The sink, with a gurgled sigh like almost mercy, overflows, emergency drain-slit and all, Sternberg's spent so unmercifully so much time in here. The water gurgles over the rim and onto the crotch of his gabardines. Great. That's just great. Now it looks like he's maybe wet himself. And what's he supposed to say. Or even if he doesn't say anything. Either way, explanation or interpretation, he comes out embodied. He demands compassion from a mirror he's backed away from, hoping to make the water stop. But it doesn't. Maybe it's been on too long. It's spilling onto the floor. Great. He demands compassion. Except of whom, though?
"J.D. bases the principle on the same principle animal researchers use to tag and track animals. Each bill is tagged with this teeny little silicon transmitter, see?" Hogan points out to Mark and D.L. what looks vaguely like a monocle over the eye that separates Annuit from Coeptis on The Great Seal. "Simultaneously," Hogan explains, "I ask the person who's taking the money to name, right off the top of their head, what they fear most in the whole world. Their one great informing fear."
Hogan, into it, extends the heavy clipboard, flapping it open to a plain print-out sheet headed simply FEAR. Mark goes down the page:
"Bomb."
"Meltdown or Bomb."
"Cancer — slow kind."
"Hyperinflation."
"The Greenhouse Effect."
"That my wife wife will scald me in my sleep."
"Hyperinflation and Attendant Fiscal Collapse."
"If the whole population in China all jumps up and down at once."
"Russian Bomb."
"Confusion."
"My father's voice."
"Ozone depletion."
"Apocalypse."
"That phone call in the middle of the night."
"Slow kind of cancer from Meltdown or Bomb."
"The dark."
"That I'll scald my husband while he's asleep."
"Nuclear Winter."
"If we get leaders over there in the U.S.S. of R. that are too young to remember what World War II was like, over there."
"Overextension."
"Fear itself."
"Bombs of all kinds."
"The Contamination of the White Aryan Race from nigger fag subversion."
"Scalding."
"The light."
"Nuclear terrorism."
"Confusion."
"Myself."
"That there's no God."
"Discomfort."
"My genitals."
"A sequel to Three's Company."
"That I die and get to go to heaven and I get there and it stops being heaven because I'm there."
"Death by Water."
"Bombs that can fit in metal suitcases."
"That there's a God."
'That the people who invented Max Headroom are busy now inventing something else."
"And so on," Hogan says, flipping the clipboard closed, "with some similar distributions on the Desire end, when we did Desire. J.D. figures this — that anybody who'll take money from a stranger, in an airport, for free, with no idea of who we are or what if any scam is at work, who'll reveal his number-one fear and desire to a clipboard, for money, is a born consumer, a micromarket all to himself, full of desire and fear and vice versa, the perfect target for the next wave of targeting campaigns. And we want some kind of targeting of his spending patterns. And so the bills are tagged."
"Jesus," says Mark, rapt.
"Mark darling," D.L. says through grit teeth.
"Relax. I told you I called a van," Hogan says, hiking over backwards to get at the paper cup's good but cold last drop. He hands the frantic Avis lady the cup to throw out for him and looks the two kids over. "You two've worked with J.D. before, right? The Reunion and everything?"
"Well," Mark starts, "I—"
"So you know this is a genius I get to work for. This man is a genius. It's an honor to even do market research for J.D. Steelritter. Even in this God-forsaken place." He looks around as if for eavesdroppers. "This is the man, this is the legendary man, I'm sure you two know, who eventually got Arm and Hammer baking soda customers to start pouring the stuff down the drain. As… get this. . drain freshened." He licks a bit of sweetener off the heel of his hand. "Is that genius? Is that textbook planned-obsolescence, or what? And all off fear. J.D. eventually figured out that anybody who'd buy a box of baking soda out of fear of refrigerator odor wouldn't hesitate one second to shell out for another box to prevent drain odor." He laughs a marvelous laugh. "Drain odor? What's that, for Christ's sake? It's just fear. Very careful research, fear, and the vision of a genius. The man is a legend. I even had a poster of him on my wall, in ad school."
D.L. spots Sternberg creeping curiously and furtively from the men's room with its broad-shouldered symbol back to the lounge, moving serpentine, shoulder-first, trying somehow to keep his back to everything at once, his hands cupped before him like those of the suddenly nude. She raises her arm to him, to fill him in on potential transportation developments, but he doesn't even look their way. He eases gingerly back down at their round table and now low-level cola and still-going cigarette just in time to hear "Hawaii Five-O"'s last Jack Lord give Danno his last instructions, ever, to book certain people, Murder-One. The nock of Mark's Dexter Aluminum arrow overhangs the round table's edge. The table's wood-grained surface is pocked with holes, from Mark's lounge trick.
"These all seem like adult fears," Mark is saying to Hogan. "Are any of those younger people's fears? Is there a different list for kids?"
Hogan's eyes go cold. He mashes down the clipboard's metal cover and latches it. "Not at liberty," he says shortly.
"Why isn't fear just fear? What does it matter whose fear?"
"And by the way," Hogan indicates the crisp treasury note D.L. is snapping into her wallet. "Can I get your fears, please?"
"You want our fears?"
"No such thing as a free lunch, kid," Hogan shrugs.
"That's just the kind of fear I'm talking about," Mark says. "I don't see why you—"
At this point somebody like Dr. C— Ambrose would probably interrupt to observe that it seems as though a pretty long time has passed since his last interruption on the general textuality of what's going on. But it seems almost like too little of true import has been going on to irritatingly interrupt and reveal as conventional artifact. Except but now some things really do start to go on. Two figures, one a long-awaited clown, round the broad carpeted curve of the lower terminal, passing the crowds at luggage roulette, bearing down. J.D. has gotten off DeHaven's slouchily apologetic good-for-nothing-shitspeck back, and has had a look at his watch, and they've rushed inside upstairs and had a look at the flight manifests for both the Lord Aloft 7:10 and the BrittAir 7:45. All three alumni and — ae are accounted for, in these manifest documents. J.D. and DeHaven have been scouring the whole of C.I. Airport. The last alumni are going to get a ride.
WHY J.D. STEELRITTER GAVE HIS SON DeHAVEN THE
RONALD MCDONALD JOB IN THE FIRST PLACE, "STAGE
FRIGHT" INCIDENT ASIDE
Because DeHaven Steelritter, son, has unwittingly given J.D. some of J.D.'s most creative and inspired ideas. It was DeHaven who first poured Arm & Hammer baking soda down the drain of the Steelritter farmhouse kitchen, in Collision, to try to erase the indelible odor of two marijuana roaches mistakenly washed down there along with the remains of something sweet. What happened to the fridge's baking soda? asks Mrs. Steelritter, who fears the noisomely oily smell of the fried roses that festoon the second-to-the-bottom refrigerator shelf. Where's my Arm and Hammer? she asks, as they sit down to a giant Midwest supper. DeHaven— who, like anybody who smokes dope under his parents' roof, is quick on his feet when it comes to explaining wild kitchen incongruities — delineates a deep concern for the impression the odor of the Steelritter drain could have made on the next houseguest who just might visit the kitchen and have occasion to get a whiff of a drain that, he declares, dry-mouthed, had smelled like death embodied.