… w/ the tragicomic irony here being that Ecko’s wacko & retrograde Romantic dream of union with Sissee in death turned out to come true. For S. Nar & Ecko were recombinantly joined in just precisely the 2-D world he’d Foreseen as their only possible union. For the syndicated vehicles Donahue! & Entertainment Tonight & its many avatars like Oprah & Geraldo! & A Current Affair & Inside Edition & Unsolved Mysteries & Sally Jessy! & Solved But Still Really Interesting Mysteries paid lavish & repetitive tribute to the now-tragic epic of Sissee Nar’s cometic rise & Reggie Ecko’s fall at the hands of Sissee’s father & the father’s epiphanic & Laiusian dreams & Sissee’s paralysis in the mirror of Ecko’s lenses & high-caliber ventilation & gruesome death with her Walkman still on & urging the first police on the scene to Flex That Fundament & Ecko’s mysterious triballistic suicide & subsequently discovered Crayola diary. & the very most famous Varietae photo of an unconscious Endymionic Sissee & a photo of Reggie Ecko jet-skiing with Ricardo Montalban back when he’d moved & shaken at Tri-Stan’s apex — these two images kept getting juxtaposed on-screen & placed side by side behind the commentators’ variform heads; & the Enquirer even did the job right & spliced the negatives together & claimed they’d been lovers all along, Ecko & Sissee, with a fetish for cross-dressing & watersports…& so fan/lover & star/object really were, in a sort of cynically campy but still contemporarily deep & mythic way, united, melded in death, in 2-D, in tales & on screens.
& then when Ovid the Obtuse’s gregarious Rolfer happened to be discussing his own obsession with the celebrated case one day during a spinogravitational alignment, & saying (the Rolfer was) how it seemed a terribly insensitive & grisly thing to say but that Ecko & Sissee Nar looked, in 2-D juxtaposition, like just the sort of perfectly doomed couple that all good BC Americans of whatever erotic persuasion hear & read & fantasize Romantically about from the age of say Grimms’ Tales on… at this point Ovid the O. got the idea to turn the entire affair into this sort of ironically contemporary & self-conscious but still mythically resonant & highly lyrical entertainment-property. The fact that Agon M. Nar — now so peripetially devastated that he has in public cursed the Gods via Prepared Statement & has ceased all moving/shaking/recombining & has allowed S-NN to be surpassed in the Sweeps by a rank cable imitator, Ted of Atlanta’s Hit or Myth Network — that Nar had had his attorneys tell Ovid the Obtuse that any unauthorized Sissee-lyric would constitute grounds for legal action deterred O. the O. not one iota. Seeking, as his lapidary soliciting abstract put it, to ‘… renew our abiding puzzlement at such suffering,’ Ovid proposed to reconstitute & present the story as a ‘… high-concept miscegenation-of-Romantic-archetypestype metamyth,’ a kind of hottub-swingers’ incest among Tristan & Narcissus & Echo & Isolde; & in the abstract he not only confirmed but did in fact plagiarize Dirk of Fresno’s theory that such were Stasis the P. Reception God’s grief at the demise of his mortal Flavor-of-the-Month & wrath at the lovesick ex-exec who’d 86’d her that he denied Reggie Ecko’s thrice-shot soul the peace of any sort of Underworld visa, that instead Stasis condemned Ecko’s ghost to haunt forever those most ultra of broadcast television’s UHF bandwidths, to abide there annoyingly & imperfectly juxtaposed with all figures & imbricately to overlap & mimic their on-screen movements as an irksome visual echo to help remind impressionable mortals that what we’re transfixed by is artificial & mediated by imperfect technē. (Like we didn’t already know. (Plus reception was nearly perfect on Cable by this time anyway.))
