It's going to rain one fuck of a lot, they can all see. 2500W steams. The stuff seems to fall in bright curtains that close and part at the discretion of gusts. The rain threatens to enclose the stalled car. Sternberg's bad cheek is right up next to his smeared window, pressing against it, bloodlessly white. He's sure he's going to puke. The clouds before the curve and car are huge. They have an almost Trump-like architectural ambition. Mark can see still more rain coming, off to the West, but coming, braids of it hanging from the sky and whipping back and forth like tinsel in wind, the real meat of the thunderstorm now probably over Collision and the now-obscured giant arches and the sheltering tight-roofed Funhouse club, where all the adults and former kids are in out of the elements, waiting, raising flashcards emblazoned with the word GLASS, drinking the symbolic health of the very idea of toasting itself. He's sure now they've got it all backwards.
"Look, kid. Three shanties up there," J.D. points. He squeezes his son's pastel shoulder pad. "I want you to go have a look and a knock, see if anybody's home. Somebody rural, with a way with a homemade idle."
"The car's going to go down in this mud, Pop," DeHaven sniffles across D.L. "We'll get stuck sure, anyway. The fucker's already level, in back." He wipes clotted talc off his cheek. "God am I sorry, Pop."
"Hush, kid. Not your fault. Just go have a look. Please. Here," handing him the noseless yarn tangle from the dashboard. "Wear the wig. Keep your head dry. Don't catch cold. No sniffling Ronalds."
DeHaven keeps his chin up. "Right." He's out of the car and behind the silver curtain of serious rain — you can hear the hiss as his cigarette's hit and extinguished — and he's off up the road, his orange yarn held to his scalp like a hairnet, riding-habit hips jouncing under his orange trousers, big red shoes sending water everywhere, up the steaming rural blacktop road and out of sight into the breath-mist that collects on the windshield of the utterly enclosed, sheltering, rained-upon car.
This is pretty much the climax of the whole journey, by the way, pending arrival. The final impediment — reimbursement and revelry and meat and fried roses, all the roses anyone could want, roses right out the bazoo, just up ahead: past the impediment.
Drew-Lynn Eberhardt can tell DeHaven Steelritter and J.D. love each other, deep down, and this affects her. She is enormously sensitive to who is loved by whom.
While J.D. Steelritter settles back cigarless, letting condensation collect unwiped over a watch-face which why worry if worrying won't serve purposes; while D.L. flicks at the dice that hang from the rearview; while Tom Sternberg snacks, watching his gabardines go up and down like a derrick at his discretion alone; Magda uses an initialed cotton hankie to wipe at Mark's window, and they look out at the fallow field to the left of the fence, the black muddy field fallow and empty right to the skyline but for Pest-Aside-maddened pests and one old, rickety, blue-collar, and totally superfluous scarecrow. The scarecrow looks somehow both noble and pathetic, like a stoic guard standing sleepless watch over an empty vault. Mark and Magda both look at the field and scarecrow and all-business Illinois rain like people who are deprived. Magda feels an overwhelming — and completely nonoracular — compulsion to talk to somebody. Mark, a born listener, right from day one, feels nothing at all.
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.