Fascinating Theatre

The young black lady was prepared to save our rotting southern community, lord knoweth how or even why.

She was the director of something she called Fascinating Theatre. On the surface, it looked just like any metroplex. It was the largest building ever in our town, and we were all convinced by the simple fact of it. Its erection showed she had faith in Fascinating Theatre in our town.
Now, we didn't truly understand the theory, but with such grand developments, we didn't figure we had to. Most everybody not otherwise engaged, which was most, became a shareholder, an employee, or both.

She taught us that theatre did not just exist on the ten screens within the walls, but must follow us all the day and into the night. All of us must attend the movies, and when not inside the Theatre we must be working for its success among us, and grateful for our very existence as a direct result of Fascinating Theatre.

She convened a meeting to show us what she meant. The city manager (this was the little bigshot Napoleon complex who was the boss in our office once upon a waketime) was trying to manipulate her. After all, she was a woman, and Black besides.

"I don't think we need both me and the mayor for this ceremony..." he laughed. She must've agreed. Immediately, he was out of the project, and only the mayor stood at one side on opening night.

There was developing a Theatre class, and a detritis of the left-behind. I was over there across the street come opening night. Here come the Director, with another one who resembled her. She was dancing, an African dance, scooting along the walk together with her follower, on the edge nearest the street, grinning broadly. It seemed to be directed at me, standing there in blank stupefication, but maybe all the left-behinds felt that way. I stood across the street, in front of the old Best Theatre, which was decrepit and dying, just watching.

It resembled a dance the natives of the Serengeti might have performed to celebrate the coming of the white man's railroad. It was a ceremony to the successful introduction of Fascinating Theatre to our town, or maybe the failure of the old way, or both.

All that the Theatre class did during the day related to Fascinating Theatre. You tried to catch their eye, thinking, you're kidding, right? but they never blinked. When they talked, they did so in banal boosterism, advertising the savior of their neighborhoods. They sounded like TV commercials. We laughed at them, but we were unnerved. There were few of us, and we had after all been rejected by the Fascinating Theatre.

He is a professional forensic craftsman. He is taking apart a revolver, and he is dusting the shells, and he puts it through a variety of very close order chemical tests there on the table while we watch. He is sweating.

He cannot find what she wants found. He shrugs. His hand is shaking now. She informs us all that probably they must now tear down the front end of the vehicle. I don't know what she means, but he does. His voice cracks as he says, "I can't do it now; I've been here for sixteen hours!"

He is afraid of being taken off the project through failure, or exhaustion. Then he would only be one of us.

There were chats in the coffee shops, casual encounters at Clayton's Grocery, wives in their turnip patches bent double at the waist out on the broad flat field, men sitting on summer evening porches running water from a hose at the St Augustine...

No more. Now in our town nothing else is but the Theatre.

Three-Octave Scale

A very efficient librarian hustles to a volume on a table. I watch from a short distance. She expertly rips a print from a large book and starts back to the reference desk with it. I am appalled. I say to her, but, but, and she ignores me utterly. That's a Botticelli you just ripped out! Amateurs, she is thinking. They don't know the ways of the Library.

I am walking now in step with George, recently deceased, from my old home town. He was a lifetime substance abuser who grew up in the sixties and went away then came back, chagrined, on the mend, an outspoken definer of abuse and its various dodges.

He says, I hear you're quite the show at a party. He says, and so quiet other times. I think, George is such a nice guy. Then as we trudge along, I'm thinking, hey, wait a minute! He just defined a primary pattern of alkies!

One wakes up, startled into a new world. (Am I also waking? I remember a pleasant intricate dream but none of the details preceeding.) He blinks, confused. Someone comes to arrest him. Yes, yes, very well, come along now.

He is nude under a blanket, and he stands up, very tall, and is cuffed with hands behind him. I am given the chore of transporting him. Come along now.He is in a red ermine cloak, and as he walks, some startling changes take place. One, he becomes shorter. Another, I see his hair color turn to grey. His elegant covering becomes a horizontally-striped Indian blanket. Then, he is no longer cuffed, and he walks into a building, looking back at me in some amusement.

