To this day I think of Indians and my father in 'one breath.' Neither of them worked and both of them drank whisky and both of them were robbed of their birthright. In the end, both were wretched and miserable. In 1873, Congress finally took the Indians' diminished reservation, and the Kansa tribe was forced to march away from the state that bears their name. My father died the same year.
The air conditioner was clanking.
Jonathan woke up on the thick patterned coverlet of the bed, leaves of Xerox scattered all around him. His throat was horribly sore. Sitting on the chair by the desk, a plump young man looked at him. Jonathan knew his face, but from where?
'It sure is stuffy in here,' said the young man. 'You ought to go outside for a while.'
It was the kid from the Con. 'Karl,' said Jonathan, sitting up.
'Hi,' said Karl, grinning with his huge white teeth. 'How are ya?'
'I'm not well,' croaked Jonathan.
'Yeah, I heard.' Karl's eyes were downcast.
Jonathan remembered and felt a flood of misgiving and guilt. 'And you. Are you okay? I mean, are you well?'
'I'm okay,' said Karl. 'When I heard about you, I took a test. Nothing. We didn't do that much, remember?'
'Yes, yes, that's right!' Jonathan settled back onto the bed with relief. 'We didn't, did we?'
'I thought you might like to know that,' said Karl. 'Come on, there's somebody wants to see you.'
He helped Jonathan to his feet, and Jonathan fumbled woozily with the locks on the door. Outside the air was cool and sweet-smelling and seemed heavier, as if it contained more oxygen. White light glowed inside the blue swimming pool. Worms of light wriggled over the walls of the Best Western.
And Moonflower walked toward them. For some reason she was wearing a 1930s evening dress, white satin with a long train. Her small breasts hung unsupported within it. Her hair was still wild, uncombed.
'We were all real upset when we heard about you,' she said.
'All of us fans,' said Karl.
'Some of us used to talk to you when you weren't there,' said Moonflower.
Jonathan held up a hand. 'It was just a part. All you could see was the makeup.'
'You became,' said Karl, 'an icon. We saw your picture so much, you moved from the right-hand side of the brain to the left. You stopped being a visual image, you became more like a word sign. You became a meaning.'
'That's the trouble with you intellectuals,' said Moonflower. She slipped the satin dress off over her head. 'You always stare at the images and tell us what they mean to you. You should ask us what the signs mean. We're the people who use them. You should be doing scientific surveys, not staring at your own belly buttons.'
She walked away, naked. Her legs and arms were thin, her hips and stomach already settling down with age. Seagulls in the blue light played about her hair.
'You also ought,' she said, 'to go swimming.' She dived into the pool and disappeared amid a flurry of bubbles, white like pearls.
'Let's get some chow,' said Karl. 'You haven't eaten anything since Bill's last night, and you lost that.'
For some reason, Jonathan already had the car keys in his hand.
The new town center was a huge shopping mall that covered the end of Poyntz Avenue, where the bank of the Blue River had once been. Jonathan walked inside and his breath was taken away.
It was glass-covered like a train station, with huge hoops of light in a row along the ceiling's pinnacle. The floor was made out of brick and there were tall fountains and shrubbery in pots and walkways leading off down avenues of shops to the closed and darkened caverns of department stores.
Jonathan walked forward with tiny, almost fearful steps, looking about him. It was late and the mall was just as deserted as the rest of the town center had been in daylight. Somewhere, echoing overhead, were the disembodied voices of children and the imprecations of adults.
He tiptoed down the main corridor, where it was narrowed by flanks of white columns, and out into a wider space. There was the sound of splashing water and emptiness. A sign hung over it. PICNIC PLACE, said the sign in neon.
In the center of Picnic Place was a black, convoluted, and somehow Italian fountain, surrounded by palm trees. Empty tables were rimmed around it. Along the walls were franchises for Mexican or Italian fast food, and for something called runzas. The voices overhead still had to find bodies. An Asian Indian woman strolled past him in a purple-and-silver sari. Her sandals made a flapping sound.
In the far corner there were double doorways that seemed to promise a more substantial restaurant. CARLOS O'KELLY'S MEXICAN CAFE, said a sign. Jonathan seemed to waft into it. Suddenly he was standing before an empty front desk. No one came to help him. He felt foolish. He walked past a kind of structural screen of plaster, meant to suggest a Mexican building.
The place was a confusing welter of decor-stuffed foxes, Pepsi signs, cow horns, old tin advertisements of women who raised fringed skirts like theater curtains over their thighs, antique (perhaps) mirrors. A table full of male students as big as sides of beef roared with laughter. Jonathan jumped as if they were laughing at him. A waiter finally came up, apologizing. 'Sorry, it's kinda late, I'm the only one here,' he said. For some reason he had a flapper haircut, like a woman from the 1920S. He wore very baggy shorts almost to the knee. He sat Jonathan at a table and passed him a large menu encased in plastic sheeting.
Chimichangas, thought Jonathan. They had not existed a decade before. In the 1970S, you sat down to beans, enchiladas and chile rellenos. Who invented chimichangas? Were they authentic? If not, how long did it take for something to become authentic?
