#Plastering Mansfield

[slightlydullpencil]

Hello everyone! I was looking through some Jane Austen merchandise on the internet today, when I came across this piece. At first glance, it seemed to me like this was just another random Jane Austen quote, plastered on some t-shirt. However, upon further analysis, I realized that this quote holds much more significance than I previously thought. In fact, I came to the realization that this quote not only perfectly encapsulates Fanny's character in Mansfield Park, but I felt like it can also represent how many introverts feel as a whole.

Throughout Mansfield Park, it is very apparent that Fanny is not a typical heroine. Instead of being outspoken, confident, and brave, Fanny exhibits much more introverted characteristics. Several times throughout the story, we see Fanny shy away from conflict with others. For example, after learning that she is to be sent to live with her aunt Ms. Norris Fanny immediately becomes despaired as she knows she would not be happy living with her. However, despite this acknowledgement of her own feelings, Fanny barely pushes back against this decision, instead Fanny only manages to give a weak statement of "I shall be very sorry to go away." (Austen 20). It is this seeming quality of Fanny's that many literary critics seem to have a problem with. Several critics call Fanny a pushover and a weakling because of her propensity to avoid conflict. However, I think that Fanny is not deserving of this label. We have to remember the environment that Fanny was raised in. She was sent to live with her aunt and cousins who, let's be honest, saw her as lesser due to her social and economic standing. As a result, Fanny was not treated as an equal by her relatives, instead Fanny was likened to something like a maid or servant. Because Fanny was treated like this from such a young age it only makes sense that at some point, she internalized these feelings of being lesser, which resulted in her developing her timid personality, as she herself thinks that she is not worthy to go against the decisions of her seeming superiors.

It is this kind of notion that I think many people can see within themselves. Many introverts tend to avoid conflict as best they can in an effort to avoid drama. Yet their seeming inaction does not indicate that they do not have specific feelings on the problem. Instead, it may simply mean that they simply feel like their opinions on a certain event may seem lesser than or unworthy of being heard. What do you guys think? Let me know!

[lboogie1906]

Ruth Inge Hardison (February 3, 1914 – March 23, 2016) was a sculptor, artist, and photographer, known for her busts entitled "Negro Giants in History". Her collection called "Our Folks", which features sculpted portraits of everyday people is of note. Her artistic productions surround historical African American portraiture, and she was interested in representing the unspoken voices of the African American past. She was the only female in the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. She was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, her family moved to Brooklyn. She acted in the Broadway Productions of "Sweet River" and "Country Wife". She began sculpting as a hobby. When she took part in the year-long "What a Life" production, she created a sculpture of its cast, which was displayed at the Mansfield Theatre. She studied Music and Creative Writing at Vassar College. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and Tennessee State University. Her works begin as clay, wax, or plaster molds, and were cast into cast stone or bronze. Her first bust in that series was of Harriet Tubman, which measured eight inches in height; she has created busts of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Sojourner Truth, and Mary McLeod Bethune, among others. Her bronze Douglass bust, for example, was unveiled at Princeton's Firestone Library. Other public works include a 7-foot abstract figure called "Jubilee" which stands on the campus of Medgar Evers College, a series of 18 children on an outdoor wall of I.S.74 in Hunts Point in the Bronx, and a five-foot mother and child given to Mount Sinai Hospital to express her gratitude for their help in delivering her only child. She created a series of Ingenious Americans, little-known African American inventors and other notables commissioned and sold by Old Taylor Whiskey. The series of nine busts included Benjamin Banneker, Charles Richard Drew, Matthew Henson, Frederick McKinley Jones, Lewis Latimer, Garrett Morgan, Norbert Rillieux, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, and Granville Woods. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence https://www.instagram.com/p/CoMzVt-rWfN/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[jwood719]

The Ohio State Reformatory, Mansfield OH: Random Photographs

Swept, but still a work in progress: upper floor of the residence/administration block.

Over the years, the reformatory has been left abandoned, with vandalism and weather taking a toll on the structure.

The current condition of the building demonstrates the determination of the preservation society and its volunteers. Though the photo above might seem to belie any such determination, imagine for a moment that this stairwell had never been swept, never had the fallen plaster removed -- it would likely not be passable.

As with many projects to save old buildings, the roof has been repaired or replaced, and some measure of airflow introduced to keep (as much as possible) pipes from freezing and bursting, and humidity from further deteriorating the structure.

The west attic ceiling; don't think it was built like that.

R. Jake Wood, 2024

[lewcoty]

Mansfield wakes to a plaster of waterlogged early winter snow

[be11atrixthestrange]

Step 12: Asking Her To Marry You

From 12 Fail-Safe Ways To Charm Hermione Granger

(Which is now complete!!)

Check it out on Ao3 or FFN!

————————————

Asking Her To Marry You

At this point in your relationship, you’ll hopefully know her well enough to plan the perfect proposal. But don’t worry too much about perfection— if you’ve followed our advice, she’ll be charmed enough to say yes to an imperfect one too. So alas, this is where our guidance ends, your future together begins. Best of luck!

————————————

Ron chuckled at the book’s irritating, yet unsurprising lack of advice. Annoyingly, the book was right— he no longer needed its guidance. What he needed was sleep, in fact, his body was now begging for it.

He set the book on the table beside him and curled up behind Hermione. With his face in her hair and his arm around her waist, he closed his eyes and was asleep in no time. Any anxiety about the next day was appeased by his dreams, in which his elaborate— maybe slightly exaggerated—  plan to propose went off without a hitch.

xxxxx

In his dream, Hermione was the first to rise— as usual, and Ron woke to the sound of the shower. Ron watched himself stumble out of bed and into the steam to join her, where she enthusiastically embraced him, jumped into his arms, and wrapped her legs around his waist. He pinned her to the wall and kissed her lips, her cheeks and her neck before working his way down her body. Dream-Ron moved his mouth between her legs while Hermione gripped his hair and slipped her thigh over his shoulder. Pleased with his own technique, Ron smugly watched on as Hermione unravelled, and he hoped that it wouldn’t be the last time that day Dream-Ron would invoke such an enthusiastic exclamation while down on one knee.

Almost too suddenly, the shower scene morphed and shifted like a memory transition in a pensive. Dream-Ron was in the kitchen, and Hermione was curled up in the living room with a book. Pots and pans sizzled on the stove, and the scent of a hearty breakfast filled the air. The tea-kettle whistled and he poured two cups before piling their plates high with food. They sat cozily on the sofa, eating breakfast and confirming plans for the day.

The walls of their apartment then faded away, rematerializing into what appeared to be a blend of a nearby bookstore and the Hogwarts library. Ron and Hermione were quickly engulfed by the maze of bookshelves. Hermione’s mind was always turning, looking for problems to solve and puzzles to complete, so she didn’t protest when Ron handed her the first book— Wuthering Heights, and told her he’d set up a puzzle for her to solve. In that book he’d dog-eared a page, and circled letters that named the title of the next one. Ron saw a smile spread across her face as she began her hunt, excitedly flipping through each novel until her stack included Wuthering Heights, as well as Iliad, Little Women, Life of Pi, Year of Wonders, Oliver Twist, and Utopia.

Hermione became so engrossed in the scavenger hunt that she didn’t notice Dream-Ron leave the bookshop. She had no problem finding the rest of the books, and was soon holding a stack of blurry titles which Ron knew to be Moby Dick, Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe, Rabbit Hill, Youngblood Hawke, and Mansfield Park. There was just one more to find— Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’, which happened to be a portkey enchanted to bring her to Grimmauld Place.

It might have seemed like a random assortment of books, but it wasn’t. Ron had spent significant effort locating these exact titles, and he could list them in order by memory, and as a result, they’d been swimming in his dreams for quite some time now. He knew Hermione was clever enough to figure out the pattern, possibly too clever— so much so that she might miss the connection entirely. After all, she frequently overlooked what was right under her nose.

As soon as she laid her hand on Emma, the walls of the Corner Books—Hogwarts Library hybrid started spinning, morphing into the drawing room of Grimmauld Place as if it had taken a long swig of polyjuice potion. Soon enough, Hermione was standing face-to-face with Harry and Ginny.

“Hermione!” Ginny said excitedly. “You made it!”

“Where’s Ron?” she asked excitedly.

Harry answered by handing her another scrawl of paper.

Meet me in the place we first kissed. You’re clever enough to find out how.

Hermione looked up at Harry and Ginny, letting slip a little huff of annoyance. “That would be the room of requirement.”

Ginny shrugged, as tight-lipped as Ron had told her to be.

“The only way to get there is with a house elf—“

“Keep reading,” said Harry.

Hermione glanced back down to the note.

Ps: Remember what I said to earn that kiss!

Hermione scowled at the note.

Harry nodded. “I can summon Kreacher if you want—“

“No!” she said, and Dream-Ron smiled. Just like at the battle of Hogwarts, he would never force house elves to be part of his proposal plan, and he understood her well enough to assume she knew that. “There’s another way.”

Harry smiled and gestured to the rest of the house. “Have fun.”

The world spun around her once again, shifting into another room upstairs. Hermione was suddenly standing in front of one of the Vanishing Cabinets that the Aurors had confiscated from an ex-Death Eater months prior. In his dream, the cabinet was a bit more obvious than in reality. It was tall, colorful, and bursting with energy as though it were alive, unlike the dull, dark, and sinister version that actually existed. Even though the cabinet looked fun and enticing in the dream, Dream-Hermione was still a skeptic, so she stood in front of it with her arms crossed, her face scrunched up as though it had called her a dirty word.

Ron had pulled some serious strings to set the second one up in the Room of Requirement, but luckily, McGonagall was as much of a hopeless romantic as he was. Hermione continued to study the cabinet from a distance, as if checking for dark magic, and he understood her hesitation of course— she had no way of knowing where its sibling was. She gingerly opened the door to find another note scribbled inside.

