David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

ACTUALLY PROBABLY NOT THE LAST INTRUSIVE INTERRUPTION

Mark Nechtr's ambivalent artistic attitude toward his teacher Dr. Ambrose — the fact that Ambrose is warm and tactful and unlov-erlike aside — and the fried-rose business completely and totally out of this picture altogether — really derives from Mark's new Trinitarian distrust of the fictional classifications that Ambrose seems to love and has entered, curling, looking for shelter from the very same cold critical winds that, in the fullness of time, had carved Ambrose's classified niche in the first place, see.

See — Mark tells the orange-faced flight attendant as they part a briefly-open-anyway curtain of water and enter the rain comparatively unseen, she shoeless and brown-skirted, his fashionable surgeon's shirt soaking quickly to a light green film over much health — dividing this fiction business into realistic and naturalistic and surrealistic and modern and postmodern and new-realistic and meta- is like dividing history into cosmic and tragic and prophetic and apocalyptic; is like dividing human beings into white and black and brown and yellow and orange. It atomizes, does not bind crowds, and, like everything timelessly dumb, leads to blind hatred, blind loyalty, blind supplication. Difference is no lover; it lives and dies dancing on the skins of things, tracing bare outlines as it feels for avenues of entry into exactly what it's made seamless. What Ambrose's "different" fictions do are just shadows, made various by the movements of men against one light. This one light is always desire. This is a truth so true it's B.C. If you're going to make lists to hide inside, he tells the stewardess — referring now to the D.L. he would love to hate — if you're going to classify everything, you might at least divide by the knife of what is desired, of where in the sky to look for the nothing-new sun. Divide from inside. Hom-iletic fiction desires peace. Eleemosynary fiction desires charity. Iconodulistic fiction desires order. Prurient fiction desires desire. Apocalyptic fiction desires the inevitable change it hides behind fearing.

Mark, if he were ever a real fiction writer, thinks he would like to try to be a Trinitarian writer. Trinitarian fiction, distinctively American, desires that change which stays always the same. It's cold as any supermarket — probably more economics than art — tracing the rate of a rate of change's change to a zero we pretend's not there, lying as it does behind Newton's fig leaf. It's an art that hides, tiny and fanged, in the eyes of storms, the axes of spins, the cold, still heart in the lover's pounding heart. It is triply subject, and good.

(Another reason Mark tends to keep his own counsel is that he can be a crashing chattering flap-jaw, once he lets go. His real friends suck it up, though, out of a kind of blind loyalty I'm afraid I can't help but admire.)

Yes Mark as Christian sees himself as would-be artist seeing himself as archer; baby Cupid; sick, bit Philoctetes, lover beyond time or compare. It is, he says, his one desire, the one beyond conditioning or obscene cuisine.

Except he tells Ms. Ambrose-Gatz it's beyond him. When he shoots, he feels it so. He feels, in his guts, that it would take three archers really to pull it off, to leave the reader punctured and spent and red. And American children shoot alone: it builds character.

"Three?" she asks, whole stewardess uniform now dark as her stained lap, shoes in a hand that balances her path through mud so fertile it stinks. Gorged insects have drowned in the milky Pest-Aside runoff, and bob.

One, he says, to aim just left and so impale the target's center. Another, he says, to betray the perfection of his comrade, to split the first arrow in two, with his own shaft.

And the third?

To be the beloved. The willingly betrayed. To wear the bright bull's-eye, and dance, under one light. To invite the very end we object to, genuflecting. To be aimed at: the at-long-last Reunion of love and what love loves.

Well and this old not-at-all-classy scarecrow is on the job: there are no crows in the rain. The malevolent car is visible through the undulating downpour, above, past a roadside ditch roaring with runoff. Sternberg's hands are at his window, and his face, looking out. J.D. and D.L. are fogged from sight. The colorful clown is on the crooked porch of the third and most distant shanty, knocking at an open door.

The potent abandoned scarecrow they stand by is just a crude cross of slapdash timber dressed up in faded military fatigues. It has no subtlety at all. The name on the military jacket's breast is obscured. The scarecrow wears a sodden Chicago Cubs cap on the not-fresh pumpkin that serves as a head, and, since it's a cross, has its arms straight out to the sides, though the arms' timber has been jaggedly broken, to simulate elbows, so that the fatigued sleeves droop earthward. The broken arms afford shelter, a bit, for the Magda who stands under an empty sleeve.

Mark can tell that Magda Ambrose-Gatz is smart. Not brilliant or witty or well-read. Not an idea man or a creative genius. She's just smart, the way simply hanging in there, as you, through all kinds of everyday tribulation and general shit can make you smart. She was in that story of Ambrose's, she tells Mark, though in there she was disguised and misrepresented, because even then her face was kind of orange. She had, yes, united with Ambrose, for a while, in holy matrimony. She still cared for him. Although they hadn't been in contact for a really long time. But she wished to speak to Mark Nechtr, here, she said, in the scarecrow's absence of shadow, because she thought she sensed underneath Mark's affected cool exterior a boy hotly cocky enough to think he might someday inherit Ambrose's bald crown and ballpoint scepter, to wish to try and sing to the next generation of the very same sad kids.

This storm's not a really bad Midwest storm, she remarks, as they stand by the scarecrow in the horizontal rain. Too windy to be really dangerous. The bad storms always hide behind a dead calm and a yellow-green sky. That's when you head for the cellar.

Mark should keep off the fried roses, in Magda's opinion. Not because they're fatal, or evil. Magda claims she'd used something similar, both with her Maryland lover and after, to preserve her orange face and voluptuous history against time's imperial march though a Depression, three recessions, a War, a Police Action, a Conflict, nine droughts, three plagues of mutagenic pests, twelve corn harvests so bountiful they were worthless, one airline deregulation, three (whoops, make that four) Presidential scandals, and the eventual erosion of agricultural price supports under pressure from the grocery lobby. And not because the dead snacks are advertising embodied, or clunky symbols, or obscene; or that they block Mark, shut him up alone inside the silence he dreads.

But just because they're not right. And right means more than ought. It also means direction. To try to digest fear into desire is to go backwards. Fear and desire are already married. Freely. One's impaled the other since B.C. What you're scared of has always been what moved you. And where you're heading has always been your real end, your Desire.

(This is all a summary, a what's the word a synopsis, and admittedly not in Magda's real voice, which cannot be done justice by me.)

That what unlocks you, even today, is what you want to want. In what you value. And what you value's married to those certain things you just won't do. And here's a cliché that's earned its status as a cliché: whether you're free or locked up depends, all and only, on what you want. What you have matters about as much as the color of your sky. Or your bars.