And there is something trustworthy about Mark Nechtr. Like, if he promises to do something, you know the only way it won't get done is if he just can't do it. Like, even if he's hooked up with somebody he doesn't really desire or want to be hooked up with, if he's given his word, the only way he won't stay hooked up with that person is if he just truly cannot do it. If he promises to get D.L. and Sternberg to this Reunion they've been looking forward to for so long, he'll try. Though it doesn't look like he's trying too terribly hard right now — his big flaw is that he's extremely easy to distract and fascinate, and now he's fascinated with this beardedly distinguished non-Mormon Steelritter janissary (who puts in a call to Steelritter Advertising's Collision office complex, where he says a Midwestern twang had promised they'd send an emergency van right over, J.D. and DeHaven Steelritter and Eberhardt 70 and Sternberg '70 and somebody down as Ambrose-Gatz '67 all being late, now, and the alumni getting restless, somewhat sloshed, and of course hungry) and who, he tells Mark, passes out free money as part of an ingenious J.D. Steelritter marketing-diffraction-test scheme.
As Hogan, the money-giver, tells the rapt Mark what the scam really is, Tom Sternberg is still in the men's room, just destalling, to give you some tantalizing idea of the laxative might of a quick-fried flower. Sternberg's now confronting the cracker-sized mirror stamped into the wall over an automatic airport sink. The sink spurts automatically at his approach. Step back and it stops. Saves water, but still. Disconcerting. Boy is he tired. Beyond tired — something behind that face in the mirror signals post-dire fatigue with the hissed whine of something inflatable in his head's center, inflating. D.L. would point to the obverse eye and ask what it saw, if it saw anything of the baggy thing slowly taking shape in his head. Well screw you, D.L.
Cause it's only dark, generally, back there in his eye's guts. Sometimes a spidery system of synaptic color, if he tries to move the bad eye too quickly. But usually nothing. But it'll heal, anyway. It'll come around. It's all in his head, he knows. Youthful-rebellion injury. Mrs. Sternberg warned from day one that the boy that does a forbidden thing, such as like for example crosses his eyes just to hurt a mother: that boy finds they stay like that. Well-known fact. Look it up in whatever resources orthodox mothers with lapsed sons access. Like early to bed: it's the sleep before dark that's most important. Like don't cry: you're better than whoever laughs at you. Like try this lotion, for sumac.
Here's the fresh sumac cyst, though, here, boy, between his eyes. It's darkened richly since the last cyst-check in O'Hare, matured from that tomato pink to the same plum shade as the airport lounge. The mirror does not lie.
Your average deformity sufferer has a love-hate thing with mirrors: you need to see how things are progressing, but you also hate it that they're progressing. Sternberg's not at all sure he likes the idea of sharing a mirror with a whole lot of actors. He's not sure he wants to rent a bureaucratic car and head West without sleep or soap for a Funhouse the brochure says is carefully designed utilizing mostly systems of mirrors. A crowded, mirrored place. . Sternberg ponders the idea as the automatic sink fills gurgling to the slit of the emergency drain at its rim. This sumac cyst between his eyes feels fucking alive, man. Pulses painfully with the squeak of his head's blood. The cyst is beginning to show a little bit of white at the acme. Not good. Clear evidence of white blood cells, which implies blood cells, and so a bloodstream. From there it doesn't take genius to figure out that you've got a body. A bit of white at an infected cyst's cap is pretty much embodiedness embodied. No way he's messing with the fucker, though. It would just love to be messed with. Would feed on it. And the stage after plum is eggplant, big and dusky and curved, like a new organ in itself, to be an ism of. And D.L. is here, after all. Who as a child he loved. Though what a personal letdown, in terms of D.L. Her being now married and knocked was OK — that was an attainability issue. The letdown is how fucking undesirable, how unlovable she's turned out, in person, after time. Three years of letters since his dreams got wet and he'd written her care of Steelritter Advertising, drunk with bright hormone, to confess to this girl whose whereabouts he didn't even know the effect she'd had on him as a child a whole decade back, during the filming of those spots at the very first McDonald's, in Collision, Ill., preserved and converted to a commercial soundstage. The little men's-room mirror's image does that blurred, swimming, memory thing. He nine, she twelve. She'd seemed so… well, developed. Her bottom had made the slide's iron sing. Her breastlets had been a maddening horizontal regularity in a jumper-top's wrinkle. Sternberg in shorts and black socks, agog, glands kick-started, though he then still only halfway to puberty (low pituitary function). A winter afternoon in Illinois, the dead fields' total snow like a well-ironed sheet, the sky blue as lit gas, shallow and broad as all outdoors, a saucer with ungentle black edges. The astringent classroom light of the elaborate McDonald's set, D.L. sharing something deep-fried with Tom under the aluminum counter as stage mothers twittered and children and clown and — Burglar were choreographed just so, for an indoor shot. A kind of Beatrice in saddle shoes, she'd given birth to some of Sternberg's first ideas. Her pubescent letters (she'd answered his letter, which was just plain nice) had started out so lilting, warm, putting-the-reader-at-ease. The poems and stories she later sent were less so; they seemed cold, coy for coyness's sake, he never forgot he was sitting in a chair in his parents' living room, reading print on paper; but they appeared deep and ambiguous and full of ideas in a way that, say, a Wïsk spot's cattle call sure didn't. And but the photo she'd sent him: was that supposed to be of her? If so, something damned unsavory's happened in the time between the taking and the looking. Now she seems so… well, underdeveloped. Like a total reversal. It's frightening. And has she really smiled once, yet, the whole time, since they met at M.I. Airport? Has she even once really looked at him when he says something? Nechtr looks at him, but that's almost even creepier: this Mark guy looks at you with the kind of distanced concentration you use to look at something you're eating.
Sternberg washes his hot face without soap. Way too much time has gone by in here, without question. Maybe everybody's out there waiting, deducing the activity and so presence of bowels.
He's got Nechtr pegged. Nechtr's that radiant distant type that it's just impossible to tell if he's putting you on, usually. So what the hell is he doing with this unsavory girl who looks way worse than her photo and says she's currently working on a poem consisting entirely of punctuation? Who has a face like a… a long face? Who wears synthetic green? Was it a planned pregnancy? Shotgun wedding? The shotgun has yet to be invented that could get Sternberg to marry the D.L. this D.L. has turned out to be, somebody one eerily fuck of a lot like Mrs. Sternberg, the sort of person who, if you visited her house, she'd smile the whole time you were there, then clean vigorously after you left. A cosmic nyet to that. Plus her tits it turns out can't be any bigger than they were that one childish day, that one single commercial either of them have ever been alumni of. Why didn't Nechtr just offer to pay for the abortion? Are Trinitarians pro-Life? Plus she smells weird— orangy on top and then a whiff of something dead and preserved underneath. Let's face it. She looks like her vagina would smell bad. He'd be long gone, personally, dude. Abortion or no. He'd be a red sail in the sunset by now if she tried—