Sternberg tries the brusque variety of a "Sorry about that," moving shoulder-first, hands cupped before him.
"I'm afraid sorry won't quite do, here, young sir."
"Young sir?"
"Look at my skirt." Magda sighs.
"You've. . stabbed my breakfast."
Though brandy in the lap isn't a completely downer-type sensation, really. Not on a par with cold water on the groin of the ambivalently embodied. Water from the automatic sink is still gushing defective, by the way, from a faucet below and just South of a woman whose white face, frozen in a photographically forevered climax, adorns the wall's condom concession; and the overflow is just beginning to shine at the base of the men's-room door, to spread a dark arc against the thin industrial carpet of the lower terminal.
"It was an accident, dude," Sternberg says, forehead aflame as Ronald's giant floppy tread lounge-ward sounds. "I'm late for this real important ride that's finally just here, so maybe we could just.. "
"I am not a dude, and you are not riding off anywhere without some kind of significant gesture of apology."
"What's up, gang?" the clown asks from the nearby lounge door, a cool clown, making a fist to look at nails that are obscured by cotton gloves. Behind and beyond, J.D. is illustrating some wide remark to Nola (she of the translucent wart) at the mobbed Avis counter.
"I said I was sorry, man," Sternberg says, deciding equally-pissed-off is the way to play this one.
"There a Sternberg and or an Ambrose-Gatz here?" DeHaven asks, nodding briefly over at the pouch-eyed overtime bartender, who's punching out, shedding his inevitable green vest as the elevated screen goes peacefully static for the first time in days.
"Yes that's just it you have said you are sorry, and only then when I stopped you." Red-eyed and somewhat blue-balled, the salesman, who manages to be effete in corduroy, no mean feat, hears his own night-flight sleep-dep signal, the sound of an infinity of mutated little jaws munching, little legs patting contented little thoraxes. "But you've made no gesture."
"I got a gesture for you, if you want a gesture."
"He's said, but not demonstrated," the pesticide man appeals to the stewardess.
"I'm Magda Ambrose-Gatz," says Magda, at herself with a moist napkin.
"And I'm Thomas Sternberg."
DeHaven's painted smile broadens over a smear of abortive beard, to which particles of pancake makeup cling, as he distributes the Reunion's very last tags. He looks Sternberg over. "Mean zit on the old forehead, there, big guy."
"It's poison sumac. It's not a zit. And this on my pants is water."
DeHaven has turned to the salesman, looking intimidating as only a professional clown can. He sizes the effete man up. "Think you're pretty hot shit, don'tcha."
"The temperature of shit doesn't enter into it. This. . apparition of a boy has deliberately spilled Rèmy on my date."
"It's not a zit."
"And I'm not a date," comes Magda's quiet-when-calm voice from Sternberg's inverted side.
Sternberg is struggling to restrain his rose-fed desire to jab the effete man's still-arresting hand with the fruity tip of Mark's arrow, which Magda, still on Sternberg's blind side, has removed and is inspecting. But the restraining hand is removed by the fine plump hand of J.D. Steelritter, who at this moment intrudes on Tom's sight as a cigar, a stomach, and a hand from above, freeing him. J.D. clears his throat.
Some people can ask whether there's any trouble here in a way that ensures a correct negative. Imagine the obverse of a greedy lover's midnight query:
"YOU AWAKE?"
The writer and academic C— Ambrose, with his birthmark and cheery smile and a maniacal laugh the whole workshop has decided we associate most closely with Gothic castles and portraits with eyes that move, exerts an enormous influence on Mark Nechtr's outlook. Even when Mark doesn't trust him, he listens to him. Even when he doesn't listen to him, he's consciously reacting against the option of listening, and listens for what not to listen to.
Ambrose tells our graduate seminar that people read fiction the way relatives of the kidnapped listen to the captive's voice on the captor-held phone: paying attention, natch, to what the victim says, but absolutely hanging on the pitch, quaver, and hue of what's said, reading a code born of intimacy for interlinear clues about condition, location, outlook, the likelihood of safe return. . That little aside cost Mark two months.
But Dr. Ambrose isn't immune to this kind of stuff either. He's clearly obsessed with criticism the way you get obsessed with something your fear of which informs you. He told us all right before Thanksgiving to imagine you're walking by the Criticism Store, and you see a sign in the store window that says FIRE SALE! COMPLETE ILLUMINATION, PAYOFF, UNDERSTANDING AND FULFILLMENT SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! PRICES GUTTED! And in you scurry, with your Visa. And but it turns out it's only the sign in the window itself that's for sale, at the Criticism Store.
D.L. claims Ambrose ripped even that obsessive little image off, that the professor's whole "art" is nothing more than the closet of a klepto with really good taste.
And yet the stuff exerts a kind of gravitylike force on Mark Nechtr, who distrusts wordplay, who feels about Allusion the way Ambrose seems to feel about Illusion, who regards metafiction the way a hemophiliac regards straight razors. But the stuff sits on his head. D.L. doesn't. It's really kind of a wonder he produces at all, back East.
In a related development, as you stand shoulder-first across thirty orthogonal meters between you and the red ring that encloses the gold chroma, and draw your 12-strand string to the tip of your nose, the point of your arrow, at full draw, is somewhere between three and nine centimeters to the left of the true straight line to the bull's-eye, even though the arrow's nock, fucked by the string, is on that line. The bow gets in the way, see. So logically it seems like if your sight and aim are truly true, the arrow should always land just to the left of target-center, since it's angled off in the wrong direction right from the beginning. But the straight-aimed and so off-angled target arrow will stab the center, right in the heart, every time. It is an archer's law that makes no sense. How is this so?
In a related fashion, occasionally a writer will encounter a story that is his, yet is not his. I mean, by the way, a writer of stories, not one of these intelligences that analyze society and culture, but the sort of ignorant and acquisitive being who moons after magical tales. Such a creature knows very little: how to tie a shoelace, when to go to the store for bread, and the exact stab of a story that belongs to him, and to him only. How to unfurl a Trojan, where on the stall door to carve BEWARE OF LIMBO DANCERS, how to give the teacher what she wants, and the raw coppery smell of a scenario over which he's meant to exercise, not suffer, authority. And yet occasionally the tale is already authoritatively gutted, publicly there, brightly killed, done by another. Or else menacingly alive, self-sufficient, organic, sounding the distant groan of growth, trading chemicals briskly with the air, but still outside the creature who desires to take it inside and make a little miracle. How is this so?