Primordial: An Abstraction

26

Somebody parks a Ford Excursion on the lawn in front of the Union. Several writers have gathered around it. They study and comment on it as if they’ve never seen a car before. I don’t blame them. It’s big. Too big.

The writers see me coming and disperse like a pack of frightened rodents.

I press my nose against the driver’s side window of the Ford Excursion and look inside.

It’s dirty.

Empty soda cans. Cigarette butts and ash. Wrappers and old clothes and dirt and dust.

The driver’s in the car. Observing me.

“Get this thing outta here you fuckin’ dummy,” I say.

He tells me to go to hell or something.

I go inside the Union and get all of the janitors.

I round them up like so much livestock.

They’re reluctant to follow my lead but I promise them various IOUs and rewards and even raises that I of course lack the desire or the authority to deliver.

Standing on a table in the café, I give a kind of neomarxist motivational speech, gesticulating like Nietzsche after a bad meal. Then we go outside.

We lean against the Ford Excursion and start to push.

The driver goes crazy.

He yells and spits and swears and kicks and punches the window and the dash and the roof and the steering wheel as we push the Ford Excursion onto its flipside and then push it back onto its rightside.

We do it again.

Again.

Until the Ford Excursion idles in the street, upside-down, where it should be.

I say, “No parking on the lawn!”

The janitors clap. One of them cheers. The other janitors look at him as if he’s done something wrong. He has, in a way. Nobody else cheered. .

The janitor who cheered shoves his hands into his pockets and stares at his shoes. Like his sense of etiquette, they need polishing.