Between teeth DeHaven says: "A job is where, when you take on a job, you do things whether it feels good to do them or not, because you promised, by the fact of taking on the job."
"What a memory. Makes a father swell with—"
"I don't see how anybody here gives a shit if I wear a red wig or not."
"You represent McDonald's, shitspeck. It's not you who's driving. You represent the world's community restaurant."
"It is awfully hot, Mr. Steelritter," Magda says, leaning forward to make herself heard. Mark hears her. The only evidence of a bra is a kind of knob at her back's center, under her brown Orion blouse, over her spine.
J.D. ignores her. "Have some fucking pride, DeHaven."
"We there, just about?" Sternberg pipes up, his hands in his lap as he stares reluctantly at Magda's blouse's knob, where hooks that men can't undo and women can undo with just one hand behind their back lie engaged in complexly-imagined relations.
"No," says J.D.
"Umm, long way?"
"Odometer's just about ready to roll," says DeHaven, watching the numbered wheels' implacable spin.
J.D. broods, removes, crunches, and reignites. The red interior fills again with the green stink of cigar. Sternberg goes back to being ignored. D.L.'s cough sounds like a laugh, and is also ignored. A classy no-nonsense scarecrow of black woven iron, more like a decoration than a real scarecrow, right up flush roadside, messes nastily for an instant with the car's shadow. Mark's just as glad about the wig's being back on, not out of any special ill will toward this Ronald kid—
"Anyway, my music I want to do has affinities with the work of like a Glass or a Reich, but with more. . progression. Harmonically it's even more atonal, and rhythmically it's got this kind of fascist quality I'm drawn to, a kind of jackboots-marching-on-a-small-Polish-town quality."
"Hush," J.D. says absently.
"It's music that grabs you by the lapels and says give me all your land or I'll gut your livestock," DeHaven sums up quickly. "Though in a much more cerebral way. And with percussion out the ass."
— but because its removal had revealed that the clown's heavy garish makeup simply ended, right around the top of his neck and the curve of his round cheeks, yielding to regular red wind-burned Steelritter skin with an abruptness that Mark just didn't like at all.
"Don't you even remember?" D.L. has turned to address Stern-berg. "Don't you remember how out of the way the McDonald's set was, back then?"
"Collision's in the middle of nowhere, kiddo."
"C.I.A.'s the closest airport and helipad, but it's still no laughing matter, how remote Collision is."
"On purpose," J.D. says, balancing his cigar on his heavy lower lip. "You don't go to client. You make client come to you. That way the cap's in his hand. Client comes a complex series of long ways to see you, has a tough journey, encounters bad roads and no maps and detours: client's convinced already, en route, that your services have value, for him to be wandering all over hell's half acre like this just to find you." J.D. beams grimly. Mark notes that DeHaven can silently lip-sync his father's whole speech. Plus his summation:
"A-very-wise-guru-at-the-top-of-a-tough-to-climb-mountain strate-gem," J.D. says. "It's no coincidence it's the gurus on mountains who're wise. You get to the top: you're already theirs."
Everyone lets this sink uneasily in.
Sternberg clears his smoker's throat, directing this sound somehow at the flight attendant beside him. "Sorry about your skirt, and stabbing your date's fruit."
"It's all right," Magda says, smoothing yellow hair back behind her ears. "And he wasn't my date."
"Except what about my Dexter?" Mark asks flatly.
"He was just a passenger," Magda explains.
"My arrow, Sternberg," Mark says, leaning a bit to look across Magda's front at Tom's boiled-egg-colored eye, trying to feel angry. "You left it back there, didn't you."
"I have it," Magda says.
Mark shifts his gaze to her. A sudden jounce — pothole; "Shit," DeHaven exclaims — makes his stomach rise in that rapid-descent way.
"It's in my carry-on." She smiles. "In the trunk. I'll give it back to you when we're there."
Mark looks at her orange face. "Thank you. It's kind of my favorite. It's the only one I can get through Security. It's aluminum." He pauses. "Thanks again."
She laughs. "It looked pretty obscene, just sticking out of that compote. I thought one of you'd want it."
"Well thank you," Sternberg says.
"Yes. Thanks." The thing cannot be lost. Even shot it at the sea once. Off an old wharf. Except it floated, though, glinting; hung in the water by its cedar knock; came in on the sluggish tide within hours.
And Mark had waited for it. On the crumbled wharf that smelled of fish. The fact that the arrow can't disappear is both a comfort and a worry. It makes Nechtr feel special, true. But from special it's not very far to Alone.
Although we all, Mark would know if he bothered to ask J.D. Steelritter, who'd done solipsistic-delusion-fear research back in the halcyon days of singles bars, we all have our little solipsistic delusions. All of us. The truth's all there, too, tracked and graphed in black and white — forgotten, now that fear of disease has superseded fear of retiring alone — sitting in dusty aluminum clipboards in a back archive at J.D. Steelritter Advertising, in Collision, where they're headed. We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd. It's Steelritter's meat.
O the sadness of J.D. Steelritter, a man who brings crowds into being! A crowded planet would lie right down for love of the men who build what they want built. But for the man who builds their wants? A drink on the house? God forbid a pat on the back, ever? A hug? A television Movie of the Week, the "J.D. Steelritter Story," sponsored by his sponsors, J.D. portrayed as the type of hero who overcomes? A sensitive novel from C— Ambrose in which J.D., manipulator of image and sign, succumbs via epistasis to the bewitchment of the Mesmermaze he spins and is forced via resolution to transcend, to come of age, to see? Something, no? But no. TV about bodies politic and people with dying bodies or robbers and cops puncturing bodies or doctors resealing bodies. Novels about novelists writing novels about novelists, who never succumb. Cute stories that slouch, sullen, clever, coy, no hair on the chests forever.
Though let's not get a wild hair up anything: he has no real bones to pick with Ambrose-as-builder, — entrepreneur, — Consumer. And why think of anything except what's just ahead? The Reunion will be huge. Larger than life. Beyond belief. Forty-four thousand actors, endorsers, celebrities, former actors, returning. 44,000 who will — photorecorded — reunite, greet, meet and eat. Eat. An irruption of ninety-nine-and-forty-four-one-hundredths percent pure consumption. The cameras' shots will be panoramic. You'll need the side-placed eyes of a deep-depth fish just to even hope to take it all in. The enormous crowd J.D. hath wrought over thirty years of time purchased second by expensive second will come together, lose the supplicants' courtesy that atomizes crowds, and desire past all earthly care the rendition of fat, the sigh of oil, the sparkle of carbonation, the consumption of government-inspected flesh. They will revel in meat, lips stained purple with the fried blood of Steelritter's floral tonnage.