He identified that manic vibe common to Last Nights. Last night of vacation, the out-of-town convention, the school year, the summer camp. A distinctive thrum. Look at them, look at them, he marveled. The Help Tourists rooted through the declining hours of their stay in Winthrop, attacking with various success the final items on their weekend’s to-do lists. Some of them sought that last piece of evidence pro or con moving here. Others held out hope for a deadline hookup, others made resolutions on how to fix their lives once they got home, unexpectedly emboldened by the simple facts of a new perspective. In the meantime, there were half-price margaritas and popular songs whose lyrics, they discovered in surprise, they knew by heart, even if they didn’t know the names of the songs. If only they could carry a tune, he told himself.
Lucky had manned the grills like a maestro, juggling direct heat and indirect heat, lean cuts, fatty cuts, veggies, and patties of different water density and thickness with admirable dexterity. Lucky was a born leader, and a born griller to boot, he had to give the man his due. He’d heard no complaints, and had none himself. The sauce had been especially tenacious, in both aftertaste and residue. A quick look around the Border Café tendered proof, around mouths and cuticles, to its steadfastness, its defiance against untold assaults by moist towelette.
He was not unstained himself, and fit right in. He had made a few new buddies. Tipped off by the newspaper, some of them felt comfortable enough to walk up to him while digging at potato salad on their cardboard plates, or gnawing basted hindparts. They asked about his job. How was it going? How much did he make? These characters were not his usual brand, you might say, but he enjoyed their little interactions. Gerald from Unisol, pasty and pale, who was getting his braces off next week. Lily Peet-Esposito, a half-pint brunette from down South, whose true personality kicked in after three drinks, and who was a connoisseur of jokes describing the cultural misunderstandings that arose when religious leaders of different faiths unexpectedly found themselves on life rafts and desert islands. Jim Lee, who was a lot more hip than he let on, a real student of the culture actually, and liked to time each beer according to a peculiar inebriation system of his, finishing off the last drop with an officious, “That was exactly one hour!” And Beverley, of course, who obviously wanted to sleep with him, patting his arm and laughing at his dumb stories when he was quite anecdote-poor these days by any honest measure. She’d shown up at Aberdeen HQ in a short leather skirt that had been an interesting if perplexing choice in the full afternoon glare of the barbecue, but had become, in the fullness of the evening, a most appropriate addition to the festivities, forward-looking, visionary even, in its erotic promise.
He’d had a not-terrible time hanging out with them that day. The night before in the hotel bar, too. Two margaritas in, surveying his new comrades, he had a sudden notion of this last week as socialization boot camp. An artificial environment created to prepare him for his reintroduction to the world. Work Task of Some Complexity. Social Interactions of Various Types and Degrees of Difficulty.
Come back, we miss you. You are forgiven.
All these ragged good times were a sales pitch for Winthrop 2.0. Honey-tongued and hard to resist. Which explained why Lucky had declined to lay out some elaborate appeal in his office, hocus-pocusing with computer graphics and laser show and swelling music why he should vote the Aberdeen way. Everything around him was Lucky’s appeal. The Help Tourists, Albie’s bleating, Regina’s wan earnestness, the inarguable common sense of Lucky’s plans and blueprints—every minute since he arrived had been a rhetorical prop in some way. From a clinical nomenclature perspective, this was a no-brainer. These people were already living in New Prospera whether they knew it or not.
Dreaming Is a Cinch When You Stop to Smell the Flowers. Dreaming Is a Cinch When You Crush All Enemies. Dreaming Is a Cinch When You Bathe in the Arterial Spray of the Vanquished.
