Celebrity

TOO

GETS

NEW ZEALAND

PART TWO

NUKED,

Five days ago—the day after our picnic—Dag disappeared. Otherwise
the week has been normal, with myself and Claire slogging away at our
Mcjobs—me tending bar at Larry's and maintaining the bungalows (I
get reduced rent in return for minor caretaking) and Claire peddling five-
thousand-dollar purses to old bags. Of couse we wonder where Dag
went, but we're not too worried. He's obviously just Dagged-out some­
place, possibly crossing the border at Mexicali and off to write heroic
couplets out among the saguaro, or maybe he's in

L.A., learning about CAD systems or making

a black-and-white super- 8 movie. Brief creative

bursts that allow him to endure the tedium of real

work. HAnd this is fine. But I wish he'd

given some advance no- tice so I wouldn't have to

knock myself out cover- ing his tail for him at

work. He knows that Mr. MacArthur, the bar's owner and our boss, lets him get away with murder. He'll make one quick joke, and his absence will be forgotten. Like the last time: "Won't happen again, Mr. M. By the way, how many lesbians does it take to put in a light bulb?" Mr. MacArthur winces. "Dagmar, shhh! For God's sake, don't irritate the clientele!" On certain nights of the week Larry's can have its share of stool-throwing aficionados. Bar brawls, although colorful, only up Mr. M.'s Allstate premiums. Not that I've ever seen a brawl at Larry's. Mr. M. is merely paranoid.

"Three—one to put in the light bulb and two to make a documentary about it."

Forced laughter; I don't think he got it. "Dagmar, you are very funny, but please don't upset the ladies."

"But Mr. MacArthur," says Dag, repeating his personal tag line, "I'm a lesbian myself. I just happen to be trapped in a man's body."

This, of course, is an overload for Mr. M., product of another era, a depression child and owner of a sizable collection of matchbook folders from Waikiki, Boca Raton, and Gatwick Airport; Mr. MacArthur who, with his wife, clips coupons, shops in bulk, and fails to understand the concept of moist microheated terry towels given before meals on airline flights. Dag once tried to explain 'the terry-towel concept' to Mr. M.: "Another ploy dreamed up by the marketing department, you know— let the peons wipe the ink of thriller and romance novels from their fingers before digging into the grub. Très swank. Wows the yokels." But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents' generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.

But life goes on.

Where are you, Dag?

*****

Dag's been found! He's in (of all places) Scotty's Junction, Nevada, just east of the Mojave Desert. He telephoned: "You'd love it here, Andy. Scotty's Junction is where atom bomb scientists, mad with grief over their spawn, would come and get sloshed in the Ford saloon cars in which they'd then crash and burn in the ravines; afterward, the little desert animals came and ate them. So tasty. So biblical. I love desert justice."

"You dink. I've been working double shift because of your leaving unannounced."

"I had to go, Andy. Sorry if I left you in the lurch."

"Dag, what the hell are you doing in Nevada?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"Try me."

"I don't know—"

"Then make a story out of it. Where are you calling from?" "I'm inside a diner at a pay phone. I'm using Mr. M.'s calling card number. He won't mind."

"You really abuse that guy's goodwill, Dag. You can't coast on your charm forever."

"Did I phone Dial-a-Lecture? And do you want to hear my story or not?"

Of course I do. "Okay, so I'll shut up, already. Shoot." I hear gas station dings in the background, along with skreeing wind, audible even from inside. The unbeautiful desolation of Nevada already makes me feel lonely; I pull my shirt up around my neck to combat a shiver.

Dag's roadside diner smells, no doubt, like a stale bar carpet. Ugly people with eleven fingers are playing computer slots built into the counter and eating greasy meat by-products slathered in cheerfully tinted condiments. There's a cold, humid mist, smelling of cheap floor cleaner, mongrel dog, cigarettes, mashed potato, and failure. And the patrons are staring at Dag, watching him contort and die romantically into the phone with his tales of tragedy and probably wondering as they view his dirty white shirt, askew tie, and jittery cigarette, whether a posse of robust, clean-suited Mormons will burst in the door at any moment, rope him with a long white lasso, and wrestle him back across the Utah state line.

"Here's the story, Andy, and I'll try and be fast, so here goes: once upon a time there was a young man who was living in Palm Springs and minding his own business. We'll call him Otis. Otis had moved to Palm Springs because he had studied weather charts and he knew that it received a ridiculously small amount of rain. Thus he knew that if the city of Los Angeles over the mountain was ever beaned by a nuclear strike, wind currents would almost entirely prevent fallout from reaching his lungs. Palm Springs was his own personal New Zealand; a sanctuary. Like a surprisingly large number of people, Otis thought a lot about New Zealand and the Bomb.