You found it! See you on the other side.

Hermione beamed, and then to his confusion, dropped her bag to the floor, hastily removing books. When her bag appeared empty, she piled two books back in— Year of Wonders and Emma.

Interesting. Ron wasn’t going to pretend to understand that choice, even in a dream-state.

He shrugged it off, which was easy to do once distracted by the look of pure giddiness on her face as she disappeared inside.

Grimmauld Place faded away, and its place appeared the Room of Requirement. Not that it was recognizable as such— Ron had asked the Room of Requirement to look a very specific way, and of course, it had obliged, exceeding all expectations. Hermione stepped out of the cabinet into what appeared to be a train compartment on the Hogwarts Express, just like the one where he had first met her.

She looked around, and tears filled her eyes as the memories of their first encounter flooded in. On the cabinet door was another note, which she unstuck from the wall with a trembling hand.

This is where we met! It’s also where I first realized how much I valued the opinion of that precocious know-it-all, Hermione Granger. I still check for dirt on my nose everyday.

Hermione shakily laughed, and wiped a tear from her eyes with her free hand. Then the train compartment doors slid open to reveal another room. This time it was a bathroom, much like the one where she nearly lost her life to a rogue troll when they were eleven.

She shuddered at the memory, but grinned when she noticed the writing on the wall.

This is where I learned exactly how desperate I was for your forgiveness, and how far I was willing to go to earn your friendship. Thank you for teaching me how to pronounce Wingardium Leviosa.

Her eyes watered again, blurring her vision so that she nearly missed the door sliding open again to reveal the next room. Patting her sleeve to her eyes, she stepped out of the bathroom and into the Great Hall, which was all dolled up for the Yule Ball. The Weird Sisters playing loudly in the background was a stark contrast to the soft decorations and draping lights which looked exactly as romantic as they did in their fourth year.

This time, however, the lights spelled out a message.

This where I realized I fancied you.

Hermione laughed, clearly not as saddened by the memory as she could have been. Instead, she appeared grateful for the event that made Ron’s daft teenage self realize she was not just any girl.

A pair of doors appeared across the room, and Hermione continued her way through, admiring the decorations with a soft smile on her face. When she exited, she found herself in the Gryffindor Common Room— more specifically— the armchairs and fireplace where they had spent so many nights huddled up close to one another, studying, talking, or simply sitting in comfortable silence.

Her eyes paused on a message plastered on the wall, just above the fire.

This is where I fell irrevocably in love with you.

She looked longingly at those chairs, like she wanted to take a seat by the fire and curl up with a blanket and a book. He could clearly imagine her eyes scanning the pages, her fingers drifting over the words as if touching them would make them real, and her lips forming into a content smile as the day’s stress left her body. It was a beautiful image of her in her default state, a picture that was one hundred percent Hermione. He’d never seen her happier anywhere else.

Dream-Ron had appeared behind her. He cleared his throat, and Hermione turned on her heels to face him, her eyes instantly re-watering at the sight of him.

“Hermione,” he began, his voice shaking with nerves. “I know that you don’t like surprises, so I hope this doesn’t come as one.”

Her lips quivered and she brought a trembling hand to her face to absorb the tears that were now falling freely down her face.

“I even spelled it out for you in the bookstore, so I hope you’ve had time to think of your answer.” She softly laughed and her eyes sparkled when he reached into his pocket and took a step toward her, lowering himself to one knee. With a shaky inhale to prepare, he asked the question. “Hermione Granger, will you marry me?”

Dream-Ron’s voice cracked like he was a teenager asking her to a dance, and he half expected her to look at him in confusion, and ask “what?”

But that’s not what happened. She was lost for words, and answered with her head which bobbed up and down as she ran toward him. He opened his arms to embrace her, but she halted.

“Wait!”

She dug into her bag, and pulled out the two books she had purposefully brought with her, Year of Wonders, and Emma. She handed them to Dream-Ron, who looked them over with an amused grin on his face, while she dove back into her bag. She pulled out a third— one that was not from the bookstore. Pride and Prejudice— her favorite book, the one she always has with her. It all made sense now.

Year of Wonders

Emma

Pride and Prejudice

Holding all three books, Dream-Ron smiled up at her. “Is… this a yes?”

“Well, seeing as I don’t have an S, it’s a ‘Yep’,” she said, before finally diving into his embrace as the books tumbled from his arms like basilisk fangs.

He had forgone all effort to keep from crying, and so had she. He momentarily pulled away from the hug to slide the ring onto her finger. It took a couple tries with their trembling hands, but then she fell heavier into his arms and he tightened his embrace. He lifted her up and carried her to an armchair, and they sat intertwined by the crackling fire, hugging, kissing, and crying into each other’s hair.

Ron half expected the room to shape-shift again, bringing them to the celebration at the Burrow where their families were waiting, but his dream never got that far. Their embrace in the armchairs began to feel even more real, and soon enough, the Gryffindor Common Room was fading to black.

xxxxx

Ron awoke in his own bed, his arms still wrapped solidly around Hermione. The sun was shining through the window, sending a beam of light to the floor where Crookshanks slept, belly up, as if he was trying to photosynthesize. Hermione began to shift restlessly in her sleep, groaning, as the light knocked on her eyelids like an unwelcome solicitor..

Reality set in, and it would have been easy to feel sad upon realizing his perfectly-executed proposal was all a dream. But instead, Ron just felt giddy with excitement. This could very well be the start of the best day of his life.

As long as everything went according to plan.

———————————————

“To Ron and Hermione!” exclaimed Arthur, reaching his champagne glass straight up into the air.

“To Ron and Hermione!” echoed a chorus of Weasleys, Grangers, and a Potter.

Glasses clinked, champagne splashed, and a beaming Ron slipped an arm around Hermione to pull her close to him. She tilted her head up to his, and he leaned in to capture her lips in a kiss. He felt her arms wrap around his middle and vaguely heard a few whistles in the background.

Ron and Hermione. It always had a ring to it.

No time had been wasted before preparing The Burrow for the celebration. CONGRATULATIONS was magically written on the wall in capitalized, tinsel-like lettering that flashed red and gold. Jean and Molly had prepared an impressive spread, which rivaled Hogwarts welcoming feasts. Hugo was already mentoring Arthur in the art of mixology, while Charlie and George eagerly volunteered to taste test each new cocktail. There was a cake shaped like an engagement ring, and it appeared that Ginny had gotten to it, because the words “about fucking time” were scribbled across in icing.

“So, Darling,” said Jean, as she refilled her champagne glass. “Aren’t you going to tell us how he proposed?”

“Yes, dear! Please tell everyone!” echoed Molly.

Hermione, who had just taken an unusually large bite of watermelon, replied with a look of surprise, as if for some reason she hadn’t expected that question. She slowly chewed, buying herself some time, and sent a panicked glance in Ron’s direction. A silent conversation followed.

How much do I tell them?

That’s up to you.

They squinted at each other for a few more moments, finalizing the details of their abridged story. Then Hermione turned back to her mom. “I’d love to tell that story.”

xxxxx

Earlier that day...

“Good morning,” were the first words Ron mumbled at the start of the best day of his life.

“Morning,” she muttered back.

He snaked his arm around her and pulled her close. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said, sending him a look of slight confusion at his eager confession of love. “I’ll be right back,” she added before hastily untangling himself from her arms, and bolting to the bathroom.

Ron groggily rolled out of bed to get dressed for the day. He opened the drawer of his nightstand to find the small velvet ring-box, and slipped it into his pocket before hobbling into the kitchen to make tea and start breakfast. He filled two mugs and set them aside to cool off while breakfast sizzled on the stove. His stomach twisted in a combination of hunger and nerves as he shuffled eggs around in the pan, planning out how he would introduce today’s activities. Luring her to the bookstore should be easy enough, but he hoped she was feeling up to the rest of the adventure.

He heard the shower starting upstairs, and turned the stove down to low. Remembering the colorful beginning of last night’s dream, he stumbled back into the bedroom, hoping Hermione wouldn’t mind a visitor. He presumptuously pulled off his shirt before cracking open the door to unleash a flume of steam into the bedroom.

Ron froze at the sight of Hermione. The shower was running in the background, but she was crouched on the tile floor, hovering her face over the toilet while she wretched. One hand wrangled her hair behind her head, while the other supported her weight on the floor.

Fuck.

“Hermione,” stammered Ron. “Are… are you ok?” He rushed to her side and knelt down, taking her hair from her hands. He cleared some loose strands away from her face while she gently shook her head.

“No,” she groaned. “Not okay—” her body interrupted her as she heaved again.

“Well, shit, Hermione,” he said softly, hoping his disappointment didn’t sour his words. Hermione rarely threw up. In fact, the last time he recalled had been during a panic attack in Australia before they found her parents. It suddenly occurred to him that this was the first time he’d held her hair on a bathroom floor while she vomited into the toilet. He felt a strange sense of pride, as if they had reached a new relationship milestone.

As his hopes for a smooth-sailing proposal started to fade, there was a part of him that considered asking her right there on the bathroom floor. It would have been the least romantic way to do it, and she’d probably hate him for it, but he doubted she’d say no. Something about seeing her in such a vulnerable state made his heart swell, and he wanted her to know it was that it was her humanity that he fell in love with.

Fuck, he’d marry her on a bathroom floor with vomit on her face, no question about it.

She grimaced and groaned, then leaned over the toilet yet again, and Ron gently held her close and rubbed her back as she suffered through the next wave of nausea.

He could maybe wait a little longer.

Eventually she stood up and wiped her face, revealing an expression of utter embarrassment. “Thank you,” she whispered, pointedly looking away from him. “I’m going to shower now.”

Ron scoured his mind for something to say that might make her feel less awkward. His randy brain landed on, “do you mind if I join you?”

