David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

The rain makes the sound of rain. DeHaven's homemade car whines and roars above the flooded ditch and bare shoulder. The car's big rear wheels spin, screaming, sinking deeper into the mud. The car's acclivated shape is now a declivated shape.

Why using beauty for fuel is bad; why it's clumsy: it's superfluous: we already ache with desire for what we fear.

This sounds to Mark troublingiy familiar: it's a seamless wave of muscular Anglo-Saxon ideas, it smacks of Dr. C— Ambrose.

Whom Mark no longer quite trusts, obviously.

Magda'll give Mark examples, then. Sternberg is obviously a big-time claustrophobe — she can always smell claustrophobia on a passenger — so why's he still inside the steamy enclosed car, eating? J.D. Steelritter desires, more than anything, to be happified, at peace; so why, though he consumes enough roses to color a Tidewater spring, does he spend his whole life worrying, planning, conceding, debating, persuading, interpreting, manipulating a faceless Crowd into backward ideas of what it wants? Why is he trying to bring about a Reunion that will silence the very clamor whose whine in his head is that head's life and bread?

And Mark's bride. D.L. wanted to be pregnant, miraculous, so that Mark would love her, do her virtue honor; so why didn't she seduce him when fertile, instead of constructing a coy and obvious lie whose lifespan can't possibly exceed three seasons?

The rain on Mark, though violent, feels good, familiar, like the tattered imagined bedroom breezes of pre-sleep. It seems OK that this alive woman who'll live forever only as an object in Ambrose's story about passion should know the secret D.L.'s mother knows, Mark's parents know, Mark knows, that only D.L. still believes he does not know. Why she lied about the little miracle to this boy, who was loved.

"Because she's infertile; she cannot produce," Magda says. "She will tell you, when you ask, that it has to do with a past. With a father. She'll invoke Electra, Vietnam, amputation, Laing, Freud. But the truth is that — inside, where push comes to shove— she wants it so."

The rain reveals both their bodies, and the skeleton under the scarecrow's clothes. Magda is really not at all pretty, facially, except for the utter and unconsciously expressed pleasure she takes in the water's feel, the overhung sleeve's fungal smell, the milky mud between her toes.

"How do you know this?"

"Because it's true, Mark. Everybody who really wants to knows what's true. Most people just don't want to. It means listening from deep inside. Most people just don't want to. But the special people listen. You can hear what's true, inside. Listen. You can always hear it. In the rain. In the static between stations. In the magnetic whisper on tapes, right before the music starts. And in that sound that utter, complete silence has, in your ears — that glittered tinkle, like tiny chimes at great heights. I believe I know you, and that you're probably special. The chances are good that you're a born listener."

Mark listens. It's true: he's special. They're both special. (But I'm not special, and chances are you're not — shit, we can't all be special, obviously; not enough room for a crowd that big in here. Suck it up.) So but he's special, it's true. Magda's right. He's a born listener.

But he can't hear anything out of the ordinary, anything that sounds especially true.

Magda laughs at the sight of DeHaven galumphing back to the screaming car, his wig still clamped tight as a skullcap, leading a big old farmer in a military-surplus slicker. The farmer leads a big horse by a heavy chain.

"I'm afraid I can't hear anything, Ma'am. I hear rain, and the car, and the car's horn, and clopping, and a chain clanking. I can't hear anything that sounds especially true."

"You will. I promise. Trust me. I know. What's true never changes its tune. He heard it, once."

"Ambrose heard it with you?"

"And you're wrong about why he's wrong. You and Steelritter are both wrong. I'm no postmodernist, or artist. I can't lie. But I still know the center you want isn't in classes, or categories, or even in what kind of religion you choose to genuflect to. It's here." She doesn't gesture. "Wherever you are. It's all around you. Every minute. That sound you hear when it's quiet, without sleep. Or awake, listening. A great silence." Her eyes roll up toward her receding hairline, toward memory. "He used to love that silence. He'd just surrender, listening." She looks at Nechtr. "That was before you were even born. Before he wrote anything anyone but he and I would ever buy."

"Before Mr. Steelritter turned him on to meat and oil and metabetrayal?"

She smiles orangely, smooths her limply askew hair with a fatigue-sleeve.

"And what's true never changes, is what he said. From B.C. to this Very End you kids seem to worship. I believed in him, as an artist. I loved him very, very much. Enough to trust him even now.

"If you want," she says, "your whole life in the adult world can be like this country. In the center. Flat as nothing. One big sweep. So you can see right to the edge of where everything curves. So everything's right in front of your nose. That's why I sometimes throw cards. To show me my nose."

"You throw cards?" Mark says, making a face with his rosy face. "Jesus, D.L. throws them." Mark distrusts thrown cards: all those arcane categories, vague meanings, wish-fulfillment as prophecy. "I don't trust them," he admits. "They just tell her what she wants to hear. They're just vague enough so you can make them say what you want to happen or are neurotic about happening." He almost sneers, if there's such a thing as a numb sneer. "And then you and her psychic call it prophecy. It's obscene, is what it is."

Magda looks at him baldly from her side of the broken-armed cross in military surplus. The rain around them is letting up. The real heart of the sudden storm has moved off East, seeming coolly to strut, a bit tiptoed.

"Your lover doesn't throw cards," Magda laughs. "She carries them around probably wrapped in silk, probably even with a souvenir crystal; and she shuffles them and closes her eyes and spreads them out, afraid to look, the way people who make wishes are scared to tell you the wish, for fear the magic is fragile, sensitive to light."

(Again, I feel an obligation to say that this is synopsis, and not true to a voice I'm afraid I just can't do.)

"She tries to use them," Magda (more or less) continues. "She invests them with a power to change what they can only reveal. She wants shelter, a structure. A house of cards, with tiny furniture. Not the kind of great blind sweep you get when you throw" She makes a throwing gesture that's surprisingly deft and slight. "Not a mirror, that just shows you your nose." She looks at Mark. "When's the last time you saw your nose?"

FOREGROUND THAT INTRUDES BUT'S REALLY TOO TINY TO EVEN SEE: PROPOSITIONS ABOUT A LOVER

Maybe because she's never, never once, been made to be anything other than what others see, Magda Ambrose-Gatz has vast untapped resources of virtue and smarts and all-around balls. D.L reads painted Elkesaite cards, knows her own rising sign, and consults media. Magda, who's been seen so often her face is pumpkin-colored, is never called on to see others, or to speak from the heart. So she listens. And sees, inside. Never called on to speak, she can actually love her own tongue, as those born to subjection may love their skin, ears, eyes. She can count the hairs in your head, hear the cries of my cells expiring. She can see. She can spread the whole outside flat, inside, throw the kind of colorless cards that reveal what cannot change. She does so for Mark, and does not condescend when the boy protests that she has no Tarot cards, only a regulation flight-attendant's skirt and a faded fatigue jacket taken from the superfluous figure suspended above them and wrapped around her against the bland chill that always follows a storm's third act.