"Can't say as I like the look of that suitcase," he tells Mark, who is pacing tiptoed in the C.I. Airport commuter terminal, waiting for D.L. to take aspirin and wash her post-tranquil face in the women's room. She's had sleep, though, at least. Said it just made her more tired.
They're late, and so no Ronald or coincident Personnel to meet them as foretold in brochure. Sternberg is now officially sleep-deprived. For him this is not fun, either. It affects his vision. The morning colors have the over-bright primacy of movies filmed pre-Panavision. Fluttery hallucinations dance in his outward eye's periphery. An armless statue on a skateboard. A Cyprus swamp, milky water swirling in pockets, drooling over exposed roots. A rainbow snapping like a whip. Except it turns out they're not even real hallucinations; they're posters: "Visit This Art Gallery"; "Explore Louisiana"; "Buy a Lawnchair at This Store and Get Ready to Check Out a Genuine Midwestern Thunderstorm." And so on. Not real. The closure of Sternberg's reversed eye tickles — eyelashes against raw nerves. A high pitch sounds in his skull — a sleep-dep test pattern, something persistent and shrill in a very small box.
"Is that all corn?" Mark asks, pointing past the terminal window.
"Sure as fuck green, isn't it."
"It's all there is. It's all you can see. I've never seen so much of anything."
"This is farm country, man. Serious farmers. D.L. and I were here as kids, for the commercial. Then it was white. Mom brought me back for an audition the next summer, though. Still has nightmares about all the corn. She wakes up, sometimes."
Mark Nechtr stares, slackly intense, at whatever he looks at. He doesn't even seem sleep-deprived to Sternberg. Radiantly perfect fucker. Creepy stare, though. Has the look of somebody in the front row of a really absorbing show all the time.
Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men's Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He's needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the Lord Aloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O'Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg's shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in that stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs.
Thomas Sternberg is thus, like the Historical Idealists of yore— to whom, if the locutionally muscular and forever terrible enfant Dr. C— Ambrose were fabricating this, he could (and so would)
make frequent and explicit and intellectually-fruitful-no-matter-how-irritating reference — Sternberg is thus preternaturally fascinated with the misdirecting pose of bloodless abstraction. Ideas. He's an idea man. It has nothing to do with how intelligent he is, or isn't. Ideas, good and bad, but always bloodless, just kind of inform his whole character and outlook.
He and Mark are both looking around the commuter terminal. Things are clearing out. Emptying. It's a bit creepy. The terminal has that too-suddenly-hushed feeling of the moment after loud music stops. Curt-looking men in custodial white are tearing down the WELCOME WELCOME bunting. Posters launch themselves at the tourist trade from every wall. One glassed-in print advertises a family bowling center, another a forty-eight-hour continuous showing of "Hawaii Five-O" episodes in the airport's lounges, in honor of Jack Lord and J.D. Steelritter and the LordAloft shuttle service's national kick-off.
One huge poster just dominates the wall opposite Sternberg: an enormous J.D. Steelritter is shown next to an enormous Ronald McDonald, one who resembles J.D., under the greasepaint, in the strange way that, say, rugby resembles football — the enormous Ronald's holding an only slightly less enormous promo-poster of the prototype Funhouse discotheque, of which Sternberg's eye can make out only what looks pretty much like an ordinary house, one you could expect to see lots of in any bedroom community anywhere, except for the enormous cadaverous grin that represents the Funhouse's door. The expression on J.D.'s face is ingenious, already makes you feel deprived not being there with them.
"We're late," D.L. says, returning and immediately clinging to Mark in a way you can't tell if he minds. "They've left, I'm afraid. Those janitors just shrugged when I asked them where anybody is."
Sternberg touches his forehead lightly. "We were supposed to get greeted with nametags, with real gold arches, the brochure said."
"Look at the fields," D.L. says, gesturing at outside, rotating her small head South to North.
We could rent a car, I guess," Mark muses.
"Ever rented a car?" Sternberg asks. "Unbelievable hassle. Like applying for citizenship to someplace. Forms to fill out. Identity to prove. You have to have a fucking credit card. Incredible lines. Picture Moscow on fresh-meat day."
"You got a better idea?"
"I almost thought I saw a kid with a nametag from a McMuffin spot going into the men's room just now," Sternberg says, wanting very much to smoke a 100, eyeing the filters and lone wet-tipped cigar butt in the window's ashtray's sand, but not lighting up, because smoking really makes him have to shit, if he has to shit.
"You want to go in and have a look?"
NO. "We could just cruise around and look for somebody," Sternberg says nonchalantly. "There's no way this place can be as empty as it looks."
It looks pretty empty, though. "Maybe I'll look," Mark ventures.
D.L. loves to put her hands on windows. "Can you even remember which way Collision is, from here?" she yawns. She can't see anything but land, the LordAloft's return to Chicago a blurred and receding dot exiting the window's left border. "If Collision was out there, close by, wouldn't we see it? There's certainly nothing in the way."
"Collision's West of here. That's East, out that window."
"So you don't see anybody to ask," Mark repeats quietly.
"Why are there like no windows facing West in here?"
Mark sighs, cracks pale knuckles, rubs his face. "I do not know. We could try Hertz or something. We've got a credit card. Or we could just walk around and find somebody. Or we could eat. You hungry at all, Tom?"
No way Sternberg is going to eat anything right now. He rarely eats around people anyway. And obversely.
Speaking of speaking about shit: Dr. Ambrose, whom we all admire with a fierceness reserved for the charismatic, could at this point profitably engage in some wordplay around and about the similarities, phonological and then etymological, between the words sca-tology and eschatology. Smooth allusions to Homeric horses pooping death-dealing Ithacans, Luther's excremental vision, Swift's incontinent Yahoos. Neither D.L nor Sternberg, nor J.D. and DeHaven — who're pulling up outside in the pay lot, arguing about something to do with DeHaven's car's ignition — have the equipment to react to opportunity in this particular manner. Mark now feels as though he distrusts wordplay.