Hermione paused, then laughed. “You want to shower with me?” she asked incredulously. “After that?” she added, motioning toward the bathroom floor.

“Well… always,” shrugged Ron.

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t exactly feel sexy right now.”

He wanted to tell her how wrong she was, and that his attraction to her was unconditional, but worried it would have come off insincere. “Ok. Breakfast is ready in the kitchen—”

“About that,” she interrupted. “It smells wonderful but…” she trailed off, motioning to the toilet where she’d left last night’s meal.

“Right,” said Ron. “Would porridge be better?”

“Yes.”

“Ok then. Porridge it is.”

“Thank you.”

Once in the kitchen, Ron scraped the remaining eggs and veggies into a leftovers box, and stored them in the refrigerator, before getting started on a gentler, blander breakfast.

To contrast the flavorless porridge he was making, Ron’s mind shifted into overdrive, trying to rework his proposal plan to consider Hermione’s nausea. Portkeys could upset even the strongest stomachs, and the Vanishing Cabinet was no walk in the park either. He had planned to floo to the Burrow from Grimmauld Place after returning together in the Vanishing Cabinet, and at the very least, they could always floo to the Burrow early…

Fuck.

Ron tried to keep an open mind about the day ahead. Maybe Hermione would be feeling better after her shower, and a trip to the bookstore would cheer her up. If that didn’t work, maybe his mum would be able to push the celebration back a day, and he could try tomorrow.

Everything was going to be fine.

He doubted that even more when Hermione never returned to the kitchen. Thinking he’d better go check on her, he left breakfast on the counter for the second time, and made his way back to the bedroom.

She had returned to the same place as before, crouched on the bathroom floor, head bowed over the toilet. She looked pale and sullen, and hadn’t bothered to change into day clothes or dry her hair after her shower. Her sopping wet hair stuck firmly to her towel which seemed to absorb enough water to save their neglected houseplants and she sat on the tile with the heaviness of a bag of flour.

“Hermione?” Ron asked tenderly.

She shook her head, and covered her face with her hands.

“You’re not feeling any better,” he said.

Hermione shrugged.

Ron willed himself to emotionally detach from the remaining images of Hermione in a bookstore, the Room of Requirement, and the Burrow and sat down next to her. With a closer look at her face he realized she was crying.

Fuck.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, as he slipped an arm around her. “I’m worried about you. You’re never sick.”

She turned into him and buried her face in his chest, mumbling something incoherent.

“Sorry?” he said, pulling her close to him so he could hear her better.

Lifting her face from his chest for a brief moment, she said, “We haven’t been spending mornings together.”

She was right, their schedules had never lined up enough to enjoy waking up at the same time, and as of late that was even more true. “Hermione,” he whispered. “Has this been happening a lot?”

Hermione nodded and pressed her face back into his chest. She spoke so softly against his shirt that he might not have heard her, but the words demanded his attention. “Ron, I’m pregnant.”

The images that had been dancing in Ron’s mind were still there— Hermione gathering books, searching for the Vanishing Cabinet at Grimmauld Place, wandering through Ron’s memories, and embracing him by the fire in the common room. It almost felt that his mind was expanding so that those images took up less and less space, because they weren’t actually real, and this was.

In all that extra space, his mind cycled through visions of his future, playing memories yet to be made. For the first time since he had decided to ask her to marry him, proposing felt like a simple task because he saw far beyond that now. He wanted to ask her, but then he wanted to hold her hair if she got sick again. He wanted to run out at weird hours of the night to buy the food she craved. He wanted to go to that bookstore, not so she could partake in his scavenger hunt, but so he could buy all the books about pregnancy and parenting.

“Are you serious?” were the words that tumbled out of his mouth, dripping with pure excitement. She nodded affirmatively, and an involuntary smile spread across his face.  He reached a hand to her cheek to wipe away a tear, before landing his lips on her forehead.

He felt her grinning under his hand, seemingly pleased at his positive reaction. Her excitement gave her next question a melody. “Well...what do you want to do?” She asked it confidently, like she already knew what he would say.

But she didn't know.

“I want to marry you,” he stated, like it was the most obvious question in the world.

She pulled away and squinted skeptically at him as if he might be joking, but there was nothing but sincerity in his eyes.

He then reached into his pocket, pulled out the ring box, and popped it open to reveal a beautiful solitaire ring— simple, understated, yet timeless, just like Hermione.  Then a smile enveloped her face and she didn’t need to say anything at all. She leaned into his embrace, and he felt tears leaking from his eyes, elation on his face, and nothing but happiness.

They sat there intertwined and crying for some time until he realized she’d never actually answered. “So… will you?”

She responded wordlessly, with an enthusiastic nod against his chest, and he slipped the ring onto her finger.

It really felt like the rest of the world had disappeared and they were alone, the only people that mattered. When reality started to filter back, Ron had to chuckle at the sudden realization of what room they were in. It was almost funny how much effort he had put into planning out the perfect day, only to propose to Hermione on a bathroom floor.

“I had a better plan, you know,” he said finally. “To ask you.”

She shook her head and mumbled into his chest. “This was perfect.”

Maybe it was. Their friendship began in a bathroom, as did their relationship nearly eight years later, so it was quite fitting that he proposed in one too. He’d have to save his scavenger hunt for another occasion, but that was ok. He had a lifetime of opportunities ahead.

To outsiders, it might not be the most romantic story. Luckily, Ron didn’t give a fuck what outsiders thought, because he had Hermione.

xxxxx

“We had just woken up and were getting ready for the day. We got to talking, and I asked him what he wanted to do,” she said, wiping a stray tear from her face. “He said ‘I want to marry you.’ I... didn’t see it coming at all.”

Ron was thankful for the fact that his lopsided grin was pretty much stuck to his face, otherwise he might have winced. As he had predicted, Hermione had left out the most important piece of information. Without it, it all sounded rather unremarkable.

“Out of the blue?” asked Molly, her eyebrows raised.

In his peripheral vision, Ron saw Harry and Ginny exchange a knowing glance.

“Out of the blue.” said Hermione, before taking another big bite of her watermelon slice.

“I think that’s so romantic!” Jean had one hand resting on her heart, and her eyes sparkled with tears. “Ron, did you plan it like that?”

Ron inhaled sharply at the sound of his name. “Um, well no, actually,” he said, sending a reassuring look toward Hermione. “I had something more elaborate planned.”

“Then what happened?”

Ron grinned as he watched Hermione show off her ring to Ginny and Angelina who had appeared at her shoulder. “I just couldn’t wait any longer.”

Molly and Jean’s soft smiles and sparkling eyes suggested they were satisfied by that answer.

The celebrations continued into the evening hours, and sometime after dinner, Ron appeared at Hugo and Arthur’s makeshift bar to find that Hugo already had a drink waiting for him.

“Congratulations again, son!” said Arthur, before engulfing him in another hug.

“Thanks Dad,” he said.

“I’m going to check on my future daughter-in-law!” he said excitedly. “I’ll see if she wants a drink.”

Arthur scurried away, leaving Ron alone with Hugo.

“I already made you an Alexander,” Hugo said, sliding the drink across the table to Ron. “Made one for Hermione too.”

Ron felt his ears turning crimson, as if he’d been caught in a lie. Now was not the time to inform Hugo why his daughter wasn’t drinking. He would just have to drink for two today.

However, Hugo was quite observant. In a whisper he added, “there’s no alcohol in hers.”

Ron met Hugo’s unflinching gaze, and the two men stared at each other for an uncomfortable pause. The tension finally broke when Hugo smiled, and Ron felt a wave of relief. “How did you know?”

Hugo chuckled. “I’ve never seen her eat watermelon.” He took a dramatic swig of his own drink before continuing. “But Jean couldn’t get enough of it when she was pregnant with Hermione.”

Ron glanced over at Hermione, who was working her way through yet another slice of watermelon. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen her eating it, but was drawing a blank.

Hugo brought him out of his memories. “I guess our conversation about contraception was for shit.”

If Ron had just met Hugo, he might have put more effort into formulating a diplomatic answer. He might have interpreted his pursed lips as stern disapproval rather than a weak attempt to prevent himself from laughing at his own joke. He definitely would not have burst out laughing and answered the way he did.

“Total shit.”

Encouraged by a few cocktails, Hugo grinned widely and unleashed a hearty laugh. Then he did something surprising. He put down his glass, circled the table, and opened his arms to embrace Ron.

“I’m happy for you, son,” he said softly. “I hope you’re happy too.”

Ron saw no reason to hold back his tears, so he didn’t. He had always assumed his future father-in-law would consider Ron's happiness simply an extension of his daughter’s, but Hugo proved him wrong. This was a man who cared about him deeply, as if he was his own son and Ron could feel it. “I’ve never been happier.”

Hugo pulled him to arms length. Ron noticed a tear on his cheek and felt another wave of connection with the man. With a pat on his shoulder, he turned back to the bar and grabbed both glasses. “Now go have a drink. Have some fun,” he said before adding with a wink, “while you can.”

Ron found Hermione discussing wedding plans in the living room with Ginny and Angelina, and slid into a seat on the armrest of her chair. He pressed the glass into her hand and leaned down to whisper in her ear, “non-alcoholic.”

She looked up at him and mouthed, thank you, before leaning against him while he slipped his arm around her.

Ginny was smiling at them as more Weasleys piled into the living room. Seeing Ron and Hermione together ignited another toast from the group. “To Ron and Hermione.”

“To Ron and Hermione!” echoed the crowd.

Plus one.

He’d never been more excited about anything in his life, and it was clearly evident by his expression. When she clicked her glass against his and looked him right in the eyes, he saw his own elation reflecting back at him, and knew she felt the same way. They had come so far, but their story was only just beginning.

