pocket stands behind her. He coughs. The others have stopped talking and are looking to Rosie as well. “Have fun!”
“Oh, I will!” said Rosie, who faced again the cash register and picked up where she left off.
The kids went back to trying on pairs of glasses and resumed their talking, enthusiasm and irony, back and forth. The man moved forward and dropped three crumpled bills on the counter. Under his arm he carried a waffle iron, its mouth held shut by packing tape.
There is a show on TV about scientists with a talk show, psychologists and doctors who have circumvented the ethical restrictions of their professions by donning lapel mics and business-casual suits. A question is posed and answered by willing participants who have been fully informed off-screen of risks and liabilities. An experiment is arranged—How Much Can A Mother Stand? What Would You Buy? How Do You Know You're Crazy?--I scroll through menus detailing the distilled drama of the past few weeks. How Do Children Hate? Eat Your Heart Out. Who Are You When You're Alone? It is the pursuit of truth, unsullied by red tape and bureaucracy. It is spectacular.
A doctor wishes to know how many arms can be appended to a human torso. Jackie Mulleon of Des Moines, Iowa wants to know the same. An operating theater is quickly outfitted with cameras and microphones. Apoca-Lips Now. Something Fishy. The Winged Nikki of Boniface. A Man's Best Friend. One for the Monkey, Two for the Show. Toe-tally Amazing. I am enthralled. I click “Buy all.” Mankind is at last master of itself.
A chemist wonders. A TV deal is signed. Astrobiology has questions. The willing crowd has in its soul the answer. A psychologist proposes a theory. The studio audience offers to test it. A physicist wonders about the harmonic frequencies of the cosmos. A switch is thrown and spotlights shine across an atom-smasher that spans entire countries. And now a word from our sponsors.
Between a television and a broken automatic wine-bottle opener I find a used photo album. You are not, I think, supposed to take these at thriftstores—the cellophane has been sleeved back over the covers, the imitation leather clothed now in the remnants of shrinkwrap. Someone has saved the wrapper from their initial purchase and re-wrapped the book in order that the mindless clerk would fold into the inventory this already-sullied archive. I take the wrapper fully off and flip through the book. There are pictures of a prom, of cars in driveways and football games on television, a graduation, hospital beds. There is a school play and home medical equipment. Someone eating Thanksgiving dinner. Someone having a birthday in a white room.
I buy the album and carry it outside. The poet is there.
“Hey man,” he asks. “Wanna hear a poem?”
“Sure.” I say.
He is already standing impossibly erect, but he straightens and stiffens yet more and extends one arm to hold the poem in the middle distance, although he has it (I know) already memorized. He reads.
“That a photo album you got?” He asks when finished.
“Yes.” I say. “From there.” I gesture behind me at the store I have just exited. “It already has photos in it.” I explain.
“Huh.” He is unimpressed. “Hey man, wanna hear a poem?” He calls out to a passerby.
“I think they might be stock photos,” I say. “Although why you would fill an entire album with stock photos is beyond me.”
“Excuse me, sir, would you like to hear--”
“They don't look like stock photos, either.” I add. “They look like bad polaroids. Who even uses polaroids any more? Maybe they're trying to appeal to some kind of trendy customer that still looks back on that kind of thing with a certain nostalgia?”
“Hey man, I hate to ask, but can you help me out a lil' bit?”
I realize he is talking to me.
“Yeah,” I say. “You had lunch yet?”
“Nope.”
“Let's go,” I say. I see block letters in neon glinting through the gaps between the buildings across the street, red like hell and stamping out a credo or command.
On Saturday nights the well-dressed women will come out on the arms of slightly less-well-dressed men, ambivalent regarding this neighborhood but hoping for a touch of bohemia transcending the staid consumption of the Tennis Club and tapas bars. The men will not care about the man who tells them he is a poet, but the women will try to pay polite attention until it becomes unbearable. Later, after they have slipped away, they will stand at streetside jazz performances, the women at the periphery and back of the crowd swaying slightly in order to convince themselves that they are still young, shimmying to the sounds made by the saxophonist, their eyes half-closed, and their husbands will stand behind them and place their fingertips on their wives’ waists in an attempt to convince themselves that they still are with them, that they are still part of the music and the passion they actually believe to be motivating the motion of their wives' bodies. They will pretend to not be confused by the young people around them snapping polaroids and listening to the band while wearing headphones. Someone in outlandish sunglasses from a thriftstore will snap their picture and it will end up in a photo album which will then be disposed of in some unlikely location and/or fashion.
