanking two closed eyes. "Jesus," he shakes his head in disgust. "But the boredom, at least: even you kids know you feel the boredom in your gut, right along with the fear. 'Do not do what is not right.' Tired image. Hackneyed jingle. No marriage, anymore. Obsolete. Conditioning has obsolescence built right in. Like the Jew what's his name and his bells and dogs that drool. Dog hears the ching of that fucking bell over and over, plus his pups, generations of dogs, ching, ching, till the sound is like the sound of the dogs' own blood in their heads — they can't hear it anymore, don't listen — they after a while stop the drooling over meat the bell had started. Give them enough time and enough bells and they start yawning, at the ching. Over at Steelritter Ads we've done conditioning research up to here," holding one hand like a blade to his fine head's top, gently squeezing the flowers with the other, in the bag.

"Not doing what you know deep down is wrong to do is boring?" Mark says, feeling the stab of a particular numbness he associates with qualities that ought to make him glow.

J.D. hears nothing but his own small voice and For Whom: "So thus the same fears that inform your whole what's the word. . "

"Character," murmurs Magda Ambrose-Gatz.

"'. . character: can't hear them, can't be moved by them, they're such old hat, by today," J.D. says. He turns, hiking an elbow. "Your adman's basic challenge: how to get folks' fannies out of chairs; how to turn millennial boredom around, get things back on track, back toward the finish line? How to turn stasis into movement, either flight or pursuit?"

"Make the listening unfashionable?" Mark says.

J.D.'s tired eyes widen as he nods. "But how to do that? How to do that? With symbols, is how. You make a gesture. You show you desire not to hear the ching."

"You behead an unsubtle image of what beauty is and fry it in lard and consume and digest and excrete it?"

"Turn your biggest fear into your one real desire?"

"Sounds pretty damn political," Sternberg suggests.

"Except what's everybody's biggest fear?"

"That Mormon researcher had whole lists of them."

"Pop."

"No no no," J.D. shakes his head impatiently, gesturing with a cigar he does not hold. "The one big one. The one everybody has. The one that binds us up, as a crowd."

"Death?"

"Dishonor?"

"I'd go with death, darling."

"My vote still goes to having a body, dudes."

"Pop."

"You gesture," J.D. says. "You sell out the squeak of your own head's blood. You sell out, but for selling-out's own sake, without end or object" — he looks above right, at the storm clouds, which are getting spectacular—"change the tired channel from life, honor, out of nothing but a desire to love what you fear: the whole huge historical Judeo-Christian campaign starts to spin in reverse, from inside."

"A campaign spins?"

"We're bored animals" — J.D. makes a summing-up gesture. "Even the naive ones know that. Bored numb with the sound of bells, the taste of meat. But ring meat," he says, "and you can bet your life you'll eat a bell. And like it."

The unmuffled engine dies, the jacked-up car coasting in a sudden roaring absence of homemade sound and halting in the shoul-derless space between rural blacktop and bare fallow field, by the field's ditch, in dirt, maybe a quarter-mile from where the road they're on takes its last curve left, West, dead into Northeast Collision. All that's there to hold your eye up ahead are three tiny rural shacks, shanties, up by the big broad leftward curve. The shanties keep you from seeing exactly where the curved road goes.

The complete silence in the quiet car, as it rolls to a crunching stop in the dirt, is like whole minutes of that second right after loud music stops. "Like it" ricochets around in the red interior as the malevolent car gives up the ghost in the roadside dirt, coming to rest perpendicular to a barbed fence between a lush verdant healthy cornfield and a rich black fallow field, boiling with confused pests lured by a taste for quality.