"But Miss this Visa has unlimited credit. Look--it's got 'LIMIT: SKY' printed right on it. Embossed."

Cause it's only dark, generally, back there in his eye's guts. Sometimes a spidery system of synaptic color, if he tries to move the bad eye too quickly. But usually nothing. But it'll heal, anyway. It'll come around. It's all in his head, he knows. Youthful-rebellion injury. Mrs. Sternberg warned from day one that the boy that does a forbidden thing, such as like for example crosses his eyes just to hurt a mother: that boy finds they stay like that. Well-known fact. Look it up in whatever resources orthodox mothers with lapsed sons access. Like early to bed: it's the sleep before dark that's most important. Like don't cry: you're better than whoever laughs at you. Like try this lotion, for sumac.

Here's the fresh sumac cyst, though, here, boy, between his eyes. It's darkened richly since the last cyst-check in O'Hare, matured from that tomato pink to the same plum shade as the airport lounge. The mirror does not lie.

Your average deformity sufferer has a love-hate thing with mirrors: you need to see how things are progressing, but you also hate it that they're progressing. Sternberg's not at all sure he likes the idea of sharing a mirror with a whole lot of actors. He's not sure he wants to rent a bureaucratic car and head West without sleep or soap for a Funhouse the brochure says is carefully designed utilizing mostly systems of mirrors. A crowded, mirrored place ... Sternberg ponders the idea as the automatic sink fills gurgling to his slit of the emergency drain at its rim. This sumac cyst between is eyes feels fucking alive, man. Pulses painfully with the squeak of his head's blood. The cyst is beginning to show a little bit of white at the acme. Not good. Clear evidence of white blood cells, which implies blood cells, and so a bloodstream. From there it doesn't take genius to figure out that you've got a body. A bit of white at an infected cyst's cap is pretty much embodiedness embodied. No way he's messing with the fucker, though. It would just love to be messed with. Would feed on it. And the stage after plum is eggplant, big and dusky and curved, like a new organ in itself, to be an ism of.

The sink, with a gurgled sigh like almost mercy, overflows, emergency drain-slit and all, Sternberg's spent so unmercifully so much time in here. The water gurgles over the rim and onto the crotch of his gabardines. Great. That's just great. Now it looks like he's maybe wet himself. And what's he supposed to say. Or even if he doesn't say anything. Either way, explanation or interpretation, he comes out embodied. He demands compassion from a mirror he's backed away from, hoping to make the water stop. But it doesn't. Maybe it's been on too long. It's spilling onto the floor. Great. He demands compassion. Except of whom, though?

Because DeHaven Steelritter, son, has unwittingly given J.D. some of J.D.'s most creative and inspired ideas. It was DeHaven who first poured Arm & Hammer baking soda down the drain of the Steelritter farmhouse kitchen, in Collision, to try to erase the indelible odor of two marijuana roaches mistakenly washed down there along with the remains of something sweet. What happened to the fridge's baking soda? asks Mrs. Steelritter, who fears the noisomely oily smell of the fried roses that festoon the second-to-the-bottom refrigerator shelf. Where's my Arm and Hammer? she asks, as they sit down to a giant Midwest supper. DeHaven--who, like anybody who smokes dope under his parents' roof, is quick on his feet when it comes to explaining wild kitchen incongruities--delineates a deep concern for the impression the odor of the Steelritter drain could have made on the next houseguest who just might visit the kitchen and have occasion to get a whiff of the drain that, he declares, dry-mouthed, had smelled like death embodied.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF HOW SOME OF J.D. STEELRITTER'S MOST POWERFUL AND LEGENDARY PUBLIC-RELATIONS CREATIONS ARE REALLY NOTHING MORE THAN A SLIGHT TRANSFIGURATION OF WHAT REALLY JUST GOES ON AROUND HIS OWN ROSE FARM'S FARMHOUSE

One fine winter morning, years back, J.D. Steelritter was getting ready to go off to work at the J.D. Steelritter Advertising Complex, just across the snowy, greenhouse-dotted fields and intersection from home. But anyway he's heading for the door, and little DeHaven, home from sixth grade (his second shot at it) with one of those mysterious feverless colds that just cry out to be nipped in the bud--he tells J.D., in complete innocence, the innocence of a child before a television, to have a nice day.

The rest, as they say.

[...] but it's a bit too late in the game for this ploy to do more than cover some losses, and the pesticide salesman is angst-ridden and red-eyed and effetely low on self-esteem, and wants very much to ball this ageless but oddly sexy orange-faced stewardess, as further coverage against estimable losses.

[...] If all blacks are great dancers and athletes, and all Orientals are smart and identical and industrious, and all Jews are great makers of money and literature, wielders of a clout born of cohesion, and all Latins great lovers and stiletto-wielders and slippers-past-borders--well then gee, what does that make all plain old American WASPs? What one great feature, for the racist, brings us whitebreads together under the solid roof of stereotype? Nothing. A nameless faceless Great White Male. Racism seems to Mark a kind of weird masochism. A way to make us feel utterly and pointlessly alone. Unidentified. More than Sternberg hates being embodied, more than D.L. hates premodern realism, Mark hates to believe he is Alone. It's the high siren's song of the wrist's big razor. It's the end of the long, long, long race you're watching, but at the end you fail to see who won, so entranced are you with the exhausted beauty of the runners' faces as they cross the taped line to totter in agonized circles, hands on hips, bent.

In a related development, Mark Nechtr is now revealed by me to have professionally diagnosed emotional problems.

[...] We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; [...] That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsis binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd. It's Steelritter's meat.

[...] The enormous crowd J.D. hath wrought over thirty years of time purchased second by expensive second will come together, lose the supplicants' courtesy that atomizes crowds, and desire past all earthly care the rendition of fat, the sigh of oil, the sparkle of carbonation, the consumption of government-inspected flesh. [...]

D.L. is utterly silent throughout this exchange, watching the odometer begin slowly to lose its magic. There is a reason for her silence that is in a way parallel to the historical U.S. conflict in Vietnam. For her, Vietnam does not exist except as complicatedly cancelled letters and hissingly connected phone calls, a completely flat-eyed father whom she first met on a tarmac at nine. Who had a hook. Who dropped at automobile backfires (Datsuns never backfire--too little power), who gazed dully and accepting at the mosquito feeding at his one big bicep. Who's long gone, now. Who left a note.

[...] J.D. sometimes looks at DeHaven with this sort of objective horrified amazement: I made that?