"One day in the mail Otis received a postcard from an old friend who was now living in New Mexico, a two-day drive away. And what interested Otis about this card was the photo on the front—a 1960s picture of a daytime desert nuclear test shot, taken from a plane.

CULT OF ALONENESS:

The need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships. Often brought about by overly high expectations of others.

SCHADENFREUDE: Lurid thrills derived from talking about celebrity deaths.

"The post card got Otis to thinking.

"Something disturbed him about the photo, but he couldn't quite figure out what.

"Then Otis figured it out: the scale was wrong—the mushroom cloud was too small. Otis had always thought nuclear mushroom clouds occupied the whole sky, but this explosion, why, it was a teeny little road flare, lost out amid the valleys and mountain ranges in which it was detonated.

"Otis panicked.

" 'Maybe,' he thought to himself, 'I've spent my whole life worrying about tiny little firecrackers made monstrous in our minds and on TV. Can I have been wrong all this time? Maybe I can free myself of Bomb anxiety—'

"Otis was excited. He realized he had no choice but to hop into his car, pronto, and investigate further—to visit actual test sites and figure out as best he could the size of an explosion. So he made a tour of what he called the Nuclear Road—southern Nevada, southwestern Utah, and then a loop down in to New Mexico to the test sites in Alamogordo and Las Cruces.

"Otis made Las Vegas the first nighl. There he could have sworn he saw Jill St. John screaming at her cinnamon-colored wig floating in a fountain. And he possibly saw Sammy Davis, Jr., offer her a bowl of nuts in consolation. And when he hesitated in betting at a blackjack table, the guy next to him snarled, ''Hey, bub (he actually got called "bub"—he was in heaven), Vegas wasn't built on winners? Otis tossed the man a one-dollar gaming chip.

"The next morning on the highway Otis saw 18-wheel big rigs aimed at Mustang, Ely, and Susanville, armed with guns, uniforms, and beef, and before long he was in southwest Utah visiting the filming site of a John Wayne movie—the movie where more than half the people involved in its making died of cancer. Clearly, Otis's was an exciting drive— exciting but lonely.

"I'll spare the rest of Otis's trip, but you get the point. Most im­portantly, in a few days Otis found the bombed New Mexican moon­scapes he was looking for and realized, after a thorough inspection, that his perception of earlier in the week was correct, that yes, atomic bomb mushroom clouds really are much smaller than we make them out to be in our minds. And he derived comfort from this realization—a silencing of ihe small whispering nuclear voices that had been speaking continually

in his subconscious since kindergarten. There was nothing to worry about after all."

"So your story has a happy ending, then?"

"Not really, Andy. You see, Otis's comfort was short lived, for he soon after had a scary realization—a realization triggered by shopping malls, of all things. It happened this way: he was driving home to California on Interstate 10 and passing by a shopping mall outside of Phoenix. He was idly thinking about the vast, arrogant block forms of shopping mall architecture and how they make as little visual sense in the landscape as nuclear cooling towers. He then drove past a new yuppie housing development—one of those strange new developments with hundreds of blockish, equally senseless and enormous coral pink houses, all of them with an inch of space in between and located about three feet from the highway. And Otis got to thinking: 'Hey! these aren't houses at all—these are malls in disguise.'

"Otis developed the shopping mall correlation: kitchens became the Food Fair; living rooms the Fun Center; the bathroom the Water Park. Otis said to himself, 'God, what goes through the minds of people who live in these things—are they shopping?"

"He knew he was on to a hot and scary idea; he had to pull his car over to the side of the road to think while freeway cars slashed past.

"And that's when he lost his newly found sense of comfort. 'If people can mentally convert their houses into shopping malls,' he thought, 'then these same people are just as capable of mentally equating atomic bombs with regular bombs.'

"He combined this with his new observation about mushroom clouds: 'And once these people saw the new, smaller friendlier explosion size, the conversion process would be irreversible. All vigilance would disappear. Why, before you knew it you'd be able to buy atomic bombs over the counter— or free with a tank of gas! Otis's world was scary once more."

THE EMPEROR'S NEW MALL: The popular notion that shopping malls exist on the insides only and have no exterior. The suspension of visual belief engendered by this notion allows shoppers to pretend that the large, cement blocks thrust into their environment do not, in fact, exist.

* * * *

"Was he on drugs?" asks Claire.

"Just coffee. Nine cups from the sound of it. Intense little guy." "I think he thinks about getting blown up too much. I think he

needs to fall in love. If he doesn't fall in love soon, he's really going to lose it."

"That may be. He's coming home tomorrow afternoon. He's got presents for both of us he says."

"Pinch me."

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23