[writing-with-l]

Sunday Romance: Save The Last Dance For Me

@sunday-romance

Word Count: 716

 The ball was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, an astounding success. It seemed like every notable member of high society was in attendance. Wealthy young ladies in richly-coloured elaborate gowns and heavy intricate jewellery spun round the room on the arms of dashing gentlemen in dark velvet suits. A long buffet table bedecked with cakes, sweets, and biscuits lined the far wall. Strings of flowers stretched from the rafters and flecks of multicoloured glitter seemed to cover everything. 

 Unfortunately, Cordelia de Winter was in no position to enjoy any of it, because her view was blocked by the staunch, heavy frame of Richard Carberry, Duke of Westwood. 

 Cordelia's eyes flickered back and forth across the room, searching desperately for some form of escape route, but she was unable to find anything of the sort. It was no use. The person she was looking for was not there. With a sigh of resignation, she steeled herself and resolved to face the man in front of her. 

 "I should be much pleased if you would join me on the dance floor, Miss de Winter," Carberry said, for what felt like the tenth time that evening. 

 His beady eyes fixed upon her, almost bulging out of his wrinkled face as it leered forwards. It made Cordelia want to vomit, but instead she plastered on a sickly sweet smile. 

 "I am truly sorry," she said, as emphatically as she could manage, "But I haven’t a space left on my dance card." She waved the object in question in front of his face, briefly enough that he couldn't possibly read it. 

 Carberry made as if to protest, a faint scowl marring his already unattractive features. Before he could utter a word, however, a deep voice from behind Cordelia made him pause. 

 "What an awful shame." 

 Cordelia started, turning quickly around - and there he was, the very man she had been searching for all evening: Edward Mansfield. The sight of him in his deep blue suit, his dark hair combed neatly into place, a light stubble across his jaw, sent Cordelia's heart racing faster than usual. 

 Edward's green eyes narrowed with distaste as he stared at the old duke. "Not to worry, Carberry," he said easily, but there was something icy in his tone, "There's plenty of other ladies around the hall this evening. Perhaps even some closer to your own age, hmm?" 

 Carberry sputtered indignantly, but Edward's sharp gaze was enough to send anyone shrinking back. He muttered something under his breath, then skulked away into the crowd. 

 Edward turned his gaze to Cordelia, the ice immediately replaced by a gentle warmth. 

 A flush darkened Cordelia's cheeks. "I had that under control, you know!" she snapped, suddenly defensive. 

 "You did," Edward agreed. "But I rather think your words are too valuable to be wasted on a swine like Carberry." 

 Cordelia opened her mouth, then closed it again. All evening her eyes had searched for him in the crowd but, now that he was actually standing before her, she found that she had no idea what to do or say. The fear of embarrassing herself weighed heavily on her mind. She fidgeted anxiously, looking back to the dance floor. 

 "I should like to get back out there this evening," she said absently, thumbing the hem of her silken sleeve. 

 Edward raised an eyebrow. "Didn't I just hear you tell old Carberry that you haven't a space left on your dance card?" 

 Cordelia shrugged. "I lied," she said easily. She hesitated, a pink blush creeping up her cheeks. "I was saving it for you." 

 Edward's eyes widened just a fraction. For a moment, Cordelia feared she had made a terrible fool of herself. Then, the corners of his mouth turned up into a smile. 

 "Well," he said, "I would have to be an idiot to waste the opportunity for such an honour." 

 A strange feeling soared through Cordelia's heart as he offered her his hand, an odd mix of relief, excitement, and something else, something that made warmth bloom in her chest. After a half-second's hesitation, she slipped her gloved hand into his grasp. She looked up into his sparkling green eyes and smiled along with him. With butterflies in her stomach, she allowed him to lead her to the dance floor.

[wewantnothing2]

"If there were an award for the most audacious product to come out of Cincinnati, the Jayne Mansfield Hot Water Bottle would be a heavy favorite—and in a city home to P&G and Kenner Toys, this is no small feat. Humorous yet wink-wink sexy, the bottle hit the market in 1957 just as the busty Mansfield was establishing herself as America’s No. 1 Blonde Bombshell. Created by Don Poynter for his Poynter Products company, the designer, is still in town and pitching new ideas. The Mansfield figure—in a pin-up pose with hands behind her neck and wearing a painted-on black bikini—is made of “blushing” pink–colored plastic with a screw-on “hat” cap and measures close to two feet head-to-foot. Poynter’s copyright is on the bottom of the left foot. He initially made a plaster model based on photos sent by Mansfield, but eventually traveled to her L.A. home to re-sculpt, where she modeled for it. “I did it for a week,” Poynter says. “I could have done it in two days, but why rush?” Priced at just under $10, Poynter says about 400,000 were sold before Mansfield died in a 1967 auto accident. Today, it’s a collector’s item. “People write me letters because my name is on it and ask, ‘My grandfather died and we found this doll. What is it?’ ” -Cincinnati Magazine, May 2016

[splashawaypoolspatx]

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A homeowner who desires to build a swimming pool that is unique and functional without marring the natural beauty of the place is free to ask for custom pools in Glen Heights and Mansfield, TX. Everything from the material to design and color and extra features are tailor-made for the customer.

[contractors892]

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[ainsleys-interests]

J.G. Ballard

The Atrocity Exhibition with an Preface by William Burroughs

A Flamingo Modern Classic edition published 2001 Copyright © J G Ballard 1993

This revised, expanded, annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition first published in a large format in Great Britain by Flamingo, 1993

A revised, expanded, annotated and illustrated edition first published in the USA by Re/Search, 1990 Copyright © J G Ballard 1990

The original edition first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1970, and first published in paperback by Panther Books, 1972

Copyright © J G Ballard 1969

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Preface by William S. Burroughs

1 The Atrocity Exhibition

2 The University of Death

3 The Assassination Weapon

4 You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe

5 Notes towards a Mental Breakdown

6 The Great American Nude

7 The Summer Cannibals

8 Tolerances of the Human Face

9 You and Me and the Continuum

10 Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy

11 Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.

12 Crash!

13 The Generations of America

14 Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

15 The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race

APPENDIX:

Princess Margaret’s Face Lift

Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty

About the Author

From the reviews of The Atrocity Exhibition: Also by J.G. Ballard

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Most of the film stars and political figures who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition are still with us, in memory if not in person - John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Together they helped to form the culture of celebrity that played such a large role in the 1960s, when I wrote The Atrocity Exhibition.

Other figures, though crucially important to the decades that followed, have begun to sink below the horizon. How many of us remember Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the Kennedy assassination in Dallas? Or Sirhan Sirhan, who murdered Robert Kennedy? At the end of each chapter I have provided a few notes that identify these lesser characters and set out the general background to the book.

Readers who find themselves daunted by the unfamiliar narrative structure of The Atrocity Exhibition - far simpler than it seems at first glance - might try a different approach. Rather than start at the beginning of each chapter, as in a conventional novel, simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye. If the ideas or images seem interesting, scan the nearby paragraphs for anything that resonates in an intriguing way. Fairly soon, I hope, the fog will clear, and the underlying narrative will reveal itself. In effect, you will be reading the book in the way it was written.

J.G. Ballard, 2001

PREFACE BY WILLIAM BURROUGHS

The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm.) The book opens: ‘A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition . . . was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.’

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments: ‘In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child . . . ’ The human body becomes landscape: ‘A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune . . . Looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest . . . ’ This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art - literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image, this is literally an explosive book. The human image explodes into rocks and stones and trees: ‘The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape . . . clinker-like rock towers suspended above the silent swamp. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Time makes no concessions.’

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image: ‘Each afternoon in the deserted cinema: the latent sexual content of automobile crashes . . . James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus . . . Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living and later used one or the other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner.’

James Dean kept a hangman’s noose dangling in his living room and put it around his neck to pose for news pictures. A painter named Milton, who painted a sexy picture entitled ‘The Death of James Dean,’ subsequently committed suicide. This book stirs sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn. ‘What will follow is the psychopathology of sex relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration without any trace of guilt of every aspect of sexual psychopathology.’

Immensely magnified portion of James Dean subsequently committed suicide. Conception content relates to sexual depths of the hardest minds. Eichmann in drag in a waste lot of wrecked porous rock.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION

Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition - to which the patients themselves were not invited - was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses. As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office. They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role. Primly she buttoned her white coat as Dr Nathan approached, holding his gold-tipped cigarette to one nostril. ‘Ah, Dr Austin . . . What do you think of them? I see there’s War in Hell.’

Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown. The noise from the cine-films of induced psychoses rose from the lecture theatre below Travis’s office. Keeping his back to the window behind his desk, he assembled the terminal documents he had collected with so much effort during the previous months: (1) Spectro-heliogram of the sun; (2) Front elevation of balcony units, Hilton Hotel, London; (3) Transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite; (4) ‘Chronograms,’ by E. J. Marey; (5) Photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression, Egypt; (6) Reproduction of Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’; (7) Fusing sequences for ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Boy’, Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-Bombs. When he had finished Travis turned to the window. As usual, the white Pontiac had found a place in the crowded parking lot directly below him. The two occupants watched him through the tinted windshield.

Internal Landscapes. Controlling the tremor in his left hand, Travis studied the thin-shouldered man sitting opposite him. Through the transom the light from the empty corridor shone into the darkened office. His face was partly hidden by the peak of his flying cap, but Travis recognized the bruised features of the bomber pilot whose photographs, torn from the pages of Newsweek and Paris-Match, had been strewn around the bedroom of the shabby hotel in Earls Court. His eyes stared at Travis, their focus sustained only by a continuous effort. For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than those provided by his own character and musculature. Why had he come to the hospital, seeking out Travis among the thirty physicians? Travis had tried to speak to him, but the tall man made no reply, standing by the instrument cabinet like a tattered mannequin. His immature but at the same time aged face seemed as rigid as a plaster mask. For months Travis had seen his solitary figure, shoulders hunched inside the flying jacket, in more and more newsreels, as an extra in war films, and then as a patient in an elegant ophthalmic film on nystagmus - the series of giant geometric models, like sections of abstract landscapes, had made him uneasily aware that their long-delayed confrontation would soon take place.

