But wait, there is more.
POWER
My dad was a janitor all his life over at the GE. We lived on Brandruff Street by the Wabash tracks. From our backyard, where we kept a garden of trellised tomatoes, pole beans, and grape arbors, we could see the top floors of the factory beyond the rails and warehouses. I staked the plants. Strips of white cloth trained the stems up the poles and wires. GE's got factories everywhere, making all kinds of things electrical. The Broadway GE made the lightbulbs. My dad worked third trick. He changed lightbulbs with new lightbulbs off the line. Union rules, that old joke. Yes, it took three guys, two to turn the ladder while he held the bulb. On the roof was the GE sign. GENERAL ELECTRIC spelled out in thousands of bulbs. The old intertwined initials blazing in a circle of script above it. G and the E laced together. Each night, my dad woke up and, ready for work, sat with me in the garden. We listened to the plants grow. Fireflies sparked upward off the tips of the lush leaves. The trains shunted back and forth in the yard. With binoculars, he focused on the burning sign, floating above the roof. Later, I watched him, a blurred shadow, crawl across the light, making his way along the brilliant scaffolding, to the single extinguished bulb. I had to look away. Only the brightest stars were in the sky, the rest washed out by all the light of the city. My father kept his eyes closed as much as he could even behind the polarized window of the welder's mask he wore. He'd look away, he told me, to where he thought our dark house would be, where I would be in the vast darkness below.
PALETTE
At night after closing, the crazed blacktop of the parking lot is sealed, the thick tar swept along the split seams, slapped about cursively with sopping mops that splatter and spray antimatter milky ways, black stars on black backdrops, the constellations unreadable in this light, a kind of Palmer primer of crippled capitals, detached legs and leaking ovoid gestures gone awry, creases on a palm incised, scored, toothy selvage. Over all these alphabets and glyphs, a slurry film is broadcast by machine, all pneumatic nozzled steamed sheeting, plowing back and forth, lapping the air-brushed edge over the edge, masking (a mat of matte black hermetic iced devil's food cake, empty black void, a desert dessert) the edge edged with another edge. And after that, while this new nothing dries, the night crew tees up some comped cones à la mode taken from the soda jerk on overtime at the take-out window. These little lamps of lactose lit-up, winnowed with each flickering lick. They're a kind of optical illusion, floating on the air, that their operators (doused in shadow camo leotards of silky asphalt splashes) make disappear.
In the dark, they watch the painter in spotless overalls overhaul the scaffolded sign out front of the Shoppe. It's an artist's palette with eight moons of vibrant neon colors jewelling its rim and a rendering of three sable hair brushes thrust through the illusion of the thumbhole. The script A of the store name drips toward the hummock of the ending z's ascender, loop-less, the italic flourish of its blobby tail, the abdomen of some oversized insect, the splat of the apostrophe, all mimicking the French curve of the big ol' kidney shaped sign, all hip that then goes all square, intersected by the rectangular sign within the sign, all business and no art, the special message board of misplaced applications — M B3EF NO ODLES, TH TUR KEY, F BBQRIBS.
They watch (as the earth's crust cools, sculpting their triple dips of neon-colored ice cream into a concrete demonstration of Zeno's paradox of time and space) the painter paint the pictures of paint, mixing paint on his own homemade palette (a slab of scrap wood) dabbing red paint on the red “paint“ of the red paint of the sign-sized palette.
The painter arcs his way through the whole rainbow of color, each one a substitution for flavor, a gigantic graphic synesthesia, of ice creams already melting into metaphors, comparisons, these synaptic associations made in the palette-shaped brain, wedged into our cone-shaped skulls. This is like this and this is like this and this is like this. It is harder now to tell the painter from the paint. More licking. More liking. More this-ing. The stars overhead look like stars in the sky. The blacktop looks like blacktop. The ice cream tastes like ice cream. The sign looks like Sign. The artist painting the sign, who looks like an artist painting a sign, signs the sign with something that looks like, when you look at it closely, even in this unfathomable and defining blackness (a color that is both all the colors and none of them), another sign.
Thought Balloons
POSTCARD CAPTIONS
1.
On a long reach, the leading airships in the breakaway pod jockey for position as they drift into the third turn near South Bend during the 17th running of the Tour d'Indiana. Dirigibles, blimps, balloons — all manner of lighter-than-air craft — vie for the coveted Otis R. Bowen Cup in a thrilling race, often taking months to complete, covering the four corners of the state.
2.
In the distinctive barn-red livery of International Harvester, a tractor blimp plows the anvil top of a fertile cumulonimbus, kicking up a trail of cirrus clouds in its wake above the parched summer fields near Monon, Indiana. Following close behind, a John Deere zeppelin prepares to sow the newly turned furrows with seeds of silver iodide in the hope of sparking needed precipitation, a practice invented by noted atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut, brother of Hoosier novelist Kurt.
3.
A rapt crowd of Hoosiers observes as the Oolitic Fire Department douses the smoldering wreckage of the Derek Jeter balloon on Christmas Eve 2002 after it slipped its tethers during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. The three-story balloon, depicting the Yankee slugger sliding headfirst into second, eluded detection during its month-long free flight over the heartland until its fiery reentry in the limestone country of south central Indiana.
4.
Casper Kastellnick, of nearby Port Royal, Kentucky, expertly rides the buoyant atmosphere produced by the world-famous helium springs outside Vevay, Indiana. The lighter-than-air air geysers erupt inertly on a predictable schedule and are of such duration and magnitude as to allow local aficionados time to master their spectacular levitational displays.
Four Places
A ROOM
First, there's the sun (which is eclipsed by the moon {the moon itself obscured by wisps of clouds} haloed by the luminous corona) which is a ball of gas (which is a state of matter characterized by the lowest density and viscosity). All this, in the corner of the stamp (the whorls of raised ink {exactly like the oily residue of thumbprints left by your correspondent} of printing, expanding like a gas {expanding until evenly distributed within its container} to its edge) near the selvage. Now (wait {a second}) where am I?
A TOWN
Pictured: the recently discovered and described “predicate.“ Here, the verb of being has just come into being. An “am“ can't even simply sit since “sit“ hasn't been invented yet. The local population is, however, intrigued. They've begun to “be.“ They have been naming things for decades, are on the verge of naming, “have been naming,“ a verb. Some “nouns,“ like “name,“ are not just nouns but verbs also. Shown in the inset: Things they have “named.“ The “adz.“ The “hibachi.“ The “bustle.“ The “gyroscope.“ The “puck.“ The “quotation mark.“