"Not doing what you know deep down is wrong to do is boring?" Mark says, feeling the stab of a particular numbness he associates with qualities that ought to make him glow.
J.D. hears nothing but his own small voice and For Whom: "So thus the same fears that inform your whole what's the word. . "
"Character," murmurs Magda Ambrose-Gatz.
"'. . character: can't hear them, can't be moved by them, they're such old hat, by today," J.D. says. He turns, hiking an elbow. "Your adman's basic challenge: how to get folks' fannies out of chairs; how to turn millennial boredom around, get things back on track, back toward the finish line? How to turn stasis into movement, either flight or pursuit?"
"Make the listening unfashionable?" Mark says.
J.D.'s tired eyes widen as he nods. "But how to do that? How to do that? With symbols, is how. You make a gesture. You show you desire not to hear the ching."
"You behead an unsubtle image of what beauty is and fry it in lard and consume and digest and excrete it?"
"Turn your biggest fear into your one real desire?"
"Sounds pretty damn political," Sternberg suggests.
"Except what's everybody's biggest fear?"
"That Mormon researcher had whole lists of them."
"Pop."
"No no no," J.D. shakes his head impatiently, gesturing with a cigar he does not hold. "The one big one. The one everybody has. The one that binds us up, as a crowd."
"Death?"
"Dishonor?"
"I'd go with death, darling."
"My vote still goes to having a body, dudes."
"Pop."
"You gesture," J.D. says. "You sell out the squeak of your own head's blood. You sell out, but for selling-out's own sake, without end or object" — he looks above right, at the storm clouds, which are getting spectacular—"change the tired channel from life, honor, out of nothing but a desire to love what you fear: the whole huge historical Judeo-Christian campaign starts to spin in reverse, from inside."
"A campaign spins?"
"We're bored animals" — J.D. makes a summing-up gesture. "Even the naive ones know that. Bored numb with the sound of bells, the taste of meat. But ring meat," he says, "and you can bet your life you'll eat a bell. And like it."
The unmuffled engine dies, the jacked-up car coasting in a sudden roaring absence of homemade sound and halting in the shoul-derless space between rural blacktop and bare fallow field, by the field's ditch, in dirt, maybe a quarter-mile from where the road they're on takes its last curve left, West, dead into Northeast Collision. All that's there to hold your eye up ahead are three tiny rural shacks, shanties, up by the big broad leftward curve. The shanties keep you from seeing exactly where the curved road goes.
The complete silence in the quiet car, as it rolls to a crunching stop in the dirt, is like whole minutes of that second right after loud music stops. "Like it" ricochets around in the red interior as the malevolent car gives up the ghost in the roadside dirt, coming to rest perpendicular to a barbed fence between a lush verdant healthy cornfield and a rich black fallow field, boiling with confused pests lured by a taste for quality.
"Varoom," the clown says to himself weakly, squashing a placid gnat.
J.D. is suddenly very calm. He has a wristwatch. Jack Lord is scheduled to arrive over Collision soon. He is afraid. Sadness and anger and disgust at Ambrose's not-worth-it betrayal are scattered like the dust the car's halt has made, all before the great cold wind of a genius's fear. J.D.'s two great sheet-wrecking nightmares are missing his own Reunion and being stalled in someplace sweeping and panoramic and unenclosed and ever-growing.
There's a great ripping fart of thunder.
"Fix the car, please," he says softly as the first fat drops hit the windshield.
DeHaven is out with a stiff whimper. The windshield yields a sudden view of glittered hood.
"Could we just walk?" asks D.L.
"Not getting out of the car," J.D. says calmly. "Still two total miles or more. Rain. My suit will run. I can't preside wet. We'll stay here. The kid's got a way with machines."
Streaks of DeHaven's real face can be seen through the trademark face as the clown slams the hood shut in the spattered rain. The dice under the rearview jump at the slam, and the oil light pulses.
"Filter's a gem," he says, reentering. "My dipstick's clean as a whistle."
"I'll let that pass," J.D. says coolly.
"The lubrication seems totally OK," the clown sums up in a voice that makes you think he wishes it weren't.
"So start the car," J.D. says, managing at once both to clap his hands and look at his watch. "Hibbego. Let's go. Couple more miles. It'll be tit."
DeHaven shakes his head miserably, his lipstick rained into something sad. The trashcan clatter of more thunder is now indistinguishable from echoes of that thunder. Big Midwest drops start hitting the car's roof in that rhythmless, tentative, pre-serious way.
"Start the car!" Sternberg screams, so that Magda jumps on the hump. Mark closes his eyes, silent, lost in his own counsel.
DeHaven hooks a begrimed wrist over the fuzzy wheel and lights an unfiltered with maddening deliberation. He shakes his head:
"This car doesn't just stop and start. The engine's Detroit and the ignition's foreign. It's an admittedly ad hoc combination. You'd call it a bad marriage, Pop. But those were the parts I could get deals on. So I have to just keep it running all the time. Can't let it stop. A motherfucker on gas. You wouldn't let me park it by the greenhouses, Pop, remember? Because of the exhaust? It doesn't even need a key, see?" — pointing a grease-tipped glove-finger at the empty slant of an ignition receptacle where a key should be. "Because if it stops, when you try to start it, the engine goes like out of control." He exhales smoke with force. "Plus it was the oil light made it stall, Pop," indicating the little plastic window that covers his costume's nose. "I'm sure we've got internal problems somewhere. I'll fuck up the belts."
"Try it, please."
"I'll make the timing belt jump if I do. We'll jump time. We'll fuse cylinders."
"Give it a try, please, son," J.D. whispers, as roof-rain sounds.
The empty ignition screams to life. And, true to the clown's word, the car's idle is now wild, tortured; the engine revs crazily, way too high, so that ancient needles flap spastically in the dash. The malevolent car stalls the second the clown reaches up by the furry wheel to put it in a forward gear. It shudders.
"Great," Sternberg yells, having cadged the Ziploc J.D.'s left on the front seat's backrest. "Great. Fix the car, you shitspeck rotten clown." He feels too enclosed to bear.
The adman is looking through the shield's angled rivulets at the three wharf-gray shanties up where the last road takes its final Westward curve. The ancient askew shacks are interconnected by a system of corrugated plumbing pipe. J.D. breathes deeply and counts the three shanties out loud, willing the Reunion to remain temporarily on hold. They'll wait for him. Jack, aloft with his bullhorn, above a sea of red smiles, the cameras sweeping panoramic, looking for what to latch onto. The rain can be worked in somehow. Could enhance the whole conceit. Funhouse 1 will be opened and used, then 'dozered. J.D. Steelritter gets stabbed in the back by a client exactly once. No Funhouse franchise. No erection of memory for Herr Professor C— Ambrose, rat. No angled systems of mirrors Windexed nightly by anally compulsive teams in white. No barrels and disks on the dance floor. No happy fellatory door. No parts that shine, burnished to reflect and refer to every other part. No whole new dimension in alone fun.