The Weapons Range. Travis stopped the car at the end of the lane. In the sunlight he could see the remains of the outer perimeter fence, and beyond this a rusting quonset and the iron-stained roofs of the bunkers. He crossed the ditch and walked towards the fence, within five minutes found an opening. A disused runway moved through the grass. Partly concealed by the sunlight, the camouflage patterns across the complex of towers and bunkers four hundred yards away

revealed half-familiar contours - the model of a face, a posture, a neural interval. A unique event would take place here. Without thinking, Travis murmured, ‘Elizabeth Taylor.’ Abruptly there was a blare of sound above the trees.

Dissociation: Who Laughed at Nagasaki? Travis ran across the broken concrete to the perimeter fence. The helicopter plunged towards him, engine roaring through the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and paper. Twenty yards from the fence Travis stumbled among the coils of barbed wire. The helicopter was banking sharply, the pilot crouched over the controls. As Travis ran forward the shadows of the diving machine flickered around him like cryptic ideograms. Then the craft pulled away and flew off across the bunkers. When Travis reached the car, holding the torn knee of his trousers, he saw the young woman in the white dress walking down the lane. Her disfigured face looked back at him with indulgent eyes. Travis started to call to her, but stopped himself. Exhausted, he vomited across the roof of the car.

Serial Deaths. During this period, as he sat in the rear seat of the Pontiac, Travis was preoccupied by his separation from the normal tokens of life he had accepted for so long. His wife, the patients at the hospital (resistance agents in the ‘world war’ he hoped to launch), his undecided affair with Catherine Austin - these became as fragmentary as the faces of Elizabeth Taylor and Sigmund Freud on the advertising billboards, as unreal as the war the film companies had restarted in Vietnam. As he moved deeper into his own psychosis, whose onset he had recognized during his year at the hospital, he welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell. The pale flares from the petrochemical plants illuminated the wet cobbles. No one would meet them there. His two companions, the bomber pilot at the wheel in the faded flying suit and the beautiful young woman with radiation burns, never spoke to him. Now and then the young woman would look at him with a faint smile on her deformed mouth. Deliberately, Travis made no response, hesitant to commit himself into her hands. Who were they, these strange twins - couriers from his own unconscious? For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.

Casualties Union. At the young woman’s suggestion, Travis joined the C. U., and with a group of thirty housewives practised the simulation of wounds. Later they would tour with Red Cross demonstration teams. Massive cerebral damage and abdominal bleeding in automobile accidents could be imitated within half an hour, aided by the application of suitable coloured resins. Convincing radiation burns required careful preparation, and might involve some three to four hours of makeup. Death, by contrast, was a matter of lying prone. Later, in the apartment they had taken overlooking the zoo, Travis washed the wounds from his hands and face. This curious pantomime, overlaid by the summer evening stench of the animals, seemed performed solely to pacify his two companions. In the bathroom mirror he could see the tall figure of the pilot, his slim face with its lost eyes hidden below the peaked cap, and the young woman in the white dress watching him from the lounge. Her intelligent face, like that of a student, occasionally showed a nervous reflex of hostility. Already Travis found it difficult not to think of her continuously. When would she speak to him? Perhaps, like himself, she realized that his instructions would come from other levels?

Pirate Radio. There were a number of secret transmissions to which Travis listened: (1) medullary: images of dunes and craters, pools of ash that contained the terraced faces of Freud,

Eatherly, and Garbo; (2) thoracic: the rusting shells of U-boats beached in the cove at Tsingtao, near the ruined German forts where the Chinese guides smeared bloody handprints on the caisson walls; (3) sacral: V.J.-Day, the bodies of Japanese troops in the paddy fields at night. The next day, as he walked back to Shanghai, the peasants were planting rice among the swaying legs. Memories of others than himself, together these messages moved to some kind of focus. The dead face of the bomber pilot hovered by the door, the projection of World War III’s unknown soldier. His presence exhausted Travis.

Marey’s Chronograms. Dr Nathan passed the illustration across his desk to Margaret Travis. ‘Marey’s Chronograms are multiple-exposure photographs in which the element of time is visible - the walking human figure, for example, is represented as a series of dune-like lumps.’ Dr Nathan accepted a cigarette from Catherine Austin, who had sauntered forward from the incubator at the rear of the office. Ignoring her quizzical eye, he continued, ‘Your husband’s brilliant feat was to reverse the process. Using a series of photographs of the most commonplace objects - this office, let us say, a panorama of New York skyscrapers, the naked body of a woman, the face of a catatonic patient - he treated them as if they already were chronograms and extracted the element of time.’ Dr Nathan lit his cigarette with care. ‘The results were extraordinary. A very different world was revealed. The familiar surroundings of our lives, even our smallest gestures, were seen to have totally altered meanings. As for the reclining figure of a film star, or this hospital . . . ’

‘Was my husband a doctor, or a patient?’ Dr Nathan nodded sagely, glancing over his fingertips at Catherine Austin. What had Travis seen in those time-filled eyes? ‘Mrs Travis, I’m not sure the question is valid any longer. These matters involve a relativity of a very different kind. What we are concerned with now are the implications - in particular, the complex of ideas and events represented by World War III. Not the political and military possibility, but the inner identity of such a notion. For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display, but for your husband it has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space. Dr Austin may disagree, but it seems to me that his intention is to start World War III, though not, of course, in the usual sense of the term. The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’

Zoom Lens. Dr Nathan stopped. Reluctantly, his eyes turned across the room to the portrait camera mounted on its tripod by the consulting couch. How could he explain to this sensitive and elusive woman that her own body, with its endlessly familiar geometry, its landscapes of touch and feeling, was their only defence against her husband’s all-too-plain intentions? Above all, how could he invite her to pose for what she would no doubt regard as a set of obscene photographs?

The Skin Area. After their meeting, at the exhibition of war wounds at the Royal Society of Medicine’s conference hall, Travis and Catherine Austin returned to the apartment overlooking the zoo. In the lift Travis avoided her hands as she tried to embrace him. He led her into the bedroom. Mouth pursed, she watched as he showed her the set of Enneper’s models. ‘What are they?’ She touched the interlocking cubes and cones, mathematical models of pseudo-space. ‘Fusing sequences, Catherine - for a doomsday weapon.’ In the postures they assumed, in the contours of thigh and thorax, Travis explored the geometry and volumetric time of the bedroom, and later of the curvilinear roof of the Festival Hall, the jutting balconies of the London Hilton, and lastly of the abandoned weapons range. Here the circular target areas became identified in

Travis’s mind with the concealed breasts of the young woman with radiation burns. Searching for her, he and Catherine Austin drove around the darkening countryside, lost among the labyrinth of billboards. The faces of Sigmund Freud and Jeanne Moreau presided over their last bitter hours.

Neoplasm. Later, escaping from Catherine Austin, and from the forbidding figure of the bomber pilot, who now watched him from the roof of the lion house, Travis took refuge in a small suburban house among the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. He sat in the empty sitting-room overlooking the shabby garden. From the white bungalow beyond the clapboard fence his middle-aged neighbour dying of cancer watched him through the long afternoons. Her handsome face, veiled by the laced curtains, resembled that of a skull. All day she would pace around the small bedroom. At the end of the second month, when the doctor’s visits became more frequent, she undressed by the window, exposing her emaciated body through the veiled curtains. Each day, as he watched from the cubular room, he saw different aspects of her eroded body, the black breasts reminding him of the eyes of the bomber pilot, the abdominal scars like the radiation burns of the young woman. After her death he followed the funeral cars among the reservoirs in the white Pontiac.

The Lost Symmetry of the Blastosphere.‘This reluctance to accept the fact of his own consciousness,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘may reflect certain positional difficulties in the immediate context of time and space. The right-angle spiral of a stairwell may remind him of similar biases within the chemistry of the biological kingdom. This can be carried to remarkable lengths - for example, the jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Much of Travis’s thought concerns what he terms “the lost symmetry of the blastosphere” - the primitive precursor of the embryo that is the last structure to preserve perfect symmetry in all planes. It occurred to Travis that our own bodies may conceal the rudiments of a symmetry not only about the vertical axis but also the horizontal. One recalls Goethe’s notion that the skull is formed of modified vertebrae - similarly, the bones of the pelvis may constitute the remains of a lost sacral skull. The resemblance between histologies of lung and kidney has long been noted. Other correspondences of respiratory and urino-genital function come to mind, enshrined both in popular mythology (the supposed equivalence in size of nose and penis) and psychoanalytic symbolism (the “eyes” are a common code for the testicles). In conclusion, it seems that Travis’s extreme sensitivity to the volumes and geometry of the world around him, and their immediate translation into psychological terms, may reflect a belated attempt to return to a symmetrical world, one that will recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere, and the acceptance of the “Mythology of the Amniotic Return”. In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator . . . ’

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. Margaret Travis paused in the empty foyer of the cinema, looking at the photographs in the display frames. In the dim light beyond the curtains she saw the dark- suited figure of Captain Webster, the muffled velvet veiling his handsome eyes. The last few weeks had been a nightmare - Webster with his long-range camera and obscene questions. He seemed to take a certain sardonic pleasure in compiling this one-man Kinsey Report on her . . . positions, planes, where and when Travis placed his hands on her body - why didn’t he ask Catherine Austin? As for wanting to magnify the photographs and paste them up on enormous billboards, ostensibly to save her from Travis . . . She glanced at the stills in the display frames, of this elegant and poetic film in which Cocteau had brought together all the myths of his own journey of return. On an impulse, to annoy Webster, she stepped through the side exit and walked

past a small yard of cars with numbered windshields. Perhaps she would make her descent here. Eurydice in a used car lot?

