"Fears?" the man with the money to offer is saying, idly working those near the line's front. "Fears here?"
By the way, for whom would perpetual union with this person yammering bad-news-customer-like at Nola be fun, I'll bet you're asking. Perhaps the most direct and efficient and diplomatic answer is that a rented Datsun is not in the offing.
Mark looks up at what's raised to public view. Jack Lord's helicopter slowly ascends, wheeling gracefully into Hawaii's electric blue, Lord at the helm, in a fine and no-bullshit-whatsoever business suit, Danno riding shotgun with his marksman's rifle, in a slightly less fine but still all-business suit. Where is Tom Sternberg? He'll give Sternberg till the next commemorative commercial, Mark thinks, trying to swallow a second gulp of soda against the rising gas of the first. Something almost imperceptibly furtive about Sternberg discourages the idea of contact in bathrooms. Mark is enormously sensitive to these sorts of things, in general. There's still the tiniest bit of cooked flower between his teeth, which he works slowly with his healthy but sort of narrow tongue, in which irritated taste buds are visible as individual buds.
Well and then he sees the probable Mormon, the money-giver, with D.L. and the hairy-armed Avis girl, at the counter, across the terminal, past the totally superfluous lounge window, which is itself past the next table, now occupied by a blonde, orange-faced flight attendant and an effete narrow-faced man in an age-glazed corduroy suit. Mark rises in alarm. They don't need Latter-Day charity, Reunion or no. There's always a Mormon around when you don't want one, trying your patience with unsolicited kindness.
"Stop me if I'm wrong, but what I sense here is conflict," says the bearded man, who it turns out isn't a practicing LDS, but rather works for J.D. Steelritter Advertising in some research capacity unrelated to the McDonald's campaign or revel. "Stymied desire," he muses. "It's clear that there's something you want, and an obstacle, a what's the word a cheval-de-frise, to your actually having it." He's writing this stuff down on a clipboard whose poor clip is holding far too much print-out paper. "Doubtless in the confrontation and potential resolution of this conflict you'll undergo changes in experience, outlook, personality, possibly even in the makeup of the desires. ."
"Needs. We have transportation needs."
". . themselves. Maybe changes that'll be of interest not only to you, but to others. You'll have something to interest the Reunion, when you arrive."
"When," he emphasizes, his face like an ad for blind faith, happy karma.
"Maybe then you could get your own credit card," the Avis woman says helpfully, genuinely sorry that she does not fashion, but only communicates, company policy. The complimentary box of DoughNuggets is empty, its wax paper greebly and smeared. Honestly, though. Even bartering farmers are better than kids without real credit. And there is simply no way this person is only twenty-five, or pregnant, she thinks, as everyone else in the line all seems to lose his patience at once and she turns back to begin handling something that looks even worse than the commodities-trading center she'd left to get a job closer to her own family's roots. If ever a person has looked infertile, she thinks, why then—
* * *
J.D. Steelritter and DeHaven Steelritter are still out in the airport lot, if you will — their initial argument about ignition having me-tastasized into a really killer row about DeHaven's less than fastidious records of just which alumni have arrived when. Turns out they're missing three, not two, alumni. And is J.D. pissed.
"I said I was sorry."
"That's just it!" J.D. shouts over DeHaven's loud idle. "You say things. But you never show. Show me some pride, just once. Some desire. You have a job, shitspeck. Define for your old man what 'job' means. What does it mean to you: 'job'?"
"These things happen, Pop," DeHaven says, smoothing his yarn wig with a cotton-gloved hand as his malevolent car growls. The car can't ever be turned off, if it's to run right, was what started the row. "I'm sorry, and I'll try not to ever fuck up anything ever again" (pissed himself, DeHaven). "But I can't promise you I'll never fuck up, because these things happen, Pop. Maybe to everybody except a genius like you."
J.D. looks for sarcasm, but it's tough, what with sleep-dep and all; he can't read much in the ingenuous bloodshot flutter of the big clown's mascara.
Though, not to take sides, but sometimes things do happen. Even in reality. In real realism. It's a myth that truth is stranger than fiction. Actually they're about equally strange. The strangest stories tend, in a way, to happen. Take for example the single solitary piece Mark Nechtr has thus far been able to produce for discussion in Dr. Ambrose's graduate workshop at East Chesapeake Trade. Its conceit is lifted and carried off right out of a banner headline in the Baltimore Sun. Nothing as richly ambiguous as FIRM DOCTORS TELEPHONE POLES, but a simple MURDER-SUICIDE IN DOWNTOWN ELEVATOR BAFFLES AUTHORITIES. And details of the story are traceable directly to the voluminous correspondence between D.L. and Tom Sternberg, who's maybe about the most claustrophobic individual in the history of his generation.
The elevator at issue is in a mental-health professionals' building in downtown Baltimore. The setup is that a mental-health professional, the kind that can't write 'scrips, a Ph.D., is treating two different guys for debilitating claustrophobia. And the treatment of both patients starts at the same time and proceeds more or less in sync, though neither patient ever meets the other. Until, that is, it becomes that time in treatment for each of the guys to confront the true beak and claws of his phobia head-on. Yes it's elevator-time. They're to be put in the building's elevator and made to ride up and down repeatedly. But see now together, for support (the psychologist being a follower of the head-on-confrontation-but-with-support school of phobic treatment).
So in they both go, and they're riding up and down repeatedly. .
Except the elevator eventually stalls, possibly from all the phobic energy swirling around in there, and it gets stuck between floors, and the buttons don't work, the thing's just broken down. The two claustrophobes are trapped, together, in a tiny elevator in a thin shaft in an enclosed building in the center of a crowded metropolis. For a while, true, they support each other. But, in the fullness of time enjoyed by all stalled things, of course, they eventually totally lose it.
"YAAGH!" one screams at the other. "You're closing in!"
"No! No! You're closing in!"
"YAAGH!"
"GAAH!"
"Get very far away!"
"You're swelling! You're taking up the whole elevator!"
"Stop closing in!"
"GAAH!"
"YAAGH!"
"You're breathing both our air! You're consuming my air! Stop that breathing!"
"Leave me alone! Get away! Oh my God!"
"Nothing left! No more breathing!"
"YAAAAAAGHURGHLURGHLURGHLURGHL."
And so on. Their worst fears, which they'd slowly, supportively come to see were fiction, came true. The whole piece was kind of a go-figure story. Mark never showed it to D.L. D.L. had bagged the Program by then, and nuptials were closing in.
I think what it was was Mark felt guilty, the story being basically just a pastiche of truths and everything. Plus ghastly and loathsome. Dr. Ambrose was surprisingly receptive, though, considering it turned out he'd written a very similar story, way back when, one about a fire in the bungalow of an elderly couple who are both wildly pyrophobic and cripplingly agoraphobic. Mark claimed he'd never read that story of Ambrose's. The whole stuck-in-elevator thing had been his idea. With some help from the truth, admittedly. Ambrose had fingered the port-wine stain on his temple absently and told Mark that of course he believed him. He trusted Mark.