00:03:58:29
A NEW THOUGHT arrives behind the considerable forehead of Leon Mopati, the Unitarian minister occupying the seat just in front and to the right of the one occupied by El-more. Every culture, goes the thought, gets the architecture it deserves. Leon looks like a black Vincent van Gogh with both ears still intact. Born and raised the second son of a diamond baron in Botswana, Leon came to America eighteen years ago to study theology at the University of Minnesota, fell in love with the foliage and snowblaze, and never looked back. Saada, his wife, a lawyer, is presently shopping. What a terrible place to be, thinks Leon: shopping. Unending space crowded with an excess of sameness. Makes you feel lost even when you’re not. Distracted. Unmoored. Like on that hot white day among the broken stones. Whiff of baked dust in the air. How signature structures bare a society’s what. Lusts. The for example. Pyramids of Giza. Cheops a thirteen-acre rock garden to the sun. Or the skeletal luminescence of a Parisian train station at midday, hosanna to the Mechanical Age. The street enters the house. The house enters the future. The future moved from Paris to Rome that spring. Walking the ruins of the Forum with her. The hot white day, the shadeless solid chronicle. How happiness happened between one footfall and the next. First mall, really, if you stop to think about it. Nine-hundred-year old center of commerce, faith, and politics the Middle Ages turned into a cow pasture. Nice work, guys. Her floppy white tourist hat turned her into a beekeeper, every step they took an act of imagination among the maplessness. But ours? Fritz Lang’s nightmare, only in color. The corrugated ceilings. The blah beige. The jade. The cinnabar highlights. Slackfaced teens hunkering against banisters playing with their taffy gum. Whose home? Farewell to an. How we touched hands simply because touching hands was the right thing to do. On the path among clicking cameras, chattering tourist guides, those low rails to keep you from the valuable rubble. Irregular manhole-cover rocks felt like walking on frozen waves. Reminding, trying to remind, of a white that was different. There we were in Italy one day in the light of an aging afternoon among the gnarly nearly leafless trees. Olive. Olive or fig or what olive or fig trees should resemble in the mind’s eye. Narrow leaves. Stalky like bamboo. But here? The great Schulzian omphalos. His very own cathedral. Our Blessed Cartoonist of the. No wonder F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in this place. Where else could he have turned up? How we blinked and were in Rome, my beekeeper and me, the light working like atomic bleach upon the bone stones around us. Sitting to catch our breaths on a broken column. It was let us call it April. April or May. Not a travel brochure in motion, not a commercial for something or other, not a preview up there. No. Just some dumb visuals for the Xbox. Certain devices we use every day, that is, having become supernatural. September 24, 1896. That’s it. Get a couple of gigs under your skin, and all you want is more. F. Lang Fritzgerald Day. Snug human scale tucked into a vast, fast, rattling hive. Paul Bunyan in drag. Saint Paul, mythic matherfother of Midwestern clearcutters, unmoved mover of our hygienic fountains and blindbright atriums, stained glass and raggybaggy costumes. Our belonging. Our community. Like the story. That one. You know. The Great Lakes boy whose family transplanted him early one autumn from one burb to the next. Every day he mounted his little red bicycle to pedal the concrete seas five miles to his favorite mall. Because that was home, you see. His being a part of. The Penelope. The place. Same principle with any musical you simply have to see more than once: ritual sing-along to the same singsongs everyone else in the audience rituals to: excess of sameness: videlicit home. Because sleep is our reward for having to stay awake so long. Twenty years for him, wasn’t it? Ithacant. Ithacan. Ithaca. Our mindwharf. Because Leon Mopati believes he may have read somewhere the film which is about to commence will contain musical bits in it, but oddly. Over five-hundred stores. Minnesot-ah! Bow Wow Meow. Count Your Blessings. Your what? But not one label in the Forum explaining where the hell you were. Just thingless names on baby plaques. Julian Basilica. Temple of the Vestal Virgins who kept the sacred flame fired. Had to remain chaste for what was it thirty years. Or else. Buried alive. Dirtmouths. Where did language go when our backs were turned? The lullaby. The lament. The requiem. Farewell to an idea. The hot white day. The broken stones. The conjuring. The surprise Leon Mopati feels at least once every week, the one he is feeling right now, that he fell in love with his own wife for the first time during that uneventful stroll among the ruins after almost a decade and a half of being married.
