Hob Broun - Inner Tube

Very early Sunday, the girl jostled me awake.

“This scene is too bloody sick,” she said. “I think we should both get out of here.”

There were warming sunspots on the backs of our heads as we headed west in her Trans Am. It was good to be moving again, even back the way I’d come. I started to talk some talk, feeling shrewd.

“Sister!” The girl clicked her tongue. “I can’t believe you fell for that schtick. They’ve been married seventeen years.”

ONCE, WATCHING GULLS WHEEL over the drilling rigs off Long Beach, I was told by a friend zealously colorless save for the ownership of an armadillo-skin guitar from Paraguay, a hawker of Spartacist magazines frequently shoved, occasionally decked, outside factory gates, that “All information is propaganda.” As absorptive as any generalization, probably more useful than most. I have been put upon and overworked; my theoretics, in turn, have been overindulged, my brain peptides allowed to swash and roil, perhaps to overflow. My desk is littered with papers where blanks are to be filled and boxes checked while I Wearily ponder such imponderables as: Connection between listening groups organized around radios in the street by market research pioneer J. Goebbels and coin-op TVs now ubiquitous in airports and bus depots across U.S.? I evoke my friends here now, the apparitional strumming of some coal miner’s anthem on his armadillo guitar, and his warm bath of certainties. I hear him say: “Communications technology is a byproduct of empire, developing out of military/industrial operation. As simple as the acronyms. OSS. RCA. NASA. COMSAT.”

Today, as I said, has been excessive, an overlapping of the tiresome and the inflammatory, a granular, unedited movie of unstable colors beginning with a two-car head-on barbecue half a mile from the facility entrance. Breakfast cereal arrived in my duodenum like bark chips. A lobby stooge who didn’t look old enough to vote compelled me to pass through the metal detector. I received in the mail an academic paper titled “The Protestant Supernatural: I Dream of Jeannie and My Favorite Martian,” and by phone a reprimand from a drone, who wouldn’t give his name, for failing to undergo the biannually required medical exam.

And so to work, a mild trepidation, admittedly with some precedent, that I was going to pick up interference — portents not only unnecessary but undesirable — dropping over me like a mist net. Two of my work orders had been urgently annotated with red felt marker. I slipped these to the bottom of the stack and spent more time than I had to on an abstract of the early sixties quiz scandals. I reviewed, on microfilm, the news play (son of prominent literary historian weeps in disgrace), and scanned a few of the culprit programs, Dotto, Twenty-One, etc. (“Welcome our returning champion and art lover, Gunnery Mate Bill Gwynn!”). How quaint all the shock and indignation now seemed, these elementary manipulations drawing a hot bewilderment like that of children discovering their parents in bed. The day’s first imponderable: Innocence lost or skepticism earned? Had the Apollo moonwalk actually been faked in a studio?

Chewing antacid mints, I moved on to a little project slugged SENSITIVE by the always chary Assignment staff. Evidently, a midwest interactive cable system — with, I assumed, a few pols in the background — wanted to move in the direction of the viewer-response political referendum. Your living room a voting booth! Should the administration continue its support for the Israeli occupation of Crete? Press now. Data enter. Suffrage by remote control seemed logical enough; all the wiring was in place. My task was to search out and analyze extant paradigm models, that is to say, see if anything similar had ever shown up on a TV show. A complex and detailed indexing system is in force here, but I didn’t know if it was up to this feckless job. Shit or Shinola? Was there a difference? I put it off on a pliable Third Tier researcher and went to see Ellen with mixed, vagrant feelings.

I found her watching Tommy Sands sing “Teenage Crush” on Kraft Theatre.

“My dreamboat.”

“Is this work?” I asked.

“What the fuck isn’t?” she said balefully.

Then, as if her mouth had been formed around speech long before I came in, as if the speech had been long thought out, if not definitively composed, she began to describe a week of compulsive pickups, of kneeling on car seats, lost clothing, fear in public parks. Her voice was low, smooth, cold. She spoke with a balance of obfuscation and detail that made my stomach clench and my cock stiffen, dropped finally away into glaring silence. I canted my eyes away, occupied my hands with a cigarette, thinking: She moves far outside your gravity, in a path too clean and swift for you. Don’t think it. Don’t even think it.

Ellen resumed her speech. “And all for the stupidest reason. Because my father married again. His fourth.” Pause. “A little thing from Dothan, Alabama. A platform diver.” Long pause. “Shit, it’s not that. Not that unsavory, secret Daddy love they paint on women with a stencil. I don’t care who he fucks. But the gratitude, the catering — to me, I mean. God, all that sugar water. The reminders are enough to choke me.”

“Reminders?”

“That he doesn’t have the slightest idea who I am.”

“So you have to go out and show him.”

“No.” She glared emphatically. “I have to deaden myself, pursue sensation until I reach insensibility. It isn’t the volcano erupting. It’s the lava after it’s gone cold.”

“I like a good aphorism.”

Delvino just inside the door, shiny as a wax-sprayed supermarket apple. Predatory eyes. The roving reporter. He affected leather-trimmed suspenders and his normally invasive geniality inappropriate for any situation.

“Can I help you?” Ellen said without much noticing him.

“Probably to see me,” I mumbled, starting out.

But Delvino came further in. “Good seeing both of you together. Chemistry is so very important. We’ve always felt that.”

“Yeah. We were just volleying a few ideas back and forth.”

“Exactly. This is a cooperative.”

Ellen had measured him out by now and sat, short hands in wide lap, like a houseguest in an uncomfortable chair. Nowhere the small rote defiance I might have expected.

“I don’t think you and I have been to the same parties,” she said.

Delvino did not move or smile, a mandarin. “I wouldn’t guess you care for parties.”

The glass beads at her wrist clicked like a tapped phone line. “Birthday parties, political parties. Do you suppose it’s because I’m too easily embarrassed? I like to walk downtown and pretend I’m from a foreign country.”

Delvino nodded, still not smiling. But he moved now, across and around the Panelyte rectangle, face molded in aimlessness. He riffled papers, weighed things and turned them, traced surfaces; not in purposive inspection, it seemed, but with the restful, not restive curiosity of someone waiting for an appointment.

“No grid overlays?” he said at last.

“I can do them in my head,” Ellen whispered.

“I’m the man for taking care of glitches. Anything else I should know about?”

I imagined Delvino taking an extension course in Interrogation taught by an ex-Miami cop, more recently Tenneco chief of security in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Delvino’s contempt for the other students is so complete, so automatic, that he is unaware of it. He takes voluminous notes, does outside reading, gets an A.

“You’re sure?” he was saying. “Resentments you might have been saving up?”

“I don’t save them,” Ellen said. “I spend them right away.”