“I got blood poisoning in the war,” he says. “From the gas.”
“Wait, what?” I say.
He takes another bite before responding.
“Back in the war. That's why m'eyes hurt.”
“Which war was this?” I ask.
“The war. I think I need a box for this. I'm full.”
I motion a waitress over and she brings us a styrofoam box. As he puts the sandwich in I glance over his head at the television mounted to the wall, the volume down but the shine of the screen unavoidable in the dim restaurant. A scientist has received a signal from space, using an array of antenna dishes straining for faint whispers of space that turn out to be a message. The newscaster asks keenly what this means for the viewers at home. A congressional hearing is being called. There is protesting in the streets. We are urged to be calm. The message turns out to be a song. It is a summons, says the crawl at the bottom of the screen. NASA has sent a probe to investigate, and now is sending an entire crew. As their ship approaches, a great blackness fills the screen and the waitress sets down the check. I realize that is is not the news but a movie that I have been watching. I don't know how much time has passed, but the poet is only now closing the box that holds his fragments of food which he will save for later.
“Do you need a ride?” I ask.
“I'm good,” he says. “Thanks.”
I am watching a documentary on famous television commercials that have gone horribly wrong. There is an ad for men's hair product that featured a model so closely resembling a little girl's deceased father that she suffered a nervous breakdown in the waiting room of the school's guidance counselor where the TV was playing. There is a man who committed suicide after a particularly poignant public service announcement about the importance of colorectal exams. One time a foreign-exchange student became so enamored of a specific brand of burger, advertised daily on the TV in his dorm's common room, that he refused to eat anything else and died from constipation.
The doughnut is impossibly light and fluffy. It runs round and round, coating my fingers as they pierce, my tongue as it explores. It is safe and warm. A televangelist is on the radio.
WHO COULD HAVE KNOWN THAT WE WOULD ADDRESS THE WHORE OF BABYLON AS MOTHER?
In January of 1989, a mentally deranged man named Kenneth Lamar Noid held up a Domino's Pizza restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia, demanding one hundred thousand dollars, a pizza, a getaway helicopter, and a copy of Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy. He believed himself to be in an ongoing battle of wills with Thomas Monaghan, the founder of the Domino's chain. As he held the two employees on duty at gunpoint, Noid explained that Monaghan had repeatedly entered his (Noid's) house in order to gather information. This stolen intelligence had resulted, according to Noid, in
the creation of The Noid, an anti-mascot used by Domino's to advertise their pizza (the Noid was depicted in the ads as responsible for the cooling of pizza, a phenomenon which could be prevented via Domino's then-exclusive foil-lined pizza-transport delivery packaging). In the twenty-three minutes it took for police to arrive and arrest Noid, he been served and had consumed nearly half of the pizza he had demanded of the employees, while explaining that The Noid was a deliberate attempt to defame and ridicule him.
Someone changes the radio and it plays a stream of oldies I do not recognize.
Steve walked into the room.
“Hey man! Haven't seen you in a while.”
“Nope.”
“This is my friend.”
“Hi there.”
I shook his hand.
“Eduardo.” He said.
“Nice to meet you.”
“He's a filmmaker,” said Steve. “Documentaries and stuff.”
“Cool,” I said. “What on?”
“Nothing much, man.”
“No, I mean, what are the documentaries about?” I looked at Eduardo.
“I'm doing one now in a series on fringe religious leaders,” he said.
I looked across the street at a fast food restaurant. There was an ambulance outside the drivethrough. There was a body in the back and there were horrified patrons inside, watching through the windows of one wall the lights and men in uniform.
Later,