Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (11 page)

“Let me go in first,” Indigo said as if he needed to open a safe passage for us through a lair, and he disappeared inside the cabin. Suddenly the dark windows took on an unearthly glow, and we heard him call out for us to enter, and in we went, Q keeping so close behind me I heard her mutter her grandfather’s strongest oath, “Cheese and crackers!” As I looked about, mine came out stronger.

Our eyes had to adjust to the dimness and shadows, but before that could happen fully, Indigo, nowhere to be seen, must have hit another switch because the room seemed to change. Cheese and crackers indeed! It was a phantasmagorium!

Entering Indigo’s parlor was like stepping into the back of a vacuum-tube radio of the same vintage as the first Grapette: the space was full of inexplicable objects, some glowing and others only seeming to glow from reflections; shapes curvilinear and right-angled, bulbous and boxy, yet all in a complex order it would take a schematic drawing to explain; the lower objects were ostensibly attached or anchored or plugged in, while the upper things appeared airborne. A chamber aloft, a room in hover.

I’d never seen so much light — 
particles of light
 — in a dim room; it was as though they were little bungs and stoppers to keep the cool darkness from leaking in and extinguishing everything. Clobbered by surprise, I saw two or three sparklings where perhaps there was only one. Yet the effect wasn’t a banishment of darkness but a shivering of it with fractured radiance: glistenings, glisterings, gleamings, glintings, glimmerings, glowings, refractions and refulgences, candescence and luminescence, little shining beacons, small shimmering bulbs, twinklings and blinkings, lamplets and lanternlets bespangling the walls in a carny of luminations. It was as if a cut-glass prism full of entrapped sunbeams had fallen and shattered, each brokenness still shedding its wavelength of spectral light. A color wheel spun so fast the pigments had flown off to bespatter whatever they hit: ceiling, floor, Q’s head. Her flaxen hair now magenta, now vermilion, and, with another step forward, orchid, heliotrope, cobalt blue. A student of chromatics could go mad. “Your face!” she said. “You’re a chameleon. A redskin. No, now you’re a green man from planet Quoz.”

I said, Let it be like this when I cross over, and she said, “Maybe you just crossed. Maybe you’re there.”

Where was Indigo? Not the color, the man, because the color — and a hundred others — fluoresced everywhere.

Did I hear music? Was sight turning to sound? A little night music? Light music? A true chromatic scale sung sotto voce? A chorale of colors? Was I seeing radiance or hearing ragtime? The disassociation of synesthesia. Where the devil was Indigo?

Ah! Of course we couldn’t see him, because we were inside his kaleidoscope skull where he’d transformed his imagination into light and color splattered all over constructions made from hundreds upon hundreds of found objects: buttons, beads, baskets, bottles, Christmas ornaments, saucers, seashells, vases, candlesticks, small brass horns, stalks of river cane, gelatin molds, twigs, a fly-swatter. Look long enough, and somewhere there’d be green cheese and crackers, shellacked and polished and reflecting light like the evening star. He’d turned the place into a loom where he could weave a two-dimensional world of murals into a three-dimensional warped and wefted tapestry seeming to have movement, and that meant he’d embraced the fourth dimension.

The chamber, although large, seemed full, almost claustrophobic, as though it could hold nothing more, not so much as an exhalation, yet I could walk through it, along narrow aisles and alleys and avenues leading into little piazzas with chairs under long, thin, cut trees, decurved into leaning bows hung with bright picked-up objects, small arbors decorated by a magpie, all of it under a beamed sky of a ceiling — the only thing keeping me from floating off into some fifth dimension.

The nature of quoz is synergistic. Like stardust lying over the planet, quoz is potential recombinant energy seeking union with an open mind. A crevice is all it needs. Ready your emotional membranes, and it enters, passes through. To the implicit force in quoz, any idea that’s ever crossed your brain is a latent zygote. This wasn’t psychosis — it was zygosis.

And then Q came from someplace, her hair chrome yellow, her face puce, and she said, “Where’ve you been, Little Boy Blue?” Under the haycock, fast asleep.