The Concentration City. In the night air they passed the shells of concrete towers, blockhouses half buried in rubble, giant conduits filled with tyres, overhead causeways crossing broken roads. Travis followed the bomber pilot and the young woman along the faded gravel. They walked across the foundation of a guard-house into the weapons range. The concrete aisles stretched into the darkness across the airfield. In the suburbs of Hell Travis walked in the flaring light of the petrochemical plants. The ruins of abandoned cinemas stood at the street corners, faded billboards facing them across the empty streets. In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac. He wandered through the deserted suburbs. The crashed bombers lay under the trees, grass growing through their wings. The bomber pilot helped the young woman into one of the cockpits. Travis began to mark out a circle on the concrete target area.

How Garbo Died.‘The film is a unique document,’ Webster explained, as he led Catherine Austin into the basement cinema. ‘At first sight it seems to be a strange newsreel about the latest tableau sculptures - there are a series of plaster casts of film stars and politicians in bizarre poses - how they were made we can’t find out, they seem to have been cast from the living models, LBJ and Mrs Johnson, Burton and the Taylor actress, there’s even one of Garbo dying. We were called in when the film was found.’ He signalled to the projectionist. ‘One of the casts is of Margaret Travis - I won’t describe it, but you’ll see why we’re worried. Incidentally, a touring version of Kienholz’s “Dodge 38” was seen travelling at speed on a motorway yesterday, a wrecked white car with the plastic dummies of a World War III pilot and a girl with facial burns making love among a refuse of bubblegum war cards and oral contraceptive wallets.’

War-Zone D. On his way across the car park Dr Nathan stopped and shielded his eyes from the sun. During the past week a series of enormous signs had been built along the roads surrounding the hospital, almost walling it in from the rest of the world. A group of workmen on a scaffolding truck were pasting up the last of the displays, a hundred-foot-long panel that appeared to represent a section of a sand-dune. Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that in fact it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognized other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist would have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern. At least five hundred of the signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman, terraced here into a quantified sand-sea. A helicopter soared overhead, its pilot supervising the work of the men on the track. Its down-draught ripped away some of the paper panels. They floated across the road, an eddying smile plastered against the radiator grille of a parked car.

The Atrocity Exhibition. Entering the exhibition, Travis sees the atrocities of Vietnam and the Congo mimetized in the ‘alternate’ death of Elizabeth Taylor; he tends the dying film star, eroticizing her punctured bronchus in the over-ventilated verandas of the London Hilton; he dreams of Max Ernst, superior of the birds; ‘Europe after the Rain’; the human race - Caliban asleep across a mirror smeared with vomit.

The Danger Area. Webster ran through the dim light after Margaret Travis. He caught her by the entrance to the main camera bunker, where the cheekbones of an enormous face had been painted in faded Technicolor across the rust-stained concrete. ‘For God’s sake - ’ She looked down at his strong wrist against her breast, then wrenched herself away. ‘Mrs Travis! Why do you think

we’ve taken all these photographs?’ Webster held the torn lapel of his suit, then pointed to a tableau figure in the uniform of a Chinese infantryman standing at the end of the conduit. ‘The place is crawling with the things - you’ll never find him.’ As he spoke a searchlight in the centre of the airfield lit up the target areas, outlining the rigid figures of the mannequins.

The Enormous Face. Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital - the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. Yet Margaret Travis’s role was ambiguous. In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape. Dr Nathan crossed an exposed causeway to the next bunker. He leaned against the dark décolleté. When the searchlight flared between the blockhouses he put on his shoe. ‘No . . . ’ He was hobbling towards the airfield when the explosion lit up the evening air.

The Exploding Madonna. For Travis, the ascension of his wife’s body above the target area, exploding madonna of the weapons range, was a celebration of the intervals through which he perceived the surrounding continuum of time and space. Here she became one with the madonnas of the billboards and the ophthalmic films, the Venus of the magazine cuttings whose postures celebrated his own search through the suburbs of Hell.

Departure. The next morning, Travis wandered along the gunnery aisles. On the bunkers the painted figure of the screen actress mediated all time and space to him through her body. As he searched among the tyres and coils of barbed wire he saw the helicopter rising into the sky, the bomber pilot at the controls. It made a leftward turn and flew off towards the horizon. Half an hour later the young woman drove away in the white Pontiac. Travis watched them leave without regret. When they had gone the corpses of Dr Nathan, Webster, and Catherine Austin formed a small tableau by the bunkers.

A Terminal Posture. Lying on the worn concrete of the gunnery aisles, he assumed the postures of the film actress, assuaging his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her body.

<Annotations>

Apocalypse.

‘Eniwetok and Luna Park’ may seem a strange pairing, the H-bomb test site in the Marshall Islands with the Paris fun-fair loved by the surrealists. But the endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything) did have a carnival air, a media phenomenon which Stanley Kubrick caught perfectly at the end of Dr Strangelove. I imagine my mental patients conflating Freud and Liz Taylor in their Warhol-like efforts, unerringly homing in on the first signs of their doctor’s nervous breakdown. The Atrocity Exhibition’s original dedication should have been ‘To the Insane’. I owe them everything.

Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown.

The many lists in The Atrocity Exhibition were produced by free association, which accounts for the repetition but, I hope, makes more sense of them.

‘Garden Airplane Traps.’ ‘Voracious gardens in turn devoured by a vegetation that springs from the debris of trapped airplanes.’ Max Ernst, Informal Life. The nightmare of a grounded pilot.

Why a white Pontiac? A British pop-star of the 1960s, Dickie Valentine, drove his daughter in a white Pontiac to the same school that my own children attended near the film studios at Shepperton. The car had a powerful iconic presence, emerging from all those American movies into the tranquil TV suburbs. Soon after, Valentine died in a car accident. By chance a telescoped Pontiac starred in my 1969 exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London.

The Weapons Range.

Weapons ranges have a special magic, all that destructive technology concentrated on the production of nothing, the closest we can get to certain obsessional states of mind. Even more strange are the bunkers of the Nazi Atlantic Wall, most of which are still standing, and are far larger than one expects. Space-age cathedrals, they threaten the surrounding landscape like lines of Teutonic knights, and are examples of cryptic architecture, where form no longer reveals function. They seem to contain the codes of some mysterious mental process. At Utah Beach, the most deserted stretch of the Normandy coast, they stare out over the washed sand, older than the planet. On visits with my agent and his wife, I used to photograph them compulsively.

Serial Deaths.

‘The war the film companies had restarted in Vietnam.’ Written in 1966, this was a prophetic leap in the dark. To date no Vietnam movie has been shot on the original battlegrounds, but I’m confident it will happen, and might even get out of control. Spielberg returned to Shanghai for Empire of the Sun, an eerie sensation for me - even more so were the scenes shot near Shepperton, using extras recruited from among my neighbours, many of whom have part-time jobs at the studios. I can almost believe that I came to Shepperton thirty years ago knowing unconsciously that one day I would write a novel about my wartime experiences in Shanghai, and that it might well be filmed in these studios. Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

Casualties Union.

The so-called Casualties Union existed in London in the 1960s, probably inspired by the nuclear disarmament movement. Putting on the cosmetic wounds was a messy business, and a recruitment leaflet reassured volunteers: ‘Death is simply a matter of lying prone.’

Pirate Radio.

Tsingtao, on the north China coast near Peking, was a German naval base during World War I, and later became a popular beach resort where I spent the summers in the 1930s. As a seven-year-old I was deeply impressed by the huge blockhouses and the maze of concrete tunnels where the tourist guides pointed to the bloody handprints of (they claimed) wounded German gunners driven mad by the British naval bombardment. For some reason these were far more moving than the dead Chinese soldiers in the battlegrounds around Shanghai which I visited with my parents, though they were sad enough.

Marey’s Chronograms.

‘An individual is a four-dimensional object of greatly elongated form; in ordinary language we say that he has considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space.’ Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation.

The Lost Symmetry of the Blastosphere.

Elizabeth Taylor was staying at the Hilton during the shooting of Cleopatra, when she contracted pneumonia and was given a tracheotomy. The Hilton’s balconies remind Travis of the actress’s lost gill-slits (which we all develop embryonically as we briefly recapitulate our biological past).

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot.

‘Where and when Travis placed his hands on her body.’ The poet Paul Eluard, describing his wife Gala, who later left him to marry Dali, said: ‘Her body is the shape of my hands.’

How Garbo Died.

The sculptor George Segal has made a number of plaster casts of prominent art patrons, mostly New York bankers and their wives. Frozen in time, these middle-aged men and women have a remarkable poignancy, figures from some future Pompeii.

The Enormous Face.

Elizabeth Taylor, the last of the old-style Hollywood actresses, has retained her hold on the popular imagination in the two decades since this piece was written, a quality she shares (no thanks to myself ) with almost all the public figures in this

book - Marilyn Monroe, Reagan, Jackie Kennedy among others. A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever. The public dream of Hollywood for the first time merged with the private imagination of the hyper-stimulated 60s TV viewer. People have sometimes asked me to do a follow-up to The Atrocity Exhibition, but our perception of the famous has changed - I can’t imagine writing about Meryl Streep or Princess Di, and Margaret Thatcher’s undoubted mystery seems to reflect design faults in her own self- constructed persona. One can mechanically spin sexual fantasies around all three, but the imagination soon flags. Unlike Taylor, they radiate no light.

A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. Warhol’s screen-prints show the process at work. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while his day-glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book.