He is Bill Bybee, the class clown from my elementary school. I think maybe I should consult the authorities, but I can't see how they would re-arrest someone who has not been arrested in the first place. This is an entirely different person than the one I started out with, and he seems to know the joke is on me, but what is there to do?

The Cottonwoods

They did have plans, the Company, but we had no worries. They had no right. We were safe.

I go down to the water, and skirt it, circle the shore. There is an elevation one-third around with thick brush and elegant cottonwoods. Someone walks there.

 A guy who doesn't look at me, slouching, not moving. I ask if he is with the Company, but he doesn't seem to understand the question, nor I his answer. I go on around the lake.

Half way there is a general store. I think to ask who is the gent up in the cottonwoods, but I don't know the proprietor well enough to ask for anything more involved than milk.

 When I pass the cottonwoods again, the one I saw before is seated at a card table. There are items on it, nondescript, strange. There is no theme, like lemonade or muffins. Also, there are no prices marked. Just toy cap pistols of an ancient vintage, already-colored coloring books, a dollhouse with two walls missing. He doesn't look up as I pass by.

 When I reach the lower section of the shore, I glance back. There are now three slouching figures, seated at individual card tables with various items scattered upon them. They were not looking at one another, nor seemingly anything else.

 "There are three strangers up in the cottonwoods," I say to my Lady when I enter the cabin. She gazes out across the lake. "Five," she says.

We stand looking. "We can be back in the city before dark," she says.

Stuart Lake

My brother Reloj and I have a speaker phone going in a plush and padded parlor (all my dream settings are unknown to me awake). We're chatting with President Obama.

It isn't an interview, or a press conference; just a casual conversation. Barrack is subdued, quiet. I ask if it's possible for the Republicans to render from out of their dismal void a sane and sensible candidate by 2016.

"I mean, has anybody risen so high and so fast from obscurity?"

I'm thinking Barrack Obama, but he says

"Stuart Lake."

Quizzical. I ask Reloj

"Stuart Lake?"

And he says

"That's the way I heard it."

We wait, and listen, but the President says no more. We google Stuart Lake then.

"There are very few angles that sing."

From Evernote:

Do You See Me Standing Here?

"The path is level now; no bumps," said Casey. I looked out back. It was true. The ridge was filled with a huge pile of pebbles, chalk-white, and you could form the path with a rake any way you wanted. 

I began with a short trip, then a slightly more distant objective occurred, then a concurrent series of errands, and before too long I was at the library swimming pool. I had not meant to go to the library swimming pool. I would not be home until later than I had anticipated. 

I better text Lady. I have the message on my iPhone, but there is a local provision for routing, a community Wi-Fi resource which requires sufficient study to justify the clerical assistants plus health insurance for all. 

The Interconnectivity manual is on a screen like at airports, but not in columns or on a grid. It was a series of sentences, actually, which is fine but each was modified by another and contradicted by a third, with the implicit understanding that any failure to follow instructions was the sole responsibility of the patron. 

Two figures appeared gliding in the background behind the text on the screen. I hastened to ask if they might answer one question. 

"Yes, I suppose," wearily said he. "'Metonymy' and 'synecdoche' are, in fact, more or less synonymous by now. A part for the whole, a piece for the object, a suggestion for the idea. Each means what the other suggests, though one intends and the other portends allegory." 

"What should manifest to the discerning eye," added her, "Is that our feet, neither of our's, are actually standing, in your pre-sense. And so you may consider what you've learned so far a gift horse."

I looked closely at the screen and they dissolved in accordance with the effort. I had assumed -  incorrectly, as it happened - I might be allowed to select the question. 

Wait, here's Lady Kale herself! I rush to her. She is angry. 

"You should not flash bad grammar and usage," she says. "Everyone may of course see it." 

"Wait, do you mean my text to tell you I would be late? But I never sent it! I was trying to learn how just now."

"Your text is available generally as you thumb it," she said with some resignation. "Didn't you read the instructions?" And she pointed at the screen. 

"Sorry," I said.