J.D. chuckles that chuckle. "Hell, Nechtr, no need to be shy about it. A lot of writing teachers make good solid incomes from teaching creative writing. There's a demand for it. Sometimes over at Steelritter Ads we get copywriters who're just coming out of creative programs. Ambrose himself makes good solid steady money over at East Chesapeake Trades."
"That's where Mark is. Mark's under him."
J.D. ignores this girl. "Creative programs are one reason the whole Funhouse franchise thing's finally gotten off the ground. Writing teachers don't press. They know when to concede. They defer to people who know what's what in an industry."
"Technically part of English Department. . technically a degree in English," Mark mutters indistinctly into the roar of the window he's opened. Smoke is drawn out the big crack, sliding like the last bits of grainy stuff down a drain. The combined smokers' smoke is the same general color as the clouds that have drawn past the Westward arches and are moving visibly this way. Threads of bright light appear and then instantly disappear in the clouds' main body— filaments in bad bulbs. The air cools further, and there's that rain's-coming smell through the window's crack. Magda leans a bit over Mark with the flowers and breathes deeply at the roar of the crosscurrent:
"Rain," with a sigh.
And they pass a sudden and alone farmhouse, right up next to 2500W, with its trees and little skyline of silos, and tire swing, and rusted machinery at angles in the dense grass of its limitless yard. The fields around the house are full of odd grass-or-hay material. A big-armed woman in a lawn chair waves from the gray porch, a wet scythe and styrofoam cooler at her feet. The house's mailbox has a name on it and is yawning open, waiting for mail. The woman waves at the growling jacked-up Reunion car. Her wave is deliberate and even, like a windshield wiper. She's a storm-watcher. A spectator sport in rural Illinois. Obscure elsewhere. But storms move like the very wind out here, no fucking around, building and delivering very quickly, often with violence, sometimes hail, damage, tornadoes. Then they move off with the calm even pace of something that knows it's kicked your ass, they move away, still tall, bound for points East, behind you. It's a spectacle. Mark would normally be more interested in the implications of the lawn chair and wave. He'd kind of like them to stop at the house and try to get some definite directions. Surely they can't be lost. The Steel-ritters live around here. And if they've been shuttling for three solid days and nights, as J.D. says, the precise way to go should be a deep autonomic wrinkle in DeHaven's brain by now. But they're circling. They are not, by any means, creating for themselves the shortest distance between C.I. Airport and Collision, 111. Mark does know about straight lines and shortest distances. Maybe J.D. and DeHaven are the kind of people who can't navigate and talk at the same time. Mark feels in his designer hip pocket the giant key of the O'Hare rental locker.
"Except he never writes anything," D.L. says. "He doesn't produce. He's blocked. He's thinking of leaving the Program. Aren't you, Mark."
J.D. directs his scimitar and ember at Mark with real interest. "You're paying to go to school to write and you don't write anything?"
"Varoom," says DeHaven.
"I'm not terribly prolific," Mark says, wishing he could wish harm to the back of D.L. 's tightly knotted head.
"He only produced one thing all year," she tells the Steelritters. "And it was so bad he wouldn't even show it to me. Now he's blocked. These things happen in programs. That's why I've decided I detest all—"
"You're blocked?" Sternberg asks Mark.
Mark decides on maybe just one petal, to tide him over against arrival.
"Probably a standards problem," J.D. says, nodding as at the familiar. "I get a creative type under me who's blocked, it always in the end turns out to be just a problem of unrealistic standards. Usually."
D.L. and DeHaven snort together at the use of the word realistic as yet another foil-bright fuel truck banshees past in the left lane, a spigot in back, next to its signs, dribbling amber fluid.
"So what do I do I call them in on the carpet and bitch them out about how all they've got to do is adjust their standards," J.D. says, his cigar now just protruding, staying there, saliva-dusky, balanced on his lower lip, so that it moves with the nonchalant grace of his speech, on that lip. "Adjust themselves downward and forward," he growls. "Adjust their creative conceptualization of, what's the word attainable felicity."
D.L's head snaps up at this.
"That art-school crap's bogus, man," DeHaven muses. "Only bullshit artists move in packs."
"Silence and speed, shitspeck," says J.D., hiking an elbow again to look back at Mark Nechtr, the unconnected kid, for whom J.D. shows a strange but genuine fondness. He gestures paralytically, if you wilclass="underline" "Adjust this paralyzing desire they have to create the perfect and totally new ad, is what I tell them," he says. "I ask them — and remember this, kid, it's free advice — I ask them, do they think it's any accident that 'perfectionism' and 'paralysis' rhyme?"
DeHaven rolls his mascara-circled eyes. Gravel clatters. A number of blank looks are exchanged. D.L. begins:
"But—"
"But they're goddamn close enough, is what I tell them," J.D. laughs, the laugh of a small enclosed person, his forehead again snapping clear. DeHaven lip-sync'd this whole thing. J.D.'s laughter sends his cigar pointing in directions. There's a perilous tilted mountain of ash. His laughter becomes a meaty coughing fit.
Mark, too, laughs, liking this man, in spite of his tough son.
Sternberg deposits his smoked filter in a back-of-the-front-seat ashtray you do not want described and clears his own throat:
"Nechtr, could we maybe discuss the possibility of some of those flowers, you think, for a sec?" gesturing with his forehead's extra organ at the Ziploc Mark and Magda somehow both hold below J.D.'s headrest-limited view.
Steelritter's whole face lights up. The arches are now extremely near. He's starved.
"You a flower man, kid? What kind? Violets? Roses, maybe? I manage a little rose-bush farm of my own, back home. We get there — which we will — you alumni are going to see a greenhouse to end all—"
Magda quietly interrupts, trying to point out that they haven't heard about Drew-Lynn's present or future yet; but and then D.L. interrupts her, telling DeHaven and J.D. and Magda that she, D.L, is no longer a graduate student but now a real struggling artist. A postmodernist.
"A postmodernist?" DeHaven grins.
"Yeah, well, we handle Kellogg's," Steelritter says gruffly. "I say get out of here with your Post products."
"Specializing in language poetry and the apocalyptically cryptic Literature of Last Things, in exhaustion in general, and metafic-tion."
Puzzled, DeHaven scratches his scalp with the furiousness of the recently de-wigged. "Who'd you meet?"
Mark is embarrassed for Drew-Lynn. Figure someone has to be.
"In fact I rather wish Dr. Ambrose were coming for his discotheque's opening today, too, although I must admit I no longer believe in him as a true artist. But I used to believe in him, and I'd like to see him cut his own ribbon," D.L. says, yawning groggily.
Magda coughs, feels at her pretty throat.
"A genuine and pleasant guy," J.D. nods in agreement. "Never any client-trouble over the whole long protracted Funhouse process. Doubts yes, but never an aggression, a press; never a real cross word. Seldom an ego. Also a flower fan, photogenic kid back there, by the way. You're under him? And he's got this wife who just can't stop smiling," he says. "Ever met that lady? So pleasant all the time it hurts. Dimples like bullet holes."