His first thought is: How'd they know I was coming? And how'd they get me on video in the first place? Utter idiocy lasts long enough for Kraft to feel the sensation of dancing to yesterday's ballet, as if he's the mario-martinet doing the tag-along, aping his screen alter ego's choreography class. Once he figures out it's live, he almost twists his neck off trying to look directly at himself. Why can't he get his eyes — either this or that pair — around and past the side of his head? The problem's not with any obstruction in his face, any blockage in the old universal joint. It's just that the screen is here and the camera is over there, and that's why, he decides, every picture tells a story. And every story lies at right angles to itself.
He picks up the Handycam, fiddles with it. He points it around the store, at the other cameras, at a nearby mirror, holding the mimic at arm's length and gauging the effects on screen. He points it at the screen itself. Big mistake. He loses another god-knows-how-many minutes of his life, image-mapping the edges of recursion's all-devouring hellmouth.
A bank of demonic monitors runs along the back aisle and out of sight. Several hundred of them superimpose their simultaneous soundtracks into a cacophony that makes Ives sound like monkish homo-phony. The massed picture screens make up a mammoth grasshopper's compound eye. They trawl at random for a half-dozen picture signals and flaunt these in assembled, inscrutable patterns. One block of picture beam, interrupted by another, resumes as an irregular trapezoid just down the plane. For Kraft, the channels congeal into a single, wide-gauge program whose theme any stringer pediatrician would recognize at once: children adrift, out of doors too late at night, too far from home, migrating, campaigning, colonizing, displaced, dispersed, tortured loose, running for their lives.
He has stumbled onto one of those half-hour slots reserved for dispensing pitched bewilderment. They're doing news again, as they do around the clock these days. Image chorus line. The sight-bite Zeitgeist One signal block has been hijacked by an emergency update on this year's flash point, one that Kraft has until now only dimly registered. He focuses in on the account, amazed at how quickly this one has slipped from precocious to precarious. The language of direct confrontation — the contempt for the public behind all action in the public interest — cranks itself up to a pitch past the usual theatrics. The endless, impotent, international diplomatic game of chicken in Dad's car begins to embrace its casualty rates. Grim foreign secretaries shaking their heads Live at Ten rule out negotiation, basking in an electrified aura of imminence that, because of the network-wide inability of home audiences everywhere to sustain concentration, will once more turn to boredom by the dismembering end.
This evening's particular head-on high noon has been busy escalating, introducing new twists and chicanes while Kraft's been away. All sides accuse the others of disinformation, a spiral of ever more sophisticated muddying of the waters. Claims of historical mandate crash up against new world orders. Preacher beseechers on a competing channel tick off the prophetic countdown to Megiddo Revisited. Nebuchadnezzar is returned to power. Engineers work at constructing life-sized living models of Babylon. TV-steered TOWs stand in for angels of incineration. Infidel legions mass for final face-off against the emissaries of evil expansionism. Does have a familiar ring to it — the old high road to simplification. Details available in this million-selling handbook; order now by calling the toll-free number on your screen.
Where's the Rapparition when we need him? The pint-sized poet could defuse this whole self-powered keg with a few well-placed hypermetrics. You know, a little sync along the lines of:
Some say this madness is the workin' out of scripture,
With Belial and Nemesis taking up the picture;
You tell me the unlivable is better than okay
'Cause we're heading for a showdown like the Good Book say.
Yeah, set the kid up as equal-time evangelist on the alternative station and we might just get enough market share to survive. But Kraft himself has only recently put the boy to bed with a mouth full of bloody fudge ripple.
On another block of sets, glitz-punkers probe the anarcho-disintegrating underside, pretending (like the solitary man trekking across the Gobi followed by a hidden documentary crew of two dozen, or the first-ever flimsy plane touching down on a deserted island, as shot from below by the disembodied camera) that they aren't part of a million-dollar, cake makeup, multiple-take, posturing, slick production number. Another, adjacent slice of the color carousel busily spins out its insistence that the universe can be saved only by constructing a doughnut the size of a galaxy.
An oval nimbus above this row of screens spews out one of those Unsolved Celebrity Mystery Tonight! samplers. Today's real reenactment includes the lavish particulars of Eva Braun's unquenchable and probably unrequited crush on Robert Taylor as well as Sukarno's lifelong ambition to sleep with Marilyn Monroe. Both utterly true, the anchors swear, so help me Broadcast.
A movie vérité police-blotter public service announcement about the recent epidemic of vanishing little ones — two million annually, a full two thirds of these abductions masterminded by estranged parents — dissolves from a gloss of the Missing Children Act into an advertisement for Home Litigation Workshops. This offer, void where prohibited, is flanked on both sides by banks of full-length shots, each in slightly different tonal registers, of a devastating Brit girl, fourteen at the most, telling her Yank soldier that she isn't going to do it, war or no war, unless they do it standing up, the best contraceptive method available. He leans her gently against the wall and provides her with stirrups by sticking two Coke bottles (empty) in his khaki back pockets while the cameras cozy in for this bit of shared intimacy in the endless, interchangeable, beautifully textured darkness at the edge of time.
This brief cross-sectional spin through the dial's mandala suffices to remind Kraft of what incontestable research continuously discovers and covers back up: the species is clinically psychotic. Pathetic, deranged, intrinsically, irreversibly mercury-poisoned by nature, by birth. And what more could one expect of a cobbled-up bastard platypus, a creature whose spirit is epoxied to its somatic foundation? Mental thalidomide cases, every last mother's son, as far back as accounts take things. On one cadre of tubes, slithery androgynes belt out a hardcore rendition of the station's signature slogan: "We nail your eyes to the screen." Just kitty-corner to these, the minority bank of "educational" monitors takes things back to a past whose name is somehow familiar to Kraft, although the face evades him.
At first he mistakes this signal for more current event. But a minute's wading in this current and the waters open up just upstream of the present. A cavalcade of years from — how long ago? What time is it now? Kraft stands staring in review at events he witnessed once, some or them firsthand, when he was still young enough to weave them into the semblance of sense. The replay unfolds in front of him, hurting afresh, the second bite of remorse.
Watches a river rising, somewhere in the Sunny South. It has swollen before, overflowed even, but never like this. The Flourishing One, survivor of countless previous auguries, the jerkwater moneylenders' town that rose to respark the West, is going under. Florence's shaky alliance with its pulmonary artery has been severed. Nervous black-and-white hand-held cameras make their way down the mud-plundered streets-turned-sewers of what was once the most angelic of angel cities.