& but one final & epexegetic ‘alas.’ For such proved to be the descantant Ovid’s love for reflecting on his own periphrastic theories about what made Agon M. Nar & Stasis & Codependae & the Satyr-Nymph Network & the popularization of timeless lies resonate aesthetically that he neglected to make any substantive mention of the fact that Sissee Nar had in fact been Skinnerianly raised to fear & avoid & religiously eschew all mirrors, any surface with reflective burnish, her wise & clever but somewhat Behaviorist father fearing that her image’s ever-Enhancing beauty would, seen, render her unattractively narcissistic, stoned on self-love; & Ovid neglected to reveal how the whole reason A.M.N. had chosen a comatose role for Sissee’s debut was so that her eyes could remain demurely shut during shooting & she could be spared any involutant glimpses of herself on monitors or tape, etc.; that if A.M.N.’d maybe let his Enhanced Love-Dumpling have one or two quick mithridatitic glimpses of herself in mirrors — thus letting her glean even some slim bit of an idea what Herm Deight MD’s aesthetic Enhancements had wrought — before at last Ecko of Venice’s reflective shades hove into her unprepared view, she’d not have been so transfixed & shocked by an image which actually she alone in all the fluorescent basin saw in truth as imperfect nay flawed & inadequately Enhanced & like totally gnarlyly mortal, & she might have been able to keep it psychically together enough to run like hell & escape the semiautomatic Wagnerian intentions of the lunatic UHF-ghost-to-be. So Ovid ended up having to stick all this narratively important background in right at the end, pretentiously referring to it as an ‘epexegesis,’ & the Acquiring Editor of the respected glossy organ he’d solicited was ill pleased, & the organ didn’t buy the thing after all, although Ted of Atlanta’s cable H.O.M.N. bought the rights to Ovid’s overall concept for one of those ‘Remembering Sissee’—type tribute-specials that lets you use a whole lot of public-domain footage over & over again under the rubric of Encomium; & even though ‘Remembering Sissee’ didn’t actually ever make it onto the wire (Hit or Myth was by then processing 660 myth-recombination concepts per diem), its Option Payment to Ovid was far from dishonoring, & between that & the respected glossy organ’s Kill Fee Ovid the Obtuse ended up making out okay on the whole thing; don’t you worry about Ovid.
ON HIS DEATHBED, HOLDING YOUR HAND, THE ACCLAIMED NEW YOUNG OFF-BROADWAY PLAYWRIGHT’S FATHER BEGS A BOON
THE FATHER: Listen: I did despise him. Do.
[PAUSE for episode of ophthalmorrhagia; technician’s swab/flush of dextrocular orbit; change of bandage]
THE FATHER: Why does no one tell you? Why do all regard it as a blessed event? There seems to be almost a conspiracy to keep you in the dark. Why does no one take you aside and tell you what is coming? Why not tell you the truth? That your life is to be forfeit? That you are expected now to give up everything and not only to receive no thanks but to expect none? Not one. To suspend the essential give-and-take you’d spent years learning was life and now want nothing? I tell you, worse than nothing: that you will have no more life that is yours? That all you wished for yourself you are now expected to wish for him instead? Whence this expectation? Does it sound reasonable to expect? Of a human being? To have nothing and wish nothing for you? That your entire human nature should somehow change, alter, as if magically, at the moment it emerges from her after causing her such pain and deforming her body so profoundly that ne — that she will herself somehow alter herself this way automatically, as if by magic, the instant he emerges, as if by some glandular bewitchment, but that you, who have not carried him or been joined by tubes, will remain, inside, as you have always been, yet be expected to change as well, drop everything, freely? Why does no one speak of it, this madness? That your failure to cast yourself away and change everything and be delirious with joy at — that this will be judged. Not just as a quote unquote parent but as a man. Your human worth. The prim smug look of those who would judge parents, judge them for not magically changing, not instantly ceding everything you’d wished for heretofore and—securus judicat orbis terrarum, Father. But Father are we really to believe it is so obvious and natural that no one feels even any need to tell you? Instinctive as blinking? Never think to warn you? It did not seem obvious to me, I can assure you. Have you ever actually seen an afterbirth? watch drop-jawed as it emerged and hit the floor, and what they do with it? No one told me I assure you. That one’s own wife might judge you deficient simply for remaining the man she married. Was I the only one not told? Why such silence when—