Jack O'Connell - Wireless

During an average day, the Canal Zone streets are crowded and busy. Today the place is a bobbing sea of skinny bodies. There are people everywhere and they’re all feeding off each other, communally crazed on this buzz running through the air, this shared conception that some major incident is about to take place. Flynn has never been to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, but he’d bet this might be a close approximation. It’s like a spontaneous unorganized circus has gotten lost on the road and come to an unexpected stop in some outdoor museum of the middle industrial age. It’s like a ragtag carnival has mutated and grown to an unreasonable proportion.

This is their idea , Flynn thinks, of a memorial for a murder victim?

The idea down in the Zone seems to be to invert everything, toward the end of finding some other, hidden level of meaning. It’s as if all the residents have agreed that, no matter what else they might do to turn a coin or relieve the pressure, this is the real job, this hunt for codes and messages is the only genuine occupation. Their environment practically demands it. There’s so much input. There’s no way to avoid all the signals and symbols and markings that scream from every direction. They move through a constant sea of obscure bulletins, an ongoing blitz of never-quite-clear communiques. The graffiti alone is blinding. Every individual red brick in the Zone seems to be partially splashed with paint. The residents will tell you that no one ever sees the artist in the act. You simply walk down the street one day and notice a picture or a word or a series of words that wasn’t there before. Supposedly, there’s an acquired thrill in trying to discern different styles, in attempting to guess who created what.

Flynn looks down at the long side of the old Seward typewriter factory. The wall is covered, right up to the roof, thirty feet off the ground. He wonders if you flew over the Zone in a plane, would you find signs on the roof itself? The artwork is striking. There’s real talent down here, people with actual ability. Do they really prefer mill walls as their canvases? Is this the medium they most want to work in? He stares at the Seward and tries to take everything in: pictures of fire rings, photo-real crucifixes, naked bodies copulating, silver B-movie flying saucers, still lifes of orchids and small dead birds, a ram’s head, a pentagram. And then there are the words, sentence fragments mostly—

O’ZBON RULES

the boys are back in town

Jammers do it on the run

“… night is the cathedral where we recognize

the sign …”—Vega

A sheet of white paper catches a breeze and blows against his legs. Flynn picks it up and reads. It’s a flier, an ad for a free concert following the parade:

Today Only

From the roof of “St Anthony’s Temptation”

Q-town’s own

SEVERED ARTERY

plays a free “Open Channel Jam” Jam

from their soon to be released album

Chug the Hemlock on Visigoth Temple Records

Flynn lets the flier fall to the street and he and Ronnie continue to move slowly down Rimbaud. They start to spot dozens of pockets of sideshows, little circles of performance artists, huckster games, Grand Guignol puppet shows, and, surprisingly, corny little novelty schticks. But this being the Canal Zone, even the standard carny bit has an edge and a weirdness to it.

On the corner of Goulden Ave there’s this bearded transvestite shill running a Guess Your Neurosis booth. Out in front of Bella C’s Tavern there’s a trio of sad-faced doowop singers trying to croon harmony out of these old Workers’ Party folk tunes. Next to them, a teenage girl is working a cardboard monte table using a Tarot pack. But the hottest attraction of all seems to be a Dunk the Mime tank in front of Orsi’s Rib Room. People are lined up before the diner, waiting to toss baseballs at a round target. The current patron is hurling speed balls like he’s furious and on his second pitch he nails a bull’s-eye and the white-faced, black leotard-clad Marcel Marceau wannabe plummets from his perch into a tub of water.

Halfway down Rimbaud, a carousel has been planted in the center of the street, but instead of horses the wooden animals are all myth creatures — griffin, hydra, basilisk, sphinx, bunyip, harpies, various dragons, all with open, fanged, predatory mouths. Next to the carousel is a revival exhibition of classic late-seventies slam dancing. Skinheads lined up in rows at opposite gutters seem to wait for some obscure signal, maybe some crude octave buried in the Husker-Du bootleg that’s blasting from Marshall lamps mounted on the closest tenement rooftop. At the right moment they charge at full run to midstreet where they collide with an opposing punk, smash knees, chests, skulls, ricochet off each other and enjoy lesser, secondary collisions with other flying bodies.

Flynn and Ronnie pass through a charge, somehow untouched, and move along past a row of slick trench-coated hipsters, eyes hidden behind black lenses in 1950s Steve Allen frames. Each ranter is up on his own fruit crate and that small elevation gives them some credibility, Flynn thinks. They gesticulate as they ramble, all throaty, scatological babble, a dozen different bent ideologies to sample and take or leave.

None of this craziness is amusing Flynn and he fears that the levels of both his anxiety and the street weirdness are increasing as they walk. Ronnie senses the tension. She pulls him up onto the sidewalk and yells near his ear, “You want to head back to the Rib Room and get a coffee? It’s still a while before the parade comes by.”

Flynn can’t help himself. He says, “The Memorial, you mean.”

Ronnie takes his arm and pulls him down another block where the music is slightly muted. She shrugs and says, “What?”

He shrugs back at her. “Don’t you think this is a little, I don’t know … disrespectful?”

“Disrespectful?” Ronnie says. “That word doesn’t get used very often down here. God, Flynn, you sure know how to surprise me. It’s a celebration. Jeez, Mr. Catholic here. You never heard of celebrating the sacrifice?”

“You mean the Mass?” Flynn says. “You never heard of ‘for the greater good’? What good comes out of Todorov being fried? Where’s the redemption?”

“Maybe that remains to be seen.”

“Yeah,” Flynn says. “Maybe.”

She looks at him a second, as if debating whether or not to keep talking, then she makes a decision and starts to move again. He goes after her, takes her arm, and pulls her next to him. He wishes he could find a way to tell her what’s going on, but he’s not sure himself. He wants to shake this feeling. He wants to find a way back to that first night at the old airport, that feeling of ignition, of being conscious of the excitement and the possibility, the chance at a long-shot renewal. But the harder he works at shrugging off this virus of paranoia and suspicion and general unease, the more it seems to integrate itself within his system, honestly like a cancer, these haunting cells of distrust multiplying, jumping from organ to organ, forming pathways to further infection, toward a near future of … what? Where does this kind of virus leave you? In the shadow of a degrading psychosis? With a spleen full of perfect intolerance, aged beyond recognition, but still alive enough to feel the waves of panic and impotence and persecution?

It’s that goddamn call from Lenore’s little clone. You’re being set up . By who, for Christ sake? If it’s Ronnie, then where’s her margin? The jammers don’t touch her. She’s the goddess of the radio freaks. Why come after them? Unless her allegiance is to the station in general. Unless she simply believes in this system, this program of licensing and control and commerce. Unless she’s a believer , a zealot, a reverse picture, a mirror image of Hazel who can’t accept the disorder the jammers create, can’t allow for a world where anarchy is the goal, rather than harmony. Where chaos is honored and yearned for over discipline and regularity.