MR. OBSTAT: Can you expand on that, Chief?
GOVERNOR: Things are just too good, somehow. I suspect a trap.
MR. LUNGBERG: A trap?
GOVERNOR: Guys, the state is getting soft. I can feel softness out there. It’s getting to be one big suburb and industrial park and mall. Too much development. People are getting complacent. They’re forgetting the way this state was historically hewn out of the wilderness. There’s no more hewing.
MR. OBSTAT: You’ve got a point there, Chief.
GOVERNOR: We need a wasteland.
MR. LUNGBERG and MR. OBSTAT: A wasteland?
GOVERNOR: Gentlemen, we need a desert.
MR. LUNGBERG and MR. OBSTAT: A desert?
GOVERNOR: Gentlemen, a desert. A point of savage reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls. An Other for Ohio’s Self. Cacti and scorpions and the sun beating down. Desolation. A place for people to wander alone. To reflect. Away from everything. Gentlemen, a desert.
MR. OBSTAT: Just a super idea, Chief.
GOVERNOR: Thanks, Neil. Gentlemen may I present Mr. Ed Roy Yancey, of Industrial Desert Design, Dallas. They did Kuwait.
MR. LUNGBERG: Hey, there’s apparently a lot of desert in Kuwait. MR. YANCEY: You bet, Joe, and we believe we can provide you folks with a really first-rate desert right here in Ohio.
MR. OBSTAT: What about the cost?
GOVERNOR: Manageable.
MR. LUNGBERG: Where would it be?
MR. YANCEY: Well gentlemen, the Governor and I have conferred, and if I could just direct your attention to this map, here…
MR. OBSTAT: That’s Ohio, all right.
MR. YANCEY: The spot we have in mind is in the south of your great state. Right about… here. Actually here to here. Hundred square miles.
MR. OBSTAT: Around Caldwell?
MR. YANCEY: Yup.
MR. LUNGBERG: Don’t quite a few people live around there? GOVERNOR: Relocation. Eminent domain. A desert respects no man. Fits with the whole concept.
MR. LUNGBERG: Isn’t that also pretty near Wayne National Forest? GOVERNOR: Not anymore. (Mr. Lungberg whistles.)
MR. OBSTAT: Hey, my mother lives right near Caldwell.
GOVERNOR: Hits home, eh Neil? Part of the whole concept. Concept has to hit home. Hewing is violence, Neil. We’re going to hew a wilderness out of the soft underbelly of this state. It’s going to hit home.
MR. LUNGBERG: You’re really sold on this, aren’t you, Chief?
GOVERNOR: Joe, I’ve never been more sold on anything. It’s what this state needs. I can feel it.
MR. OBSTAT: You’ll go down in history, Chief. You’ll be immortal.
GOVERNOR: Thanks, Neil. I just feel it’s right, and after conferring with Mr. Yancey, I’m just sold. A hundred miles of blinding white sandy nothingness. ‘Course there’ll be some fishing lakes, at the edges, for people to fish in…
MR. LUNGBERG: Why white sand, Chief? Why not, say, black sand?
GOVERNOR: Go with that, Joe.
MR. LUNGBERG: Well, really, if the whole idea is supposed to be contrast, otherness, blastedness, should I say sinistemess? Sinistemess is the sense I get.
GOVERNOR: Sinisterness fits, that’s good.
MR. LUNGBERG: Well, Ohio is a pretty white state: the roads are white, the people tend to be on the whole white, the sun’s pretty bright here…. What better contrast than a hundred miles of black sand? Talk about sinister. And the black would soak up the heat a lot better, too. Be really hot, enhance the blastedness aspect.
GOVERNOR: I like it. Ed Roy, what do you think? Can cacti and scorpions live in black sand?
MR. YANCEY: No problem I can see.
MR. OBSTAT: What about the cost of black sand?
MR. YANCEY: A little more expensive, probably. I’d have to talk to the boys in Sand. But I feel I can commit now to saying it’d be manageable in the context of the whole project.
GOVERNOR: Done.
MR. LUNGBERG: When do we start?
GOVERNOR: Immediately, Joe. Hewing is by nature a fast, violent thing. MR. OBSTAT: Chief, just let me say I’m excited. You have my congratulations, man to man and citizen to Governor.
GOVERNOR: Thanks, Neil. You better go call your Mom, big fella. MR. OBSTAT: Right.
MR. LUNGBERG: What about a name, Chief?
GOVERNOR: A name? That’s a typically excellent point, Joe. I never thought of the name issue.
MR. LUNGBERG: May I make a suggestion?
GOVERNOR: Go.
MR. LUNGBERG: The Great Ohio Desert.
GOVERNOR: The Great Ohio Desert.
MR. LUNGBERG: Yes.
GOVERNOR: Joe, a super name. I take my hat off to you. You’ve done it again. Great. It spells size, desolation, grandeur, and it says it’s in Ohio.
MR. LUNGBERG: Not too presumptuous?
GOVERNOR: Not at all. Fits the concept to a T.
MR. OBSTAT: I take my hat off to you too, Joe.
MR. YANCEY: Damn fine name, Joe.
GOVERNOR: So we’re all set. Concept. Desert. Color. Name. All that’s left is the hewing.
MR. YANCEY: Well let’s get down to it, then.
5. 1990
/a/
Suppose someone had said to me, ten years ago, in Scarsdale, or on the commuter train, suppose the person had been my next-door neighbor, Rex Metalman, the corporate accountant with the unbelievable undulating daughter, suppose this was back in the days before his lawn mania took truly serious hold and his nightly paramilitary sentry-duty with the illuminated riding mower and the weekly planeloads of DDT dropping from the sky in search of perhaps one sod webworm nest and his complete intransigence in the face of the reasonable and in the beginning polite requests of one or even all of the neighbors that hostilities against the range of potential lawn enemies that obsessed him be toned down, at least in scale, before all this drove a wedge the size of a bag of Scott’s into our tennis friendship, suppose Rex Metalman had speculated in my presence, then, that ten years later, which is to say now, I, Rick Vigorous, would be living in Cleveland, Ohio, between a biologically dead and completely offensive-smelling lake and a billion-dollar man-made desert, that I would be divorced from my wife and physically distanced from the growth of my son, that I would be operating a firm in partnership with an invisible person, little more, it seems clear now, than a corporate entity interested in failure for tax purposes, the firm publishing things perhaps even slightly more laughable than nothing at all, and that perched high atop this mountain of the unthinkable would be the fact that I was in love, grossly and pathetically and fiercely and completely in love with a person eighteen count them eighteen years younger than I, a woman from one of Cleveland’s first families, who lives in a city owned by her father but who works answering telephones for something like four dollars an hour, a woman whose uniform of white cotton dress and black Converse hightop sneakers is an unanalyzable and troubling constant, who takes somewhere, I suspect, between five and eight showers a day, who works in neurosis like a whaler in scrim shaw, who lives with a schizophrenically narcissistic bird and an almost certainly nymphomaniacal bitch of a roommate, and who finds in me, somewhere, who knows where, the complete lover… suppose all this were said to me by Rex Metalman, leaning conversationally with his flamethrower over the fence between our properties as I stood with a rake in my hand, suppose Rex had said all this to me, then I almost certainly would have replied that the likelihood of all that was roughly equal to the probability of young Vance Vigorous, then eight and at eight in certain respects already more of a man than I, that young Vance, even as we stood there to be seen kicking a football up into the cold autumn sky and down through a window, his laughter echoing forever off the closed colored suburban trees, of strapping Vance’s eventually turning out to be a… a homosexual, or something equally unlikely or preposterous or totally out of the question.