Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (32 page)

“Look at the damn mail we was talking about! Ain’t nobody in the Post Office actually had to read a damn address in ten years; you bet your ass they gotta read writin’ now! Everybody was freaked out. No e-mail, no phone, no fax, ain’t no more
Click On This
, kids. People all goin’ crazy till they start gettin’ them letters from Visa and Mastercard and such sayin’ ‘Hey, we hear you got an account with us? Why doncha tell us what you owe us, and we’ll start sendin’ you bills again?’ Well, that was one thing they liked sure as shit. They still waitin’ for their new cards with them raised-up letters you run through a big ol’ machine, but you know what? They think about sixty to seventy percent o’ them people told them what they owed them. Can you beat that? People’s mostly honest, ’ceptin’ the ones that ain’t. . . .

“That’s why you gettin’ mail twice a week now, not at your house but on the block, see? You gonna have to have some smart people now; that’s why I’m tellin’ you all this.”

“Thanks, Rudy,” said a kid.

“Now that they ain’t but four million people in this popsicle town, you got room to learn, room to move around some. All them scaredy cats took off for them wild places, like Montana, Utah, New Jersey. Now you got room to breathe, maybe one o’ you gonna figure everything out someday, kid. That’ll be thanks enough for old Rudy. But this time, don’t mess up. Keep us fuckin’ human— Morning, Bill—”

“Morning, Rudy.”

“—and another thing.
No
damn cell phones.
No
damn baby joggers or double fuckin’ wide baby strollers.
No
car alarms!”

* * *

Opening night.

The dancers are finishing the Harvest Dinner dance, like
Oklahoma!
or “ June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” on speed. It ends with a blackout. The packed house goes crazy.

Spotlight comes up on center stage.

Bill stands beside Shirlene. He’s dressed in bib overalls and a black jacket and holds a pitchfork. She’s in a simple farm dress. Bill wears thick glasses. He looks just like the dentist B.H. McKeeby, who posed as the farmer, and Shirlene looks just like Nan Wood, Grant’s sister, who posed as the farmer’s spinster daughter, down to the pulled-back hair, and the cameo brooch on the dress.

Then the lights come up on stage, and Bill and Shirlene turn to face the carpenter-gothic farmhouse, with the big arched window over the porch.

Instead of it, the backdrop is a painting from one of the Mars Lander photos of a rocky surface.

Bill just stopped.

There was dead silence in the theater, then a buzz, then sort of a louder sound; then some applause started, and grew and grew, and people came to their feet, and the sound rose and rose.

Bill looked over. Shirlene was smiling, and tears ran down her cheeks. Then the house set dropped in, with a working windmill off to the side, and the dancers ran on from each wing, and they did, along with Bill, the Pitchfork Number.

The lights went down, Bill came off the stage, and the chorus ran on for the Birthplace of Herbert Hoover routine.

Bill put his arms around Fossman’s shoulders.

“You . . . you . . . asshole,” said Bill.

“If you would have known about it, you would have fucked it up,” said Arnold.

“But . . . how . . . the audience . . . ?”

“We slipped a notice in the programs, just for the opening, which is why you didn’t see one. Might I say your dancing was superb tonight?”

“No. No,” said Bill, crying. “Kirk Alyn, the guy who played Superman in the serials in the Forties, now
there
was a dancer . . .”

* * *

On his way home that night, he saw that a kid had put up a new graffiti on the official site, and had run out of paint at the end, so the message read “What do we have left they could hate us” and then the faded letters, from the thinning and upside-down spray can, “f o r ?”

Right on, thought Bill. Fab. Gear. Groovy.

At work the next day, he found himself setting the galleys of the rave review of
Glorifying the American Gothic
, by the
Times’
drama critic.

* * *

And on a day two months later:

“And now!” said the off-pixievision-camera announcer, “Live! On Television!
Major Spacer in the 21st Century
!”

* * *

“ . . . tune in tomorrow, when you’ll hear Major Spacer say:

WE’LL GET BACK TO THE MOON IF WE HAVE TO RETROFIT EVERY ICBM IN THE JUNKPILE WITH DUCT TAPE AND SUPERGLUE.

“Don’t miss it. And now, for today’s science segment, we go to the Space Postal Joint, with Cadet Rudy!” said the announcer.

Rudy: “Hey, kids. Listen to ol’ Rudy. Your folks tried hard but they didn’t know their asses from holes in the ground when it came to some things. They didn’t mean to mess your world up; they just backed into one that could be brought down in thirty seconds ’cause it was the easiest thing to do. Remember the words of Artoo Deetoo Clarke: ‘With increasin’ technology, you headin’ for a fall.’ Now listen how it could be in this excitin’ world of the future . . .”

* * *

A few years later, after Bill and the show and Rudy were gone, some kid, who’d watched it every day, figured everything out.

And kept us human.