00:04:03:06
MOIRA LOVELACE looks like a flautist in her fifties: short, prim, stringy. She reminds Leon, one seat to her right, of a cubist painting. Weekdays, Moira teaches algebra at Kennedy High. Looking out on her students, she sees a classroom crammed with space aliens. She cannot understand their lingo. She cannot understand their clothing. What they listen to too loudly through their headphones may be many things, but none of them is music. Every Saturday evening Moira stays at home and makes sex videos of herself in her king-size bed, sheets silk leopard like in spy thrillers from the sixties. Sometimes with one hand she employs a pink dildo that reminds her of a small pink torpedo. Sometimes she employs plastic bags and smeary makeup. The general impression is one of a messy clown asphyxiating, naked. Moira has learned a lot about cinematography over the years. How it is almost impossible to produce a movie single-handedly. How a whole evening can be devoted to a worthy sixteen-second clip. Every Sunday Moira stays in, making copies of her video, packing each in a plain brown envelope. On her way to school every Monday morning, she mails the envelopes to strangers across the country. Moira locates their names in phonebooks at the library. She thinks of her sex videos as love letters to the world. They put a crackle into lives of people she will never meet and punish her for creating them in the first place. A discreet grin tightens across her lips as Moira Lovelace pictures who may be thinking about her this very second in Omaha, Nebraska, and how.
00:04:04:04
EVERYONE ELSE laughs after that gal up there whomps that feller on the head with the teddy bear so Ida and Johnny Ray Jarboe laugh too cuz that must mean it’s real funny what the heck they’s here to have a good time. Saved two years drove all night from Pikeville Kentucky with Grammy and the kids in the back to whoop it up a little that’s just what they’s gonna do. After breakfast at Sbarro they drop Grammy at the Super 8 drop Little Johnny Ray and Betty Sue and Susie Lynn and Lynna Ann with her — rag-baby at Underwater Adventure give them a hundred bucks tells them to meet at the West Parking Exit in Tennessee at closing time don’t forget now Tennessee. Back home Ida works as a waitress at Bob’s Big Boy it’s okay nice people good tips. Johnny Ray is between jobs so he helps his Uncle Wilgus raise a little juanita in the woods back of his cabin. That’s where he done had his first visitation one night out harvesting all by his lonesome. Bright triangle appears outta nowheres and them voices start going at it in his head hens in a chicken coop Johnny Ray all dizzy like as if he’s walking on a slant. Turns out they’s got five things to say in our language just five that’s all and they says them over and over. Other side. Wooden song. Do it yourself. Sooner or later. Hammer. Johnny Ray he beelines fer home wakes Ida tells her what he done seen. She says that dog won’t hunt cuz you know women then she says maybe it will. Ida reckons the message may be some kinda secret code or whatnot like as they have in Mission Impossible. Sooner or later they’s coming to our plane to tell us something cuz we’s so god damn ignorant about most everything no shit got that straight. So us earthlings got to pick up a hammer build a do it yourself landing site to help guide them in which is what Ida and Johnny Ray are doing you bet. Only to get the coordinates they got to listen to a wooden song or you know music box anybody can figure that one out. Course Ida and Johnny Ray sorta thought it would be plain when you walked into the San Francisco Music Box Company with them spacemen running a covert operation down there on behalf of their alien empire which particular music box was the right particular music box but they was skunkpiss wrong. Mind you over the years Johnny Ray come to understand them voices ain’t got just those five things to say in their native language neither no way. They can chaw about all manner of things if they wants to sure who can’t only they speak when they’s got something to say and they’s got something to say maybe three four times in their entire lives. Otherwise they’s fine jes thinking to each other with their brainwaves only not too much cuz communicating as they see it is nothing except a invasion of privacy. So here Ida and Johnny Ray sit watching a show waiting for another sign. That’s what’s so great about this great country of ours. Body can walk three miles inside the Mall of America and never step into a store can spend ten minutes in each and three days later you know what? Three days later you’s still ambulating no finish line in sight what a thing ain’t nothing like it in the whole wide world nope that’s the Lord’s honest truth sure is.