“Slowly. Carter’s up to something.”
“Like what?”
“Can’t tell. What he gave me is incomplete, but it’s complicated, that much I can see.”
“Does it involve more real estate?”
“Somehow. I got a feeling things’ll be hopping in another month or two.”
“Listen, I get off around two-thirty.”
“Come by. I’ll be up.”
Jill’s est terminology annoys him — she knows this and teases him with it — yet sometimes it’s strangely accurate. The word “impact,” for example, with its soft plosive p, reminding him of sitting on a plane, without peanuts or gum, a popping in his ears, a sudden descent.
“How did your wife’s leaving impact you?” she asked one night. He fell and fell.
“Are you ever uneasy, doing stuff for Carter?”
“No,” she answers. “It’s my job.”
“Right. Balzac said ‘The individual is not expected to be more scrupulous than the nation.’”
“I don’t know about that. I just figure he’s building his own karma. In the next life he’ll come back as an old chamois in a car wash. I’ll wipe my dipstick with him.”
Adams enjoys hearing her talk late at night after playing at the club, delights in the gentle pressure of her head on his arm.
The second marriage, they say, is the one for love.
He strokes her hair.
The first, too.
The phone wakes him from a dream: perfume, silken clothes.
Jill hands him the receiver. “Hello?” he says.
“Parum-pum.”
“Kenny?”
“What’s up?”
“It’s late. What’s happened?”
“Nothing, man, just checking to see if you’re still kicking.”
“What time is it?”
“One.”
“Three here.” He should never have given Kenny Jill’s number.
“Good news. I’m fixed.”
“You are?”
“No more going broke. I’m fixed with a band now.”
“Great.” Jill turns over, asks him who it is. “My brother.”
“What?”
“Nothing, Kenny. That’s great.”
“We’re doing a shoot for MTV next week. Song called ‘Thoughts You Never Had.’ Rock’s tribute to Nancy Reagan.”
“Gonna get rich.”
“Damn straight.”
“We’re splitting the bill with a punk band now. They’ve got synthesized drums and a Linn drum machine.”
“I hate that fuckin’ Linn,” Kenny says. “Glorified metronome.”
“Goddamn tin can.” Adams enjoys his brother.
As Kenny talks, Adams’ dream comes back to him: he was swimming in a sea of women’s clothes, with an erection like a wooden mast. Perfume sprayed his face. His body was heavy, sopping with the scent. He touches Jill’s bare shoulder, leans back on the blue-striped pillow, and drifts away again, Kenny’s voice a distant warning from shore.
No one, he thinks, properly appreciates the difficulty of beginning. He is entering coordinates into the computer. Latitude, longitude, the Tome Pepsi sign hanging by a nail on the wall, facing north, of that brown adobe bar in Ciudad Acuña, the river in south Texas where he lost his high school ring, all reduced to a set of binary numbers, neat, concise.
Caprice, he thinks, occupies much of the world’s space.
A sign on the wall says, PROPER NAMES/DANGEROUS WORDS. The gallery is nearly empty. A series of pedestals in the center of the room support copper cylindrical tubes — he recognizes these as more sophisticated models of the equipment Pamela used to tinker with in the garage. Atop the copper tubes, attached with wires, striated plastic cylinders rotate slowly. Images appear inside the cylinders. In one, an image of Pamela, strands of her dark hair blowing violently across her forehead. As the cylinder turns she raises her arms. She is holding a camera. With a sardonic smile she snaps the viewer’s picture. Then she lowers her arms and closes her eyes. Another cylinder reveals, bit by bit, a house frame, crossbeams and posts. As the cylinder turns the frame crumbles in a funnel of dust.
Most of the cylinders contain words. Wirklichkeit is here. So is Marriage, a vague, faded pink, floating as if underwater.
Pamela’s other words:
Odyssey
Acceptance
Pageant
Stasis
Leftovers
Distant Warning
Thrombosis
Vertical Ruins
On the gallery walls, framed holographic images illuminated by black light: spectra of various lengths and intensities, silver, gold, and blue. Names of actors and politicians (Strom Thurmond, Veronica Lake), a more traditional collage reminiscent of Picasso.
The catalog says, “Saussure writes, ‘In language there are only differences,’ emphasizing the centrality of choice. A term’s meaning is determined by a host of other terms not chosen. Ms. Adams’ work renders dramatically this structuralist principle. Her words, free of referents as they are free of frames and museum walls, are tangible negations resisting interpretation. In representing only themselves, their meanings attached to words that the artist did not choose, they fill the gallery space, almost invisibly, with absence.”
In the fall the valley turns green. Scholars and mystics have joined hands in attempts to explain why our seasons misbehave. Weathermen pepper our skies with balloons, diviners scratch the earth with sticks. Legends, and curious accounts in leather pouches found in the hollow of a tree, suggest that the valley was once a lake. Dogwood bloomed on its banks, peacocks danced in the hills.
Fishermen reported seeing water sprites, twinkling, no fatter than fingers, change into bulbous squashlike creatures in the middle of the night. What appeared to be falling leaves drifted slowly out over the lake, then turned into metal filings, which rained down hard upon the men. Nothing was safe. The shape-shifters smashed turtles, birds, trawlers, anything that settled on the lake.
On shore a chubby boy, an orphan, lived on the pumpkins of the fields. He longed to swim. As he had no family, the villagers assumed responsibility for him. They warned him of the danger in the water, but he seemed to have an intimate knowledge of the lake. He spoke of the colors at the bottom as though he’d been diving. Some people suggested that he came from the lake; after all, he had no family. Where did he come from?
One night, having informed the fishermen that he was tired of treading the earth, he jumped into the shallows and swam. From time to time the townsfolk saw him in the middle of the lake, riding a shaggy white buffalo. Eventually the boy wrenched a horn from the animal’s head and tossed it ashore. A tree laden with heavy fruit sprang up where it landed. Next the boy surfaced gripping a black obelisk. The obelisk was slippery; often the boy lost his grip, but finally managed to fling it ashore. An artesian well burst forth, spraying water high into the air. The villagers danced beneath the spring, feasting on heavy fruit as the boy battled tumbleweeds, crates, panes of glass. Each time he hurled an opponent ashore it became, instantly, a source of beauty and health. The people were delighted.
Finally one creature remained — the mother squash, the biggest in the lake. The boy caught his breath, ate a chunk of pumpkin, submerged. He was underwater for hours. The lake boiled. Orange steam rose in patches off the water. The water began to blaze. Women from the village tossed ice into the deepest part. A mixture of blood — male and female, mother and son — hardened on the surface, burst into flames. It burned until the lake dried up. Afterwards there was no sign of the boy or the squash — just a salt deposit, as if from giant tears. For years boiling rain seared the dogwoods in the valley. The grass dried up in summer.