“Remember that thing last year, those Alsatian separatists who blew up the daycare center?”
“Sure, sure.”
“So I just heard ABC is planning to do it as a Movie of the Week.”
I am back at my station in a darkness decorated by red indicator lights and soft glowing control buttons. I am once more in front of the guns, but mounting an assault of my own. In violent concentration, the synapses of my brain are flamethrowers. I fire neuron after neuron — chemical warfare, all-out bombardment. But these war machines are sealed away, one inside a console, one inside a skull; and now, between the two containers, waves begin to pass — magnetic waves, sine waves, alpha waves — that tangle and intertwine like the slippery arms and legs of lovers in a horizontal hold.
I feel buffered down here, safe. I feel as comfortably obsolete as the vacuum tube or the scanning raster. Have you ever visited a place, an old hotel, let’s say, and felt yourself spliced into some powerful continuity? Like there’s something just at your back but you can’t turn fast enough to catch it? That’s how it is for me, burrowed away with stacks and stacks of old TV shows. I am transformed in communion with the past. Like to see some fucking ant try that.
3
THE TOWN WHERE I’M staying has just lost its post office to federal austerity. This is fine with the postmistress, who can now keep a better watch on her barroom, Boot Hill, where she suspects her nephew has been fudging the receipts. There is a gas station and convenience store, a gun shop, a Rosicrucian optometrist who works out of his home. And there’s the Golconda Motel & Cafe, where I occupy unit #6. I am the only permanent resident, permanence being a relative thing out here. After my second month, Opatowski offered me my choice of paintings. I went from room to room and finally chose one called, according to a label on the back, “Fishing Village Morn.”
“I understand,” he said. “You need some water to look at.”
Opatowski is fond of me, and not just as a steady source of revenue. There is a regional affinity. Opatowski was an electrician in Pottstown, Pa., before migrating. He laments the absence of pizza, and the presence of crummy sports coverage in the papers, but he loves the weather. His wife, though suffering from lung disease, has taken up fossil-hunting.
“The woman has a need to know,” Opatowski says admiringly.
Telephones are unreliable, the water is briny. No one asks me what I do. It’s easy to be as small as the Golconda’s comforts in this slim town, where in no time I have learned the common faces, brown and dug with squint lines from the sun. They teach me to be plain, to expect only what has already happened. I’ve sat in the cafe on Sunday afternoon with every table full and the only sounds coming from fork and plate and cup. I’ve been wrapped in anecdote like a mile-long bandage by amateur historians. Distinctions as dry as the air. Last week there was a fistfight at the gas station. The women were friends; each had witnessed at the wedding of the other. They fought over a pack of cigarettes and people stopped their cars to watch until someone crossed over from Boot Hill to pull the friends apart. Everything is easy here.
I pay one hundred thirty dollars a week for my room with a view: red rock dust, weary cottonwoods, a couple of rotten molar buttes. The bed is firm and the water pressure is good. I have lived in half a hundred rooms like this, but this is the first to be personalized. There are photos all around, production stills from shows like My Friend Irma and Johnny Staccato and Broadway Open House. I have the driving gloves my sister sent last Christmas tacked to the back of the door, my library in fruit crates beside the bed, a crucifix that glows in the dark.
Last night I went out back by the propane tanks and slid into one of the unreliable lawn chairs Opatowski puts out. The air had an unusual flavor to it, something like water from a corroded, mossy pipe. I shifted in the chair, tilted, drank warm beers. Past blotches of shadow — things half-repaired, empty boxes along the fence — the ground went out gray and flat, moving away from me like a conveyor belt. As absently as you might list baseball players, I thought up sexual extremities to pass the time.
“Night like this, I can barely keep my eyes open.”
Opatowski took a chair. I waited for the plastic webbing to tear under him.
“First customer in two days and I have to run him off. He’s got Siamese cats he won’t leave in the car.”
“Why be such a tough guy?”
“No animals means no animals. Hairs in the rug, little black turds. How’s Heidi going to like that?”
“She’s seen worse.”
Then I changed the subject by handing Opatowski one of his own beers.
“Jesus,” he said. “Take them, okay, but take them out of the cooler.”
He wasn’t kidding. A few minutes’ silent sipping and he was fast asleep, dreaming maybe about capacitors or icy streets. I went by the office to lock up and turn off the neon. Early to bed, that was easy too.
I poured raisin bran into my magpie feeder — a plastic ashtray nailed to the outside sill — showered, and, burning every light, lay on the bed to dry. Home again. All the rooms I’d been in, like a hermit crab assuming empty shells. Home again and again. I’d paced in paper shower shoes, stared into empty medicine cabinets, at cigarette burns on a tabletop. And never have I failed to find what there is to find. Possibility. The imminence of leaving.
4
FOR CHILDREN ARRIVED SINCE Hiroshima, television has provided first contact with the past, our first sense of a world larger than this one. In safe rooms, on the hard, sure glass of a light box, we observed ghosts without fear. Hitler, Dracula, Maid Marian, Red Ryder — all floated by us on the same low clouds. We found artifacts for the taking, jumbled and abundant, expendable as toys — chariots, fighter planes, crossbows, gold dust, igloos, plumes and spurs and buckskin, black glass floors and silk hats and white telephones, chivalry, palmistry, roulette, hanging — and from this disorder we let the past compose itself. Looking backward while staring straight ahead, we were not confused, as by the trim, sequential packages to come. History didn’t need cunning or disguise; it strolled right on in. Adults adored the shape of indoctrination. “No TV on school nights,” they would say.
I experienced third grade in a building of beige ceramic brick. We pledged allegiance (“one nation, invisible”) under a portrait of Lincoln — or was it Henry Fonda? In November, we cut out paper pumpkins and heard all about the Pilgrims. Devout and intrepid men. Men with buckles on their hats.
“I know,” flapping my arm, bursting with facts from Witches of Salem, which had bobbed up in the wake of Saturday cartoons. “I know something about the Pilgrims. They set fire to each other.”
I was sent home with a note to my parents.
“Smart remarks don’t win friends,” Gordo said with his underlining tic, a short, sharp sniff.
“But it’s true what I said.”
“No allowance for two weeks.”
Not until much later did I learn that the Pilgrims fed lobster to their pigs, bathed rarely, and then with their clothes on.