Still-distant Collision is a madhouse. Frantic, clotted, teeming with alumni begging to stay. The obverse of Saigon's fall. The townspeople, descendants of an accidental market, have learned to change big bills — everywhere there are souvenirs, homemade concession stands. Twin arches of plated gold have been erected, each the size of St. Louis's Gateway, and below their giant twin paraboloid zeniths a gemmed altar that demands, recorded, to let it give you a break. The predella itself a lawn-sized golden patty. And everything that's been built — arches, altar, predella — has been perforated and filled to spurt and shower U.S.D.A. Grade A blood at the ecstatic moment of Jack Lord's helicoptered approach. The sight will be halcyon, chialistic. He will watch desire build to that red-and-gold pitch, that split-second shudder and sneeze of thirty years' consumers, succumbing, as one. And this is the one secret of a public genius: it will be the Storm before the Calm. Gorged with flora and the fauna their money's killed and shipped frozen to serve billions, the alumni will give in, reveling, utterly.
And that, as they say, will be that. No one will ever leave the rose farm's Reunion. The revelation of What They Want will be on them; and, in that revelation of Desire, they will Possess. They will all Pay The Price — without persuasion. It's J.D.'s swan song. No more need for J.D. Steelritter Advertising or its helmsman's genius. Life, the truth, will be its own commercial. Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that's been its object all along. And, in Death, it will of course become Life. The last commercial. Popular culture, the U.S. of A.'s great lalated lullaby, the big re-mind-a-pad on the refrigerator of belief, will, forever unsponsored, tumble into carefully salted soil. The public, one great need, will not miss being reminded of what they believe. They'll doubt what they fear, believe what they wish; and, united, as Reunion, their wishes will make it so. Their wishes will, yes, come true. Fact will be fiction will be fact. Ambrose and his academic heirs will rule, without rules. Meatfiction.
And Steelritter, in what he's foreseen? He'll retire to the intersection where everything started. At peace in the roaring crowd's center. Maybe have a long-needed nap, stretched out on the intersected road, each limb a direction, cigar a sundial. He'll relax and feel the great heavy earthspin beneath him stutter, flicker, oppose.
He will be the object of appreciation. He will be not just needed. He will be loved. Beloved. Because he will Re-Present the Product.
He broods, riding shotgun. He's smoked his cigar down to the point where he feels the heat of the thing on his lips. The woven-iron scarecrow recedes in no time. He pegs his butt out the window and, because he wants it so, ceases to brood, his great forehead smoothing like a smartly-snapped sheet. Soon they'll make the last turn West.
They're passed by a chicken truck in a tremendous hurry. Its sides are like the sides of a crate. Its passage is a spray of feed and feathers against DeHaven's windshield. The action of the homemade wipers (furious) sends the clown's redly pulsing nose all the way inside the crack between glass and instrumentation. The nose falls completely out of anybody's notice, resting somewhere inside the dash.
Our six in turn pass an enormous old farmer who's hitchhiking on the barely-there shoulder of the county road. You can see his old harvester disabled and listing tiredly to starboard in the waving corn behind him. On the moving car's other side, the very tops of the two giant arches glint, just visible, inclined like a child's severe eyebrows just over the countertop line between land and the baby-blue iris of a sky that looks down all day at food. J.D. is the first to make out the arches' tops — give that man a cigar, he smiles— because the other five are all looking at the big farmer, hitching, motionless, a statue rushing toward them. He's huge; his thumb casts a shadow. The malevolent clown's car sprays him with gravel.
"Not enough room for a farmer that big in here, dude," DeHaven says.
"You don't usually see big old men," D.L. says speculatively. "Big men seem to die young. Have you seen many big old men? It's rare. Usually they die."
This is kind of thoughtless. Both Steelritters are pretty big. So's Mark Nechtr.
DeHaven uses maybe two fingers to turn the car left, his other white hand scanning the FM dial. The car moans on the turn. A bit more of the giant blond arches appear, now dead ahead, still distant but revealing more of themselves, the Nordic eyebrows spreading, getting less severe, as the jacked-up car moves toward them. The intersection's road sign had said 2000W. All roads seem to be identified only by numbers and directions out here in the country. J.D. coughs richly. The car's six panes of glass are still speckled with some surviving but still motionless little insects— unkilled, Mark figures, killing one, because they make the killing uninteresting, plus loathsome.
A neglected fact is that a black line — obsidian, really — appeared when they turned truly West on straight-shot 2000W. These are possible storm clouds. They appear as a Semitic hairline above the golden brows.
In a development, DeHaven's gloved fingers have plucked from the tides of daytime static the FM avatar of that same Wonderful WILL station, now deeply into a mid-morning Pentacostal old-time gospel hour. The preacher — you can tell he's a charismatic, a Revivalist, because he can do to English what the Swiss can do to French: every syllable gathers to itself a breathy suffix — the preacher addresses himself to the issues of eyes and motes and beams. Alludes to the seasons that inform rural spirituality. Makes reference to tight cycles of life, passage, death, passage, life. He holds a mono-tonic high-C idiot note throughout, repeating one or two very simple themes. The high steady whine and breath ring wincingly against the sleep-deprived tuning forks of everybody in the car except Magda, who nightly sleeps, unmedicated, the sleep of the dead. The only variation at all is in the preacher's audience-response; he repeats each epithet three times. His tone is almost frantically laconic, if that makes sense. Mark cops an image of Camus on speed.
J.D. Steelritter, whose own spirits now vary inversely with the car's distance from the still-distant but at least now visible and spreading arches, from the idea of the revel beneath them, tries absently to recall where and how he hired these particular troublesome, late-to-arrive kids, as children. Eberhardt he remembers spotting as he'd toured, with a guide, the gutted ruins of Ambrose's Ocean City Park. She'd been with her father, a really solid, sturdy-looking man, a Volvo of a man, in a crew cut, muscular under a black satin jacket whose back showed a blue Southeast Asia encircled by a red Kek-ulian serpent, sucking at its own sharp tail, with the white legend I DIED THERE below. It was the way she touched the melted lurid shell of the ruined Funhouse's Fat May, palm to its big sagged forehead, a tiny mother with a giant fevered child, that had excited J.D. — here was a kid at her gentlest with the luridly disclosed. The father had proffered his amputee's hook as J.D. introduced himself. Eberhardt'd been a well-developed, attractive kid. The Sternberg kid he couldn't remember just where he picked that kid up, or why, though he remembers all too well the metal twitter of his mother's voice, the way she kept fucking with the kid's hair and clothes, smoothing him into something seamless and false after J.D.'s time and care had gone into fashioning him as the kind of sad, rumpled kid who orders from intercoms and then eats while he plays.