The rest of the night was a series of washed-out images. When he awoke on his farm the next morning, McElroy couldn't process the situation completely and instead merely waited for a visit or phone call or summons or even a squad car. He waited all day and then the next, but nothing happened. No one came. Nothing changed. Where was his punishment? Where was the crushing blow? Somehow, McElroy said, waiting was worse than anything else.
He stopped attending Sunday rehearsals and instead stayed home listening to old Steve Reich recordings. He would put the music on, step onto his porch and wait for something to open up, for things to shift upward and to the left or anyway at all.
But no one came and nothing happened.
While he went on waiting and staring out through the fields, he "thought about corn and how I envision it experiences itself. Like laughter thrown up from the ground," he said, "nothing really, but there nonetheless. Corn: a joke without a punchline. Corn: a joke in search of a punchline. A joke that is all punchlines but which hasn't noticed yet, and maybe that's the punchline. Or a joke in which laughter is the punchline, but the laughter is waiting for -- and can't begin until it hears -- the punchline. Until it hears itself. And so it's there in the field, laughing at itself for no reason other than that it is already doing this, luckily -- and completely unaware of anything other than the feeling of its own humor in the face of nothingness.
"Magic," he said and stopped talking. He picked up his violin, shook his head, and stood from the bar.
"Wait, that's it?" I asked. The violin, I saw for the first time, was broken, crushed. "Nothing happened?"
"That's it," he said. It wasn't magical at all, just anticlimactic.
Bullshit.
Despite my protests, McElroy was gone shortly after, and I stumbled angrily out of the bar, puked in the elevator, and collapsed on the floor of my room. McElroy checked out by the time I woke up the next day. After a few apathetic attempts to rustle up some news, I flew back to my editor with nothing but a two week hangover and some unchargeable expenses. Losing my job was inevitable. I even pitched McElroy's story in desperation, but no one responded to my emails. The elections came and went. Nobody won, but people took office anyway. That might be the end of things had I not woken up a few months later with a lingering and obvious question: if Colavec never crushed the farmers' seed project, had it then actually succeeded?
I tried calling McElroy a few times, but I must have miswritten the number. I kept reaching the voice-mail of a real estate agency. I was curious enough, though, to drive cross country to where he'd lived and give him a visit. Frankly, I had nothing else to do. I arrived late at night and found the town much as he had described it. Why did that matter? Had I suspected McElroy of making it all up? Perhaps. But there was the diner and the laundromat and the on-ramp and the church, just as in his story, everything closed or desolate in the dark, but real nonetheless.
Yet I couldn't find his farm.
Or any farms for that matter.
Rather, I drove slowly through one suburban neighborhood after another without seeing a single piece of corn or field. I knew agriculture followed Thunian patterns, rings of produce surrounding a hub of consumption, but I couldn't seem to break free of the central hull. One row of houses lead onward to another, and each culdesac or roundabout leaked into more.
By the time I'd lost my bearings and couldn't find my way back to Main Street, feeling like a complete idiot, I realized there were no cars in any of the driveways, no lights over the garages, no flowers in the yards, no curtains in the windows.
I was lost in an unfinished housing development.
It must have been huge. At first I thought perhaps I was driving in circles, but the roads became increasingly unkempt and overgrown with grasses. Everything was so flat out there that I couldn't see beyond the houses in front of me. It all turned in on itself. When the saw goes through the body, that’s a real cut. No blood, though, only husks. Where was the corn? It had to be here somewhere. Maybe I just couldn't see it. I envisioned my car moving through an enormous ear, kernels becoming canals and vice versa. I tried to envision the area from above, but could only see McElroy's string laden map, confused and erratic. What would it look like when it opened?
The neighborhoods continued to grow. It must have been close to three in the morning when I stopped the car. I was exhausted and just couldn't drive anymore. For a while I sat on the hood staring at newly painted siding and shutters, but eventually I made my way up a stone walkway to the nearest home. The open-house sign carried the name Colavec Cronus and Ops.
I found it unlocked and stepped inside.
It was empty, obviously, and strangely cold. On my headphones, I listened to the Steve Reich MP3s I'd bought in anticipation of talking to McElroy. I remembered him describing the music to me. "What makes me uncomfortable," he said, "is when one rhythm slowly becomes another, one beat at a time, but it's hard to hear it happen." The smell of wood and paint thickened the air. I gave myself a tour and imagined purchasing the place. "Suddenly the tone and timbre and drive of the song are different, as if you'd never heard the previous few seconds. Like they never existed at all." When I went upstairs, I found an empty box of cigarettes, a few crushed cans of beer, and a tangled pair of women's underwear in a pool of water. "As if the real change happens in between the notes, like it happens sometime when we’re not listening, or maybe like it doesn't happen at all, like nothing really changes," he said. There were burn marks along one of the walls. "Sometimes, underneath or behind it all, you can hear a song that isn't playing, and it sounds even prettier than the one you don't understand."
My cell phone rang. I looked down to see McElroy's number. It was almost four, so it must have been urgent. When I answered, I heard a recorded voice asking about my interest in buying a house. Time-shares were available, too. The land was beautiful and the neighbors were wonderful. Job opportunities were everywhere. Whether I believed it or not, things were possible.
I laid down in a room on the second floor and stared, falling asleep, through a clean window toward the moon. It was brighter than usual and reminded me of something sad, of Demeter maybe, the only god that mourns because seasons pass, because things change. I considered rewriting McElroy's story with her as the protagonist. The celestial crybaby. Would she sob harder knowing the harvest and the winter are one and the same? Maybe not. Maybe she'd say that real change is realizing that very fact itself -- or that when corn opens up and spreads its pollen, its only furniture moving from one empty house to another. Nothing changes, she'd say -- but now, somehow, you're different.
If Demeter were a character in a Philip K. Dick story, would she find herself at the end and be unperturbed, saying "Yes, it was me all along -- but it doesn't matter"?
From outside, I think I can hear, over the tone and timbre of everything else, the hum of a prettier song, but it's just Colavec's for-sale signs creaking their hinges in the wind.