CHAPTER TWO

THE UNIVERSITY OF DEATH

The Conceptual Death. By now these seminars had become a daily inquisition into Talbot’s growing distress and uncertainty. A disturbing aspect was the conscious complicity of the class in his long anticipated breakdown. Dr Nathan paused in the doorway of the lecture theatre, debating whether to end this unique but unsavoury experiment. The students waited as Talbot stared at the photographs of himself arranged in sequence on the blackboard, his attention distracted by the elegant but severe figure of Catherine Austin watching from the empty seats beside the film projector. The simulated newsreels of auto-crashes and Vietnam atrocities (an apt commentary on her own destructive sexuality) illustrated the scenario of World War III on which the students were ostensibly engaged. However, as Dr Nathan realized, its real focus lay elsewhere. An unexpected figure now dominated the climax of the scenario. Using the identity of their own lecturer, the students had devised the first conceptual death.

Auto-erotic. As he rested in Catherine Austin’s bedroom, Talbot listened to the helicopters flying along the motorway from the airport. Symbols in a machine apocalypse, they seeded the cores of unknown memories in the furniture of the apartment, the gestures of unspoken affections. He lowered his eyes from the window. Catherine Austin sat on the bed beside him. Her naked body was held forward like a bizarre exhibit, its anatomy a junction of sterile cleft and flaccid mons. He placed his palm against the mud-coloured areola of her left nipple. The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.

Obscene Mannequin.‘Shall I lie down with you?’ Ignoring her question, Talbot studied her broad hips, with their now empty contours of touch and feeling. Already she had the texture of a rubber mannequin fitted with explicit vents, an obscene masturbatory appliance. As he stood up he saw the diaphragm in her handbag, useless cache-sexe. He listened to the helicopters. They seemed to alight on an invisible landing zone in the margins of his mind. On the garage roof stood the sculpture he had laboriously built during the past month; antennae of metal aerials holding glass faces to the sun, the slides of diseased spinal levels he had taken from the laboratory. All night he watched the sky, listening to the time-music of the quasars.

Left Orbit and Temple. Below the window a thickset young man, wearing the black military overcoat affected by the students, was loading a large display billboard into a truck outside the Neurology department, a photo reproduction of Talbot’s left orbit and temple. He stared up at the sculpture on the roof. His sallow, bearded face had pursued Talbot for the past weeks during the conception of the scenario. It was at Koester’s instigation that the class were now devising the optimum death of World War III’s first casualty, a wound profile more and more clearly revealed as Talbot’s. A marked physical hostility existed between them, a compound of sexual rivalry over Catherine Austin and homo-erotic jealousy.

A Sophisticated Entertainment. Dr Nathan gazed at the display photographs of terminal syphilitics in the cinema foyer. Already members of the public were leaving. Despite the scandal that would ensue he had deliberately authorized this ‘Festival of Atrocity Films,’ which Talbot had suggested as one of his last coherent acts. Behind their display frames the images of Nader and JFK, napalm and air crash victims revealed the considerable ingenuity of the film makers. Yet the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized.

The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out a Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia. More properly, the programme should be called a festival of home movies. He lit a gold-tipped cigarette, noticing that a photograph of Talbot had been cleverly montaged over a reproduction of Dali’s ‘Hypercubic Christ.’ Even the film festival had been devised as part of the scenario’s calculated psycho-drama.

A Shabby Voyeur. As she parked the car, Karen Novotny could see the silver bowls of the three radio telescopes above the trees. The tall man in the shabby flying jacket walked towards the perimeter fence, bars of sunlight crossing his face. Why had she followed him here? She had picked him up in the empty hotel cinema after the conference on space medicine, then taken him back to her apartment. All week he had been watching the telescopes with the same fixity of expression, an optical rigor like that of a disappointed voyeur. Who was he? - some fugitive from time and space, clearly moving now into his own landscape. His room was filled with grotesque magazine photographs: the obsessive geometry of overpasses, like fragments of her own body; X-rays of unborn children; a series of genital deformations; a hundred closeups of hands. She stepped from the car, the coil hanging in her womb like a steel foetus, a stillborn star. She smoothed her white linen skirt as Talbot ran back from the fence, ripping the cassette from his camera. Between them had sprung up a relationship of intense sexuality.

The Image Maze. Talbot followed the helicopter pilot across the rain-washed concrete. For the first time, as he wandered along the embankment, one of the aircraft had landed. The slim figure of the pilot left no reflections in the silver pools. The exhibition hall was deserted. Beyond a tableau sculpture of a Saigon street execution stood a maze constructed from photographic billboards. The pilot stepped through a doorway cut into an image of Talbot’s face. He looked up at the photograph of himself, snapped with a lapel camera during his last seminar. Over the exhausted eyes presided the invisible hierarchies of the quasars. Reading the maze, Talbot made his way among the corridors. Details of his hands and mouth signposted its significant junctions.

Spinal Levels.’Sixties iconography: the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child. In the patio at the centre of the maze a young woman in a flowered white dress sat behind a desk covered with catalogues. Her blanched skin exposed the hollow planes of her face. Like the pilot, Talbot recognized her as a student at his seminar. Her nervous smile revealed the wound that disfigured the inside of her mouth.

Towards the D.M.Z. Later, as he sat in the cabin of the helicopter, Talbot looked down at the motorway below them. The speeding cars wound through the cloverleaves. The concrete causeways formed an immense cipher, the templates of an unseen posture. The young woman in the white dress sat beside him. Her breasts and shoulders recapitulated the forgotten contours of Karen Novotny’s body, the motion-sculpture of the highways. Afraid to smile at him, she stared at his hands as if they held some invisible weapon. The flowering tissue of her mouth reminded him of the porous esplanades of Ernst’s ‘Silence,’ the pumice-like beaches of a dead sea. His committal into the authority of these two couriers had at last freed him from his memories of Koester and Catherine Austin. The erosion of that waking landscape continued. Meanwhile the quasars burned dimly from the dark peaks of the universe, sections of his brain reborn in the island galaxies.

Mimetized Disasters. The helicopter banked abruptly, pulled round in a gesture of impatience by the pilot. They plunged towards the underpass, the huge fans of the Sikorsky sliding through the

air like the wings of a crippled archangel. A multiple collision had occurred in the approach to the underpass. After the police had left they walked for an hour among the cars, staring through the steam at the bodies propped against the fractured windshields. Here he would find his alternate death, the mimetized disasters of Vietnam and the Congo recapitulated in the contours of these broken fenders and radiator assemblies. As they circled overhead the shells of the vehicles lay in the dusk like the crushed wings of an aerial armada.

No U-Turn.‘Above all, the notion of conceptual auto-disaster has preoccupied Talbot during the final stages of his breakdown,’ Dr Nathan wrote. ‘But even more disturbing is Talbot’s deliberate self-involvement in the narrative of the scenario. Far from the students making an exhibition of an overwrought instructor, transforming him into a kind of ur-Christ of the communications landscape, Talbot has in fact exploited them. This has altered the entire direction of the scenario, turning it from an exercise on the theme of “the end of the world” into a psycho-drama of increasingly tragic perspectives.’

The Persistence of Memory. An empty beach with its fused sand. Here clock time is no longer valid. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These images are the residues of a remembered moment of time. For Talbot the most disturbing elements are the rectilinear sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with his own continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of his own consciousness. Later, walking along the overpass, he realized that the rectilinear forms of his conscious reality were warped elements from some placid and harmonious future.

Arrival at the Zone. They sat in the unfading sunlight on the sloping concrete. The abandoned motorway ran off into the haze, silver firs growing through its sections. Shivering in the cold air, Talbot looked out over the landscape of broken overpasses and crushed underpasses. The pilot walked down the slope to a rusting grader surrounded by tyres and fuel drums. Beyond it a quonset tilted into a pool of mud. Talbot waited for the young woman to speak to him, but she stared at her hands, lips clenched against her teeth. Against the drab concrete the white fabric of her dress shone with an almost luminescent intensity. How long had they sat there?

The Plaza. Later, when his two couriers had moved to the ridge of the embankment, Talbot began to explore the terrain. Covered by the same even light, the landscape of derelict roadways spread to the horizon. On the ridge the pilot squatted under the tail of the helicopter, the young woman behind him. Their impassive, unlit faces seemed an extension of the landscape. Talbot followed the concrete beach. Here and there sections of the banking had fallen, revealing the steel buttresses below. An orchard of miniature fruit trees grew from the sutures between the concrete slabs. Three hundred yards from the helicopter he entered a sunken plaza where two convergent highways moved below an underpass. The shells of long-abandoned automobiles lay below the arches. Talbot brought the young woman and guided her down the embankment. For several hours they waited on the concrete slope. The geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot’s mind.

The Annunciation. Partly veiled by the afternoon clouds, the enormous image of a woman’s hands moved across the sky. Talbot stood up, for a moment losing his balance on the sloping concrete. Raised as if to form an arch over an invisible child, the hands passed through the air above the plaza. They hung in the sunlight like immense doves. Talbot climbed the slope, following this spectre along the embankment. He had witnessed the annunciation of a unique

event. Looking down at the plaza, he murmured without thinking, ‘Ralph Nader.’

The Geometry of Her Face. In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. The diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature, and to the scenario that had preoccupied him at the Institute. He began to prepare for departure. The pilot and the young woman now deferred to him. The fans of the helicopter turned in the dark air, casting elongated ciphers on the dying concrete.

Transliterated Pudenda. Dr Nathan showed his pass to the guard at the gatehouse. As they drove towards the testing area he was aware of Catherine Austin peering through the windshield, her sexuality keening now that Talbot was within range. Nathan glanced down at her broad thighs, calculating the jut and rake of her pubis. ‘Talbot’s belief - and this is confirmed by the logic of the scenario - is that automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Apart from its manifest function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event - a liberation of sexual energy - mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form: James Dean and Miss Mansfield, Camus and the late President. In the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster we see the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader, our nearest image of the blood and body of Christ.’ They stopped by the test course. A group of engineers watched a crushed Lincoln dragged away through the morning air. The hairless plastic mannequin of a woman sat propped on the grass, injury sites marked on her legs and thorax.