He was surrounded by extras sipping tequila drinks, bit players in an infomercial for a lifestyle. All this can be yours for the low introductory price of . . . Were they aware of this? Did it matter? They were used to commercials, commercials were a natural feature of existence, like rain or dawn. Winthrop the Elder had forced his vision onto this land and his people, and Lucky was no different. Sure their methods were different. But their motives, goals, the results—timeless medicine-show shenanigans. Were the smoke and mirrors even necessary, he wondered? New Prospera strutted on the quicksilver feet of futurity. It was progress, and progress was Windex, Vaseline, Band-Aids: pure brand superiority. Beyond advertising. Why advertise when the name of your product was tattooed on hearts and brains, had always been there, a part of us, under the skin.
“Peep This” swaggered from the jukebox, and people shrieked as they recognized the opening sample. Every couple of years a hip-hop song invaded the culture with such holy fervor that it revealed itself to be a passkey to universal psyche, perfectly naming some national characteristic or diagnosing some common spiritual ailment. You heard the song every damned place, in the hippest underground grottoes and at the squarest weddings, and no one remained seated. “Peep This” possessed exactly such uncanny powers, and in the way of such things completely killed off a few choice slang words through overexposure. When grannies peeped this or peeped that from the windows of their retirement-community aeries, it was time for the neologists to return to their laboratories.
Just a few bars into “Peep This” and leis were bouncing off the ceiling. That sublime and imperative bass line, he told himself. Behinds jostled tables and chairs to make more dancing room. Beverley pulled him up. He did not beg off or point dejectedly at his bum leg. Truth be told, like everyone else, he loved “Peep This.” It had taken months of brief exposure at the corner bodega before he realized that the song had attached itself to his nervous system. He was more or less powerless against it, a blinking automaton. In the Border Café, he swayed and nodded to the directives of the bass line, nothing too extravagant, but he was, nonetheless, dancing.
New Prospera. New beginnings, blank slates. For all who came here. Including him. No, he was not about to hock all his possessions and hightail it out west, but things would not be the same when he got back home. The old ways would not hold. Would he go back to work, reclaim the mug and office that was rightfully his? His thoughts alighted on his cuff links. When was the last time he had seen them? Where the fuck were they? He looked around at his new cohorts, into their sweaty, peppy faces. The name was what they needed. Narcotic. Hypnotizing. New Prospera was the tune people knew the second they heard it, the music they had danced to all their lives. That was the point of a name in this situation: to set up a vibration in the bones that resembled home.
He snapped his fingers in time to the famous bridge of “Peep This,” that dangerous territory that often compelled the weakest dancers in the room to unfortunate excess, but this bunch did not take the bait. Which made this a bona fide miracle in process. He pictured “Peep This” as the soundtrack for an Apex ad, wherein one by one his current co-partiers pulled back their sleeves or pants legs to reveal perfectly camouflaged wounds. Slightly roughed up by life’s little accidents but somehow better for the experience. He bebopped his head to the beat. Was he supposed to honor the old ways because they were tried and true? Fuck all Winthrops, and let their spotted hands twist on their chests in agony. And forget the lovers of Freedom. Was he supposed to right historical wrongs? He was a consultant, for Christ’s sake. He had no special powers.
He snickered, mulling over what Goode and Field would do in this situation. The Light and the Dark. Goode announces in preacherly tones, “We are Americans and the bounty of American promise is our due. It is what we worked for, it is what we died for, and we call it New Prospera.” The audience moving their heads in solemn amen and hope. To that sweet music.
He pictured Field, but the vision was dimmer. He saw a lone figure, withdrawing into shadow after delivering a grim, pithy “Where you sit is where you stand.” And really, what t
he hell were people supposed to extract from that?
The song ended. The librarian tickled him under his ribs and beat it to the bar for refills. Jim Lee appeared, mopping his brow with his T-shirt. There were only a few sips left in his glass—another hour had passed. Jim said, “What do you think?” which in retrospect could have meant any number of things, but in that moment was interpreted as the latest inquiry into the town’s name status. And this time he had an answer.