But where the hell is Indigo?
And then he was there too, coming into the room on a boy’s bicycle painted in carny colors, nodding hello, and again out of the room, and soon again back into it, slowing to say, “Want a ride?” And my wambled brain thinking,
Just had one, thanks.
And here he came around again. “Thirsty or not?” And that time I got out a real answer: Thirsty!

I sat down in a chair under one of the tree limbs in front of a large fireplace, the chimney sided by a mural of half-mad Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat.” I was fit to dance by the light of the moon. Q asked if I was all right, and later she alleged I said a candle has no opposite because if it did, you could take a couple of sticks of darkness into a lighted room and extinguish it.

Sans wheels, Indigo reappeared carrying a tray of three ice-cubed glasses and three bottles of Grapette, the old-style little fellows, and he poured us a round of Uncle Benjamin’s secret formula in the very room where inventor Fooks used to take his, and Q asked again, “Are you okay?” and I said, For a minute or two, I think I transitioned.

Indigo may have smiled. His art had succeeded.

Sitting, sipping, collecting myself, I could see the room now more clearly. It wasn’t airborne, but I still felt it could be if my attention wandered, because it was deliberately fitted out to permit the ordinary to transmogrify into the alien in an auxiliary cosmos where the immutable laws were those of fancy, and the goal was to unhitch a visitor from the mundane and the presumed in order that he might flitter like a bat through the darks of imagination. An emporium to disorient one’s sensorium.

At the center of the Great Parlor, for that’s what it was in its lodgelike setting, were large wooden tables topped with spired towers made entirely from found objects gathered by an artist on jolly terms with that elusive chimera of the late last century, one’s inner child. But the craftsmanship was from experienced hands. If you know Erastus Salisbury Field’s huge painting
Historical Monument of the American Republic,
you’ll have an idea not of the architecture but of the folk vision inherent in Indigo’s world of spires. Or perhaps closer is the fabled Watts Towers in Los Angeles, structures Indigo loved. Nothing was pointless or daffy, although everything was whimsical.

On the far side of the room was a four-by-eight-foot spacecraft, airborne except for a small, hidden pedestal. A compact person could board it. Oh, to be again nine years old! Cross a hydroplane with a jet fighter, add in a few details from a Formula 1 race car, paint it in harmonious metallic pastels, tip the nose with small nodules of stained glass, and you’d have Indigo Rocket’s rocket-ship, a piece of sculpture waiting for its gallery. He said cryptically, “A transition between air and water and land requires certain metamorphoses in design — for efficiency.” I interpreted that to mean rotors for flight could metamorphose into propellers for water, sails could change to wings, wheels to pontoons, and maybe even the machine into man — or woman.

He called it
The Mother Ship
 — driven by imaginative fire through dreams of earth, air, and water — the ur-craft spawning three much smaller but more intricate dream ships he brought out and held aloft one at a time to demonstrate their capacities to “transition” from element to element, from physical substance to the ether of one’s dreams.

The vehicles functioned according to four guidelines: they were
stressed
like a bow,
pressurized
like a pneumatic tire,
charged
like a storage battery, and
articulated
like a skeleton. “I call them creature ships because they have a certain life force.” Rotors on one craft had the shape of a well-turned feminine leg, and a fuselage on another had the body of a porpoise. They were devilishly clever, like da Vinci’s drawings of machines. But if Leonardo conceived contraptions that one day would indeed exist, Indigo built deliberate impossibilities.

The ships belonged to his world of spires atop the tables. “It’s all related,” he said. “It’s a family.” Within each object was a consistent and continuing unity of vision, something often visible in the best folk art, and sometimes on beyond. “When I start building a tower, all I know is that it’s headed for the sky.” Q, who had been looking at a sketchbook of his spires, said, “That could be your epitaph.”

Indigo constructed his towers from what he happened upon and could bring home: a rattan cornucopia for the body of a building, a belt buckle for a door, a woody vine became a spiral ramp, a goblet a tabernacle dome, a piece of costume jewelry for a cathedral window, a gourd turned into a house; all the constructions bright and airy and transformable into other shapes. He said, “I like to dream of building one I could live in.”

