New Bedlam by Bill Flanagan

Author:Bill Flanagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

part three

100 fathers

23.

Dash Ryan could not recall the name of the woman who was painting his face. She talked away at him as she moved around his head, jabbering happily in his right ear, then his left. It reminded him of a stereo demonstration record. When he and Pam were first married, they bought a big color TV console with the AM/FM radio and hi-fi. The salesman put on an LP filled with the sounds of race cars charging from the left speaker to the right and a foghorn singing call-and-response with a bullfrog. He remembered ducks quacking along in a procession from one end of the showroom to the other, and then scattering as a train barreled across the sonic landscape.

He could recall the smell of the aftershave on the salesman as he lifted those speaker doors off their hinges, uncoiled their cords, and positioned each five feet from the cabinet. This maneuver had been rehearsed so that just as he set the second speaker on the floor, the sound of the “1812 Overture” exploded on either side of the Ryans. Pam jumped and then covered her mouth with her gloved hand and laughed. They were sold.

Dash could remember sitting next to Pam on the green couch in the living room of their old house in Bethesda watching himself interview candidate Edmund Muskie on that TV. They never used the hi-fi much. Pam sometimes liked to play original cast albums when they had folks over, but neither West Side Story nor My Fair Lady took advantage of the home entertainment system’s capacity for extreme stereo panning.

All these details Dash remembered precisely. He could recall the heft and ballast of the primitive remote control. To use it you had to stand directly in front of the TV’s electric eye and aim like Marshal Dillon. He could remember details of the day they replaced their rabbit ears with a roof antenna. Craig Bjerke from the station came over on a Saturday and went up on the roof and hooked them up while Dash held the ladder and Pam brought out lemonade on a tray.

These images from decades ago were at his disposal, but Dash could not recall the name of the woman who was swabbing color under his eyes and slapping blush on the back of his hands and spraying what felt like gum in his hair, while chattering as if she were his closest friend.

Was she the girl who wanted to be a weatherperson and sent him résumés full of misspelled words? Or was she the one with the daughter at CNN and the son in jail? There were two or three regular makeup women on the show and it pained him that he could not remember any of their names. He saw them more than he had ever seen Craig Bjerke. Why was Bjerke still taking up space in Dash’s memory? Why could he not record over that old tape?

“What do we want to do about the forelock?”

Dash looked in the mirror at the chatty woman, who was regarding the top of his head like a chess master.

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