The jukebox was quiet, and he seized the opening, shouting, “I have an announcement to make! I have an announcement to make!” Everybody turned. Jack Cameron excavated a drunken bellow from deep in his stomach. Leis slapped his face, hurled from all points. An inexplicable brassiere zipped by.
So encouraging. These people understood him. He would deliver his ruling and be done with it. His ticket back home. “Okay, okay! People have been asking me all night if I have come to a decision. About the whole name thing. Well, I have.” He put a hand on Jim Lee’s shoulder and climbed onto a chair. He looked out into the room. He cleared his throat. Steadied himself. He met Beverley’s gaze and smiled foolishly. Certainly the table was stable enough, and would heighten the drama. So he used bony Jim Lee as a cane, and clambered up on the table. Someone threw a lei up at him and he caught it. He held it in the air and they hollered, one or two among them flicking their Bics and holding them up in tribute.
To be done with his stupid exile. Why had he removed himself so completely from those things that others cherished, with his needless complications and equivocations. It was all very simple, after all. Why did he need to make it so difficult all the time. So dark in outlook all the time, frankly. And he felt like being frank, above the fray as he was, astride the tabletop, on the layer of polyurethane covering the map of Cozumel.
It was a nice moment. Someone should have taken a picture. Nice composition, what with the multicolored streamers crisscrossing the ceiling and his triumphant manic face. If only someone had taken a picture.
He was about to speak when something in him gave way, and his bad leg jackknifed with such speed that he was on the floor in an ugly mess before anyone could catch him. In the ensuing hubbub, he fixated on one exchange in particular:
“What happened?”
“He slipped.”
. . . . . . . .
He was weak and feverish. Caught in the fangs of the big fear, shaken back and forth. His brain worked as unsteadily as his feet, had wires hanging out after someone ripped out that important piece of hardware. It was cooler outside, much cooler than inside the banquet hall, and this soothed him for a few blocks. The streetlights and traffic lights and neon lights all had halos, and seemed beacons summoning him. But so many different directions: How was he to know which way to go?
He was aware of his body as a shell. Fragile, thin as excuses. A vessel containing the dust of his essential him-ness, which would be lost when the vessel failed. Well, that was the way of the world. For a time he was fixed in his body, stuck and named and fixed in place, but one day that would not be the case. One day only his name would remain, on a tombstone or etched onto an urn, marking his dried bones or ashes. A delivery truck almost clocked him as he stumbled into the crosswalk. Pay attention, he told himself. Pay attention: accidents come out of nowhere to teach you a lesson. He should be looking out for that which strikes from above, things like lightning that fall from the sky to instruct through violence.
Blubbering in his fever. On the buildings the names hung there as if by magic. (The billboards were attached by bolts and brackets.) In the windows of stores they were spread out in an unruly mess, this pure chaos, sick madness, as if tossed into a garbage heap. (Items were arrayed in orderly, enticing displays.) And the citizens walked the streets, alone, in comfortable pairs, in ragged groups, with their true names blazing over their hearts, without pride or shame, plainly, for this new arrangement was just and true. (Strangers passed him, and he passed strangers.)
Now he was in the Crossroads of the World, as this place had come to be called. The names here were magnificent, gigantic, powered by a million volts and blinking in malevolent dynamism. Off the chart. The most powerful names of all lived here and it was all he could do to stare. He had entered the Apex.
What was all this struggle? He answered himself: There was not enough room to be heard and understood. Every name competed against every other name for attention. (He could not bring himself to call the reward of this competition by its true name, love.) To be heard—because if it was not heard how could it be said to exist? People were always saying, “You have to get your name out there,” and in that moment for the life of him he could not understand what those words might mean. We spent our lives trying to keep our true names inside and hidden, because if they were let out we would be known and ruined.
