Behind a barbed-wire tangle can now be seen the Correctional Facility whose sign, way back at C.I.A., had said not to give rides.
The Facility has slit windows, is low and squat except for guard towers on stilts, and anyway is just on the whole huge, taking several seconds to pass. Another sign, this one in red, says the area is Federal and Restricted. There's no sign of movement Mark can see. The wall of towering storm clouds is now flush up against the (very) late-morning sun, giving the Southwest sky the appearance of a nighttime wall, but with a night-light. Sternberg is gesturing persistently for one of Mark's fried roses; Mark ignores him, listening, rapt.
"Gotta tell you, in confidence, though," J.D. says, craning to see the sun finally get taken. "Never could get all the way through a single one of those things the guy writes. Not one of them, and we're friends. Sent me the whole load of his stuff. Couldn't even lift the box. Figured that was a bad sign right there."
There's thunder.
"And sure enough," J.D. says. "Un-get-throughable. Troubled marriages all over the place. Hard as hell to read."
"Marriages?"
"Sometimes boring, too," D.L. says, nodding as if in admission. "Indulgent. Cerebral but infantile. Masturbatory. A sort of look-Dad-no-hands quality."
"Hey, now, Sweets."
"Or, in the opposite concept, too," J.D. Steelritter says, butting his cigar in another clottedly ghastly ashtray, hearing in the corn's pre-kick-ass-storm hiss that idiot-high For Whom he'd thought was his son's idiocy; "too smart. Too clever for its own good. Makes it too coy."
"Almost Talmudically self-conscious?" Mark says. "Obsessed with its own interpretation?"
Magda has pressed against Mark in the asexual way of a stranger next to you at a really scary film, her left shoulder muscular and port-wine birthmark bright.
"Personally I'm a hundred percent behind your basic phenomena of interpretation," J.D. says. "Interpretation is meat on my table and burger coupons in you kids' wallets. But for instance this story we had to use to blueprint the franchise campaign off of… that For Whom story, in Sixty-Seven. Liked the concept. Did not like the story. Do not like stories about stories."
D.L. snorts softly to herself.
Steelritter looks down at her. "Because never did and never will do an ad for an ad. Would you? A salesman selling salesmen? Makes no sense. No heart. Bad marriage. No value."
Mark has leaned forward, smelling cannabis and talcum and carbolic and amber from DeHaven and D.L.
"Stories are basically like ad campaigns, no?" J.D. says. DeHaven isn't lip-syncing this one. "Which they both, in terms of objective, are like getting laid, as I'm sure you know from trade school, Nechtr" — looking briefly back. " 'Let me inside you,' they say. You want to get laid by somebody that keeps saying 'Here I am, laying you?' Yes? No? No. Sure you don't. I sure don't. It's a cold tease. No heart. Cruel. A story ought to lead you to bed with both hands. None of this coy-mistress shit."
By way of a weather report: the dark fingers of scout-clouds have reached past the sun and are groping at the malevolent car's broadly shallow sky. Shadows fall in county-sized stripes, making gray bars in dull-green terrain, an oriental watercolor whispering muted color. And Tom Sternberg, whom Mark has been studiously ignoring, and whose debilitating claustrophobia you've probably forgotten because he's been just strength embodied, so far, in the speeding crowded enclosed car, has that erection, still, sees no way politics can be brought into the above discussion, is now dreadfully afraid of himself, wants one of those scale-of-stasis-yanking fried blossoms, except now can't get the distracted, rapt Mark's attention. And is clubbed between the eyes with an idea. He asks J.D. Steelritter whether his own rose-bush farm grows the roses the Maryland academic Mark trusts cuts and fries and turned Mark on to. This is a cataclysmic development: Magda's yellow silence is that horrified public kind of one whose seatmate has farted at the ballet.
FINAL INTERRUPTION
Mark Nechtr has taken a keen personal interest in J.D. Steelritter's informal criticism of Dr. C— Ambrose's famous metafictional story, "Lost in the Funhouse." He thinks J.D. is wrong, but that the adman's lover/story analogy is apposite, and that it helps explain why Mark has always been so troubled by the story, and by Ambrose's willingness now to franchise his art into a new third dimension — to build "real" Funhouses. He believes now that J.D. Steelritter and the absent Dr. Ambrose have not just "sold out" (way too easy an indictment for anybody to level at anybody else), but that they've actually done it backwards: they want to build a Funhouse for lovers out of a story that does not love. J.D. himself had said the story doesn't love, no? Yes. However, Mark postulates that Steelritter is only half-right. The story does not love, but this is precisely because it is not cruel. A story, just maybe, should treat the reader like it wants to… well, fuck him. A story can, yes, Mark speculates, be made out of a Funhouse. But not by using the Funhouse as the kind of symbol you can take or leave standing there. Not by putting the poor characters in one, or by pretending the poor writer's in one, wandering around. The way to make a story a Funhouse is to put the story itself in one. For a lover. Make the reader a lover, who wants to be inside. Then do him. Pretend the whole thing's like love. Walk arm in arm with the mark through the grinning happy door. Shove. Get back out before the happy jaws meet tight. Reader's inside the whole thing. Not at all as expected. Feels utterly alone. The thing's wildly disordered, but creepily so, hard and cold as windshield glass; each possible sensory angle is used, every carefully-taught technique in your quiver expended, since each "technique" is, really, just a reflective surface that betrays what it pretends to reveal.
Except the Exit would never be out of sight. It'd be brightly, lewdly lit. There'd be no labyrinths to thread through, no dark to negotiate, no barrels or disks to disorient, no wax minotaur-machina to pop out on springs and flutter the sphincters of the lost. The Egress would be clearly marked, and straight ahead, and not even all that far. It would be the stuff the place is made of that would make it Fun. The whole enterprise a frictionless plane. Cool, smooth, never grasping, well lubed, flatly without purchase, burnished to a mirrored gloss. The lover tries to traverse: there is the motion of travel, except no travel. More, the reflective surfaces in all directions would reflect each static forward step, interpret it as a backward step. There'd be the illusion (sic) of both the dreamer's unmoving sprint and the disco-moonwalker's backward glide. The Exit and Egress and End in full view the whole time.
But boy it would take one cold son of a bitch to write such a place erect. A whole different breed from the basically benign and cheery metafktionist Mark trusts. It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict. The story would barely even be able to be voluntary, as fiction. The same mix of bottomless dread and phylogenic lust Mark feels when he bends to the pan's sizzle to see what. .
Except Mark feels in his flat young gut, though, that such a story would NOT be metafiction. Because metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love, a night-light on the black fifth wall of being a subject, a face in a crowd. It's lovers not being lovers. Kissing their own spine. Fucking themselves. True, there are some gifted old contortionists out there. Ambrose and Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme can fuck themselves awfully well. Mark's checked their whole orgy out. The poor lucky reader's not that scene's target, though he hears the keen whistle and feels the razored breeze and knows that there but for the grace of the Pater of us all lies someone, impaled red as the circle's center, prone and arranged, each limb a direction, on land so borderless there's nothing to hold your eye except food and sky and the shadow of one slow clock. .