He had created a narrative bringing the objects together: “A catastrophe wipes out all people over the age of three, and that calls forth the arrival of the Noggins, creatures of compassion and interchangeable intelligence whose lives depend on cooperation. Without harmony, they’re dysfunctional.” He was looking at a Noggin in his hand as he spoke, as if teaching it. “They raise the human children and teach them kindly wisdom.”

Noggins? I said, and he, “If you have transport and towers, then you have to have creature life, creatures who use their noggins.” From one of the skinny, ice-bent trees, he took down a plastic Easter egg that, as if painted by Picasso, had a face which changed with the angle of the beholder. Such an Egg Noggin — capable of interchange, transformation, and cooperation — was embryonic life to create a realm of benevolence.

“The Noggins,” Indigo said, “have mastered the four elements and have acquired high, humane intelligence as they learned their mastery, but they’re still a fusion of intelligence and machine even though they have emotions. Their highest transition is to blend with their operators — like a horse with its rider. This fusion comes from fantasy physics that works interchanges among matter and energy and being.” So, a kind of
meta
physics.

He demonstrated certain physical transitions with the Noggins as he talked, at one point saying, “When I was doing the instruction books for Transformers — you know, those interlocking toy creature-machines — the company encouraged attacks and violence as a way to involve a kid’s imagination. I used to wonder,
What if there were loving warriors? What if there were art attacks?
An alien ship arrives and dissimulates into multiple Noggins. Each one is skilled in an art technique unleashed by musically enhanced lasers that change surfaces into images like murals and patterns. They turn a gray world into colors. But the powers of blackness can fight back. They can shock the pastels and render them colorless for a while. It’s an art attack! Pearl Harbor meets the Museum of Modern Art.”

While he was saying this, he was disassembling one Noggin to build it into a second one. “What if violence got turned into art — dynamic art, performance art — and the child was the artist
and
performer? Don’t children love performance where things are moving? They can visualize things in motion all at once like in real life — everything moving and transforming at every moment.”

The Noggin in his hands now had feet instead of wheels, and its furry head had become feathery. “What if the idea wasn’t to obliterate and vaporize but to create and actualize? What if the idea wasn’t to actuate a preset program designed by an engineer but to help kids imagine something new for themselves, something the child hasn’t imagined yet? Not destruction but construction where little kids are the creators and get to see their ideas hatch out of their own noggins.” Now the second creature in his hands was ready to sprout what I took for rotors, but they could have been wings or fins or flippers or a clown’s feet.

“It’s a lot easier to knock down a sand castle than to build one,” he said. “Destruction can even be fun for a minute or two, but wreckage doesn’t leave behind any sense of achievement. It’s empty, and kids soon feel that. They’re left with nothing. We’ve got a world now where simulated attacks and virtual violence are probably more marketable than some toy or game that tries to create a vision and a physical expression of it. Kids are going to imitate us. We’ve taught them weapons are solutions. But there may be a time coming when search-and-destroy could change to search-and-design.”

Q, who had been jotting down pieces of the conversation, asked if he thought any of these ideas had to do with his dream on the Ouachita sandbar. He said, “That dream opened a door to an idea. A theme. It was an inspiration that arose when the time was right. You know, a kind of dream ship that transported me to a mother ship for transference.” He raised an arm to indicate the entire room, filled with his daedal inventions. “All this is the result of transitions.”

Indigo pulled out a notebook of verse he’d written to illustrate his realm of Noggindom:

One by one the faces come

Out of the mist to be kissed;

Two by two enjoined as one,

Three or more joined in fun,

Ten or more become a sum

All together numbering many

Spinning together on the run.

At midnight he showed us to a room softened and charmed with arches and odd pieces of sculptured wood; the floor was steel blue, as if part of a ship built to travel between elements; a ladder, like one in a submarine, led to a small loft above a drawing table; a red velveteen settee, paintings of icebergs, and one of a cat done by his friend Blue. A four-poster bed. Everything was, to use Q’s phrase, “in quiet resplendence.”

I stood at the window for some time, looking out toward the old oxbow. I felt I’d dozed off on some river sandbar of the mind and been taken aboard an indigo rocket ship, and, if affirmation can be transition, I think I transitioned. I hope so. After all, transit without transition doesn’t take a traveler very far.