Frank Gelt’s tuned to this station himself — the immaterial waves that, like the horizons, bind through spacetime, but in invisible, insensible gusts—Summertime, it sings and it’s airy, and the living’s queasy, from the album Dolly “Tziporah Ruth” Parton Sings The Liturgy Of The Sabbath & Other Holiday & Western Favorites For Your Listening Pleasure, RCA 47-9928; Gelt driving an oldfashionably crisis convertible, leading Heber in the limo with Der ensconced in the back, belted, boloed, countried in a hat, ten gallons obstructing rearview. Hamm, Mada, and Johannine sit opposite him in a hush. A station identification, again, then, for the Fourth, sort of a responsibility to do something here, anything: wipers squeaking in time to a medley of patriotic parodies, sung by a woman by the name of Mahalia “No Relation To” Jackson; it warbles in the cabs of a thousand trucks abandoned along with their trailers’ pork product, in the wombs of a million cars shouldered as peddlers’ sacks upon Fridays’ dusks for a walk amid the grain, a night’s greeting of the fruited plains, beggared, burdened with only the wares of the soul. But just look outside, will you, what you’re passing, what’re you talking…oy vey, can you see, nothing at all. Snow, radioweather with the signal gone down. Heber kvetching, I can’t see a goddamned thing…out of range. They’re a motorcade in search of a valuable lost, as if of Egypt’s cup, Ben to the brim: famined, their meal ticket, their retirement package — pantsed, then draped with a tallis. Not to wait for a Messiah, a Moshiach salvific, understand, but to go out and proactively search. You want we should head out to Angels, or down south Mexico way? With President Shade and his daughter due in sooner than later as Hanna’d say, does Der have any answers? A fatherly surrogate, an Israeldirection…north south east or lost he says, I don’t know what to tell you, Sam, um, er, Mister President. Maybe you should sit down for this, get comfortable, be prepared. To hop on one foot that’s the tongue. Lillian sobbing her eyes into bloodshot, cracked knuckles, or that’s just the inarticulate planenoise, imagined — an image of the First Lady prostrate in the aisle, headrest’s pillow bunched for a priedieu, upon which she prays pets to her daughter’s indulgence — there, there; there, there…
