Elsewhere some of the advertising trademarks have woven a kind of barbed wire around the F. A cage for a Tyrannosaur? A mad experiment, homespun white wire, but then again, why not? If the credits birthed the Destroyer, can’t they build a box to hold it? Some of those advertising trademarks were bristly to begin with, the people in Design wanted tension in the graphics, and meantime, over in another quadrant, other leftovers have come up with a tactic for the omnivorous vacuum U. A trick out of Three-Card Monte, bait and switch. First, a couple-three broken lines of phonemes will gather and compose themselves, as if they still added up to something comprehensible. Of course they don’t—what you’re seeing would never be mistaken for words in sequence—but nonetheless those few chameleonic lines will attract the U, eager as ever to schlup. It’s not as if the big upright can read, after all. But no sooner is the urn in place than, above its hungry mouth, the ruse breaks and scatters. The signifier was only signifyin’.
The idea is, each time, you leave the freak vowel more run down. Doesn’t even the Devourer get run down? Doesn’t an anomaly, too, hit the wall? Anyway, what you’re seeing is all a mad experiment. A counterforce of the blind, unsure of its end, it scrabbles on feeling its way.
It’s a good thing you got out! Back home you’d have fallen into that stalling tactic, that channel-surfer’s tactic, blipping from scene to scene in search of just the right shock on which to end. That notion that the right scene would set up your destiny. The dream that this country does best. Good thing you came out instead, you risked a doddering and fusty entertainment based on how long a person can go without having to pee. The flicks themselves have long since run out of surprises: if the assassin doesn’t fall in love, the bookish girl in black whoops it up in a candy-colored romper room. There never was much opportunity for surprise, in ninety minutes or a hundred, and there’s even less these days, when you need a multimillion-dollar urban-renewal package just to save the downtown moviehouse. The star-studded American shebang, winding up through the coming attractions and down through the credits in their grave-rows, that’s long since been squeezed dry and shoehorned into smaller screens. Yet here you sit, putting off the bathroom. It feels like a stone in your belly, but that’s nothing compared with what’s going on in the belly of the R. It’s mostly empty now, that upper-story belly, now that the rebels have lassoed its back foot. As the flabby consonant struggles against its leash, most of its half-digested bits and pieces tumble out. The remains, gnawed and pitted and in no way legible. But look, wow, the monster’s stomach acids had a side effect. Look, a few of these nubbins have been infected. We’re talking zombie nubbins, and they’re sprouting up, too, muscling up. The alien spawn flex their dorsi, they spread their talons, and one of them’s going after the rope that holds the mother-letter’s leg. The resistance needs to regroup, and if they had any last semblance of jot and tittle, of names or logos, they’ve lost it now. Next thing you know, anything’s possible, it’s fresh dynamics altogether, here a Visigoth or a chimera, there a warrior saint or a comely stranger with a quick sword and a reflecting shield. Now when did that happen?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN DOMINI is the author of two short story collections and three novels in print, as well as one book of collected essays. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and Ploughshares, and nonfiction in GQ and The New York Times. Grants include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He makes his home in Des Moines, Iowa.