In front of a newsstand, looking up at the sky as if it were a vast eternal mirror, he saw all the logos and names, and saw himself as some brand of mite lost in the pages of the musty encyclopedia of the world. Galanta and Apex, Percept and Rigitol. If he severed the golden tethers that kept these things close to this mortal world, to their mortal meanings, imprisoned as products, these names were the names of heroes who had performed miraculous feats. These names were the names of ancient cities where great battles had been won, where the words culture and civilization had first been formed by human mouths. But we reeled them in and kept them close to this muddy earth, and on the shelves of supermarkets they were artificial kneecap lubricants, sponges equipped with abrasive undersides, aerosol sprays that magically banished static cling. Such disreputable gods.
Isn’t it great when you’re a kid and the whole world is full of anonymous things? He coughed into his sleeve. Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it. All those flying gliding things are just birds. And etc. Once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it? He told himself: What he had given to all those things had been the right name, but never the true name. For things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them.
Constellations wheeled around him, lit up under the auspices of the electric company. He stood beneath them in this mess, limping around the valley of the names. Star watchers were fucked. There were too many stars in the sky to name them all. They were bright and keen, but had to make do with letters and numbers—B317, N467, T675—until they earned their names.
Until then, anonymous and barely there at all.
A name that got to the heart of the thing—that would be miraculous. But he never got to the heart of the thing, he just slapped a bandage on it to keep the pus in. What is the word, he asked himself, for that elusive thing? It was on the tip of his tongue. What is the name for that which is always beyond our grasp? What do you call that which escapes?
If he closed his eyes and fell back, would someone catch him? He decided to try it.
THREE
HE IMAGINED a town called A. Around the communal fire they’re shaping arrowheads and carving tributes to the god of the hunt. One day some guys with spears come over the ridge, perform all kinds of meanness, take over, and the new guys rename the town B. Whereupon they hang around the communal fire shaping arrowheads and carving tributes to the god of the hunt. Some climatic tragedy occurs—not carving the correct tributary figurines probably—and the people of B move farther south, where word is there’s good fishing, at least according to those who wander to B just before being cooked for dinner. Another tribe of unlucky souls stops for the night in the emptied village, looks around at the natural defenses provided by the landscape, and decides to stay awhile. It’s a whole lot better than their last digs—what with the lack of roving tigers and such—plus it comes with all the original fixtures. They call the place C, after their elder, who has learned that pretending to talk to spirits is a fun gag that gets you stuff. Time passes. More invasions, more recaptures, D, E, F, and G. H stands as it is for a while. That ridge provides s
ome protection from the spring floods, and if you keep a sentry up there you can see the enemy coming for miles. Who wouldn’t want to park themselves in that real estate? The citizens of H leave behind cool totems eventually toppled by the people of I, whose lack of aesthetic sense is made up for by military acumen. J, K, L, adventures in thatched roofing, some guys with funny religions from the eastern plains, long-haired freaks from colder climes, the town is burned to the ground and rebuilt by still more fugitives. This is the march of history. And conquest and false hope. M falls to plague, N to natural disaster—the same climatic tragedy as before, apparently it’s cyclical. Mineral wealth makes it happen for the O people, and the P people are renowned for their basket weaving. No one ever—ever—mentions Q. The dictator names the city after himself; his name starts with the letter R. When the socialists come to power they spend a lot of time painting over his face, which is everywhere. They don’t last. Nobody lasts because there’s always somebody else. They all thought they owned it because they named it and that was their undoing. They should have kept the place nameless. They should have been glad for their good fortune, and left it at that. X, Y, Z.
. . . . . . . .
The Help Tourists stood over him, stunned, pebble eyes blinking, before they helped him up. There they were, getting their freak on, and then something like that happens. New Fast-Acting Buzzkillzz—When Everyone’s Having Too Much Fun. He assured them that he was okay but maybe it was time to go. Poor Beverley insisted on her aid. He did not need physical assistance, but nonetheless. They staggered down the street and she attempted to draw him out with two jokes. He didn’t get either one and unsuccessfully feigned comprehension. His palms were smeared with a mixture of grit and spilled margaritas, a shameful mud.