Before NUSW opened its doors, Parsonsville was populated by lettuce farmers who numbered fewer than two hundred families. The main street used to sport a general store, a diner, and Leonard’s Hardware Store, which sold tools, work clothes and tractor parts. The original residents were now relics in their own town. Since the influx of disposable cash Parsonsville had ballooned to a population of nine thousand permanent residents and half again that many students, faculty, and staff when school was in session. There were fancy restaurants and coffee shops, a modern movie theater with four screens, clothing stores and even a hotel — the Stafford Arms. Lettuce farms surrounded the school and town — like old castles on the outskirts of so many modern European cities. It was hot that morning so John wore a blue-and-red Hawaiian shirt and white trousers. The university crowd was still asleep so John found himself among farmers driving their pickups and walking into and out of the twenty-four-hour drugstore that sold everything from aspirin to cigarettes, fresh produce to bicycles.
At the corner of Prospect and Main he saw a small leather notebook that had been tossed into a bright orange public trash can. The black-bound journal had maybe fifty or so sheets of unlined paper, each of which had been scrawled over in mostly blue ink forged into letters that reminded John of tiny, frantic dancers making their way across the pages. Each sheet was written upon top to bottom, edge to edge, back and front. There were no paragraph breaks, dates or even spaces between sections of thought.
... she’s at it again. Had her lawyer call me to say that I had stole her family’s airlooms and killed her dog. Damned dog. It bit me four times before I put it down. And Shelly gave me that damn watch and paintin of old Colonel Blue. Lawyer said that if I don’t make recompents (that’s the word she used) for the hound and return her clients property that she would have me in court. Damn bitch lawyer and fuckin fool Shelly. I should do to them what I did to that damned dog Milo. A man has to protect himself. A man has to stand up for what he knows is right. I aint afraid. I been in jail before. I fixed Shellys front steps and painted her garage. I aint askin for any of that back. Dogs dead and the watch and paintin are mine. Shelly gave them to me. Me...
John sat on the university bus stop bench, reading, wondering how the diary found its way into the trash. It looked pretty old. The pages had been white but the edges were turning yellow beneath armies of bright blue and blue-black letters. It was mostly a litany of complaints — people who had crossed the diarist and situations that betrayed him (John was sure the memoirist was male).
The writer had taken his compulsive obsessions out on the pages of this book. Now someone had thrown it away. Maybe he did it himself as a kind of exorcism.
... nigers spicks and chinks all over the place nowadays. Schools full of them. Town too. It makes me mad when I see them dressin and talkin like us. Goin to our schools and breathin our air like it was natural. Nigers spicks and chinks all up behind stupid white girls with their asses and tits hangin out. I saw this one niger in a 3 piece blue suit at Darlene’s Cafe outside town. He was just sittin there eatin meat loaf actin like he was readin a book. I went up to his table and asked him if he was a butler. He looked at me with his mouth open and his eyes all googly like a big black fish. I had my 38 in my pocket. If he had said somethin I would have shot him right there in front of Darlene and everybody. I wasn’t afraid of him...
John thought that the man in the suit was probably Earl Vashon, the resident poet in the creative writing department. Earl always wore suits and usually had his nose in a book. He’d won a Pulitzer decades ago. Earl was from Mississippi like Herman and also like Herman he spoke in a cultured accent that didn’t exist anywhere but in him.
My brother George died last March in Indiana. Luce his wife said that it was a heart attack but you never really know. Terry my other brother buried George outside Phoenix. I’m goin to go up to see him now that he’s dead and buried and all the excitement have died down. George and me did not speak. I forget now what the last fight was about but it doesnt matter because we were always fightin me and him. It seamed like all we had to do was look at each other and we wanted to come to blows. Luce been writin me but I never answer. I know she wants somethin and I’m not a bank or a head doctor either. I don’t want her cryin to me. I did not kill George and he never liked me...
A big turquoise-colored bus trundled up to the stop and opened its door.
“You gettin’ in?” the old white bus driver said after five seconds had passed.
John looked up from the journal and shook his head.
“Bastard!” the driver shouted.
The door closed and the bus rolled off.
John walked across the street to the air-conditioned coffee shop, ordered a medium latte with two extra shots of espresso, sat down at a window table and continued to read.
He christened the diarist Brother of George (BOG) studying every word, phrase, idea and grievance BOG had to offer. Imagining he lived millennia in the future, John scrutinized his subject as if it was the memoir from a representative of an extinct ancestral branch of what humans had evolved into. From his lofty point of view John imagined that BOG was culturally insane but through that insanity might be uncovered intellectual and linguistic precursors of his highly advanced species.
For the next week John spent every spare moment reading, notating, and considering BOG’s journal. He wrote to Prosperity about his thoughts but shared them with no one else. He lectured, maintained office hours, made love (that was not love) to Carlinda, and effectively ignored the camel-colored letter, the discovery of Chapman Lorraine’s body and the paper he needed to deliver to the history department review committee.
On the morning of the following Saturday John awoke with the understanding of what his paper was to be. At the corner of Prospect and Main in Parsonsville he sifted through the orange trash can finding a set of white plastic dinnerware utensils, wrapped in a white paper napkin, a broken set of fancy headphones, and a list of some sort. These treasures he took over to the coffee shop for study.
The list was jotted down on a small sheet of lined notepaper, written in fountain pen blue-black ink that blobbed up now and then. Iron Man, Mandarin, Unicorn, Jack Frost, Sunturion and Stratosfire, the Stark... There were sixty-three entries on the paper front and back. It took John a while to realize that this was a list of comic book characters. It wasn’t until three days later he figured out that all these names were fictionally related to the first name on the list — Iron Man.
There were ecological and economic issues bound up with the slightly stained napkin wrapped around the plastic fork, knife and spoon. The broken set of headphones (made in China) presented a more advanced interpretation of the same issues.
Monday afternoon after the second Saturday at the trash bin, John drove to Spark City, not to see Senta but to buy an old traveling trunk at the used furniture store on the opposite side of town from the motel and bar.
That evening John placed BOG’s diary in a corner of the trunk. By Friday the comic book characters list, disposable dinnerware set and headphones were nestled next to what he called the First Find.
Every Saturday for the next few months John made his way in the early hours of the morning to the orange real-time capsule where he uncovered a trove of data-laden material which would become the reconfigured history of today.
He wrote to Prosperity that his discoveries were both exotic and pedestrian, the two main requirements for reconstituted history, like dinosaur footprints in stone-hardened mud or some obscure measuring tool from an ancient Egyptian architect.