Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburban Tale
Copyright 2012 Paul Hawkins
Dedication: To the memory of my father
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant - Emily Dickinson
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---
Author’s Note: I have consulted the characters’ own notes and recollections to tell this story to the best of my ability. It is not my fault that some of them are slightly addled. None of them set out to lie, I don’t think, but may lie to themselves. That happens when people retell the past to themselves so they can live with it. Special thanks to Rosalind Russell, who thoroughly interviewed the other participants in order to sift the truth from fiction and, in the process, now remembers events she never actually attended.
Chapter -Prologue - by Blaise Bohrs
Vacuum Tube Technology
It's 1939, and a boy on a farm without alternating current could have told you more about the world than a Ph.D. student can today. He drank in the newsreels, he scoured the magazines left in the hotel lobby or the barbershop for knowledge, he pulled in the news from the air, from the antenna of his crystal radio hooked to his window screen. He heard the voices and saw the visions in his mind and poured them into his bottomless thirst to reach out beyond the humdrum landscape visible from his window. The world was bigger in the 1930’s.
The world was bigger both in one's mind and outside it. There were more pieces to it and they didn’t need to fit together. There were quarter-mile grey dirigibles humming transatlantic routes across grey transoceanic skies to and from grey photographic skylines; there were champagne corks popping in tall business-dealing offices; there were farmers turning soil and driving home-modified Model T’s across brown acres, proud odd time-saving home-welded metal arms clawing dust inventively and effectively while horses and mules watched and twitched their ears; there were crystal radio antennas attached to window screens in a farm boy’s stuffy boxy upstairs room in Summertime, with cicadae hatching and humming in the acacia in the yawning purple-then-black world outside, and his younger brother’s already out like a light and snoring, but this boy at 13 or 14 is just beginning to realize that out in the sweetening and cooling darkness is something precious he is missing, something his heart has a hole in it for, something he is yearning to find.
And always there were the silver signals, bounced by hucksters and amateurs alike across the invisible skies - the breath of angels, the news or dreams or bragging of a ham radio operator in Enid or Sydney or Sioux City or Cleveland or St. Louis, and the soap-sponsored radio crooners and the comedians with their guffawing but genteel audiences in some unseen New York auditorium, all laughing, the jokes like razor-thin silver signals a morse code of surrender and defiance in the blackness, leisure and desperation, a silver stab easy yet resolutely made at the thing closing in, a signal fading in and out while the boy hears the distracting noise of his brother's buzzing and the prowling of cats in the field in the alley on the fire escape down on the porch getting into the garbage cans or the milk pails below, oh shut up just get to the punch line this time please and yes, the line then the laughter, crackling like tinfoil or popguns or static and the darkness pushed back for an instant, the link made with the people all of us laughing, and maybe out there one who laughs at a lot of things that he does, and maybe out there someone who wants to know him, before the sponsor's slogans send him off to fight for banks and brand name soap.
The airwaves were fairs and carnivals and home to liars - not confessors, like now, folks who drop their drawers before any camera and expose lives or souls - not confessors, liars, showmen, each with his lie, his own outlandish world bumping the gaudy farcical sphere of someone else - the wolf-boy the faith healer the pygmy shaman the snake oil mystic Hindu the anatomically-gifted farm girl the albino spelunker the cheesy British comedian with his parrot who won't talk on live radio, the bubble dancer the "Mister, I seen Jesus" transient the refugee the Shadow. Their lie with and against your lie - you're an enigma you're special a mystery no oath no credo no uniform can confine you you're a thing; you're old you're young you're dying in the farmhouse with the grandkids shooed outside, you're on a train to meet a girl you've only written letters to before, you're in a big unfamiliar city with two dollars in your pocket wondering which way to turn at the corner, you're in a line you're bunked in a mission you're in a field you hear a laugh; you're in school you're a single woman with her first real job in a new city and all the men are jerks, you're black you're Irish you're Czech you're German you're hated, you're left behind you're ditched by your friends or you've ditched them for anything new, you've moved with no clear guide though with the silver signals; you spark and fade like signals in the vacuum tubes - part of you is airy angel, and you're free.
My father and mother grew up in the 1930's, did their part in World War II, and then set about making the American Century.
The Sub-Suburbs
The sub-suburbs are a place where the suburbs themselves peter out; the white-flight myth of indulgence without responsibility can push its cul-de-sacs no further and collapses upon itself, lost, lost. Property values fall; trailer home and manor home rub elbows; angels, beasts, and men co-mingle, each out of their element. Nothing is what it seems but everything has the kernel of what it can be. The Sub-Suburbs are the fringe of Being and Becoming, the mundane rediscovering the mysterious; they are often marked by a convenience store in the middle of nowhere.