Journeys to an Interior. Waiting in Karen Novotny’s apartment, Talbot made certain transits: (1) Spinal: ‘The Eye of Silence’ - these porous rock towers, with the luminosity of exposed organs, contained an immense planetary silence. Moving across the iodine water of these corroded lagoons, Talbot followed the solitary nymph through the causeways of rock, the palaces of his own flesh and bone. (2) Media: montage landscapes of war - webbing heaped in pits beside the Shanghai - Nanking railway; bargirls’ cabins built out of tyres and fuel drums; dead Japanese stacked like firewood in L. C. T.s off Woosung pier. (3) Contour: the unique parameters of Karen’s body - beckoning vents of mouth and vulva, the soft hypogeum of the anus. (4) Astral: segments of his posture mimetized in the processions of space. These transits contained an image of the geometry assembling itself in the musculature of the young woman, in their postures during intercourse, in the angles between the walls of the apartment.

Stochastic Analysis. Karen Novotny paused over the wet stockings in the handbasin. As his fingers touched her armpits she stared into the sculpture garden between the apartment blocks. The sallow-faced young man in the fascist overcoat who had followed her all week was sitting on the bench beside the Paolozzi. His paranoid eyes, with their fusion of passion and duplicity, had watched her like a rapist’s across the café tables. Talbot’s bruised hands were lifting her breasts, as if weighing their heavy curvatures against some more plausible alternative. The landscape of highways obsessed him, the rear mouldings of automobiles. All day he had been building his bizarre antenna on the roof of the apartment block, staring into the sky as if trying to force a corridor to the sun. Searching in his suitcase, she found clippings of his face taken from as yet unpublished news stories in Oggi and Newsweek . In the evening, while she bathed, waiting for him to enter the bathroom as she powdered her body, he crouched over the blueprints spread between the sofas in the lounge, calculating a stochastic analysis of the Pentagon car park.

Crash Magazine. Catherine Austin moved through the exhibits towards the dark-skinned young man in the black coat. He leaned against one of the cars, his face covered by the rainbows reflected from a frosted windshield. Who was Koester: a student in Talbot’s class; Judas in this scenario; a rabbi serving a sinister novitiate? Why had he organized this exhibition of crashed cars? The truncated vehicles, with their ruptured radiator grilles, were arranged in lines down the showroom floor. His warped sexuality, of which she had been aware since his arrival at the first semester, had something of the same quality as these maimed vehicles. He had even produced a magazine devoted solely to car accidents: Crash! The dismembered bodies of Jayne Mansfield, Camus and Dean presided over its pages, epiphanies of violence and desire.

A Cosmetic Problem. The star of the show was JFK, victim of the first conceptual car crash. A damaged Lincoln had been given the place of honour, plastic models of the late President and his wife in the rear seat. An elaborate attempt had been made to represent cosmetically the expressed brain tissue of the President. As she touched the white acrylic smears across the trunk Koester swung himself aggressively out of the driver’s seat. While he lit her cigarette she leaned against the fender of a white Pontiac, their thighs almost touching. Koester took her arm with a nervous gesture. ‘Ah, Dr Austin . . . ’ The flow of small talk modulated their sexual encounter. ‘ . . . surely Christ’s crucifixion could be regarded as the first traffic accident - certainly if we accept Jarry’s happy piece of anti-clericalism . . . ’

The Sixty-Minute Zoom. As they moved from apartment to apartment along the motorway, Karen Novotny was conscious of the continuing dissociation of the events around her. Talbot followed her about the apartment, drawing chalk outlines on the floor around her chair, around the cups and utensils on the breakfast table as she drank her coffee, and lastly around herself: (1) sitting, in the posture of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’, on the edge of the bidet, (2) watching from the balcony as she waited for Koester to find them again, (3) making love to Talbot on the bed. He worked silently at the chalk outlines, now and then rearranging her limbs. The noise of the helicopters had become incessant. One morning she awoke in complete silence to find that Talbot had gone.

A Question of Definition. The multiplying outlines covered the walls and floors, a frieze of priapic dances - crash victims, a crucified man, children in intercourse. The outline of a helicopter covered the cinder surface of the tennis court like the profile of an archangel. She returned after a fruitless search among the cafés to find the furniture removed from the apartment. Koester and his student gang were photographing the chalk outlines. Her own name had been written into the silhouette of herself in the bath. ‘ “Novotny, masturbating,” ’ she read out aloud. ‘Are you writing me into your scenario, Mr Koester?’ she asked with an attempt at irony. His irritated eyes compared her figure with the outline in the bath. ‘ We know where he is, Miss Novotny.’ She stared at the outline of her breasts on the black tiles of the shower stall, Talbot’s hands traced around them. Hands multiplied around the rooms, soundlessly clapping, a welcoming host.

The Unidentified Female Orifice. These leg stances preoccupied Talbot - Karen Novotny (1) stepping from the driving seat of the Pontiac, median surface of thighs exposed, (2) squatting on the bathroom floor, knees laterally displaced, fingers searching for the diaphragm lip, (3) in the a tergo posture, thighs pressing against Talbot, (4) collision: crushed right tibia against the instrument console, left patella impacted by the handbrake.

The Optimum Wound Profile.‘One must bear in mind that roll-over followed by a head-on

collision produces complex occupant movements and injuries from unknown sources,’ Dr Nathan explained to Captain Webster. He held up the montage photograph he had found in Koester’s cubicle, the figure of a man with itemized wound areas. ‘However, here we have a wholly uncharacteristic emphasis on palm, ankle, and abdominal injuries. Even allowing for the excessive crushing movements in a severe impact it is difficult to reconstruct the likely accident mode. In this case, taken from Koester’s scenario of Talbot’s death, the injuries seem to have been sustained in an optimized auto-fatality, conceived by the driver as some kind of bizarre crucifixion. He would be mounted in the crash vehicle in an obscene position as if taking part in some grotesque act of intercourse - Christ crucified on the sodomized body of his own mother.’

The Impact Zone. At dusk Talbot drove around the deserted circuit of the research laboratory test track. Grass grew waist high through the untended concrete, wheel-less cars rusted in the undergrowth along the verge. Overhead the helicopter moved across the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and cigarette cartons. Talbot steered the car among the broken tyres and oil drums. Beside him the young woman leaned against his shoulder, her grey eyes surveying Talbot with an almost minatory calm. He turned on to a concrete track between the trees. The collision course ran forwards through the dim light, crushed cars shackled to steel gondolas above a catapult. Plastic mannequins spilled through the burst doors and panels. As they walked along the catapult rails Talbot was aware of the young woman pacing out the triangle of approach roads. Her face contained the geometry of the plaza. He worked until dawn, towing the wrecks into the semblance of a motorcade.

Talbot: False Deaths.(1) The flesh impact: Karen Novotny’s beckoning figure in the shower stall, open thighs and exposed pubis - traffic fatalities screamed in this soft collision. (2) The overpass below the apartment: the angles between the concrete buttresses contained for Talbot an immense anguish. (3) A crushed fender: in its broken geometry Talbot saw the dismembered body of Karen Novotny, the alternate death of Ralph Nader.

Unusual Poses.‘You’ll see why we’re worried, Captain.’ Dr Nathan beckoned Webster towards the photographs pinned to the walls of Talbot’s office. ‘We can regard them in all cases as “poses”. They show (1) the left orbit and zygomatic arch of President Kennedy magnified from Zapruder frame 230, (2) X-ray plates of the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, (3) a sequence of corridor angles at the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, (4) Miss Karen Novotny, an intimate of Talbot’s, in a series of unusual amatory positions. In fact, it is hard to tell whether the positions are those of Miss Novotny in intercourse or as an auto-crash fatality - to a large extent the difference is now meaningless.’ Captain Webster studied the exhibits. He fingered the shaving scar on his heavy jaw, envying Talbot the franchises of this young woman’s body. ‘And together they make up a portrait of this American safety fellow - Nader?’

‘In Death, Yes.’ Nathan nodded sagely over his cigarette smoke. ‘In death, yes. That is, an alternate or “false” death. These images of angles and postures constitute not so much a private gallery as a conceptual equation, a fusing device by which Talbot hopes to bring his scenario to a climax. The danger of an assassination attempt seems evident, one hypotenuse in this geometry of a murder. As to the figure of Nader - one must remember that Talbot is here distinguishing between the manifest content of reality and its latent content. Nader’s true role is clearly very different from his apparent one, to be deciphered in terms of the postures we assume, our anxieties mimetized in the junction between wall and ceiling. In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace. In twentieth-century terms the crucifixion, for example, would be re-enacted as a

conceptual auto-disaster.’

Idiosyncrasies and Sin-crazed Idioms. As she leaned against the concrete parapet of the camera tower, Catherine Austin could feel Koester’s hands moving around her shoulder straps. His rigid face was held six inches from her own, his mouth like the pecking orifice of some unpleasant machine. The planes of his cheekbones and temples intersected with the slabs of rain-washed cement, together forming a strange sexual modulus. A car moved along the perimeter of the test area. During the night the students had built an elaborate tableau on the impact site fifty feet below, a multi-vehicle auto-crash. A dozen wrecked cars lay on their sides, broken fenders on the grass verges. Plastic mannequins had been embedded in the interlocked windshields and radiator grilles, wound areas marked on their broken bodies. Koester had named them: Jackie, Ralph, Abraham. Perhaps he saw the tableau as a rape? His hand hesitated on her left breast. He was watching the Novotny girl walking along the concrete aisle. She laughed, disengaging herself from Koester. Where were her own wound areas?

Speed Trials. Talbot opened the door of the Lincoln and took up his position in agent Greer’s seat. Behind him the helicopter pilot and the young woman sat in the rear of the limousine. For the first time the young woman had begun to smile at Talbot, a soundless rictus of the mouth, deliberately exposing her wound as if showing him that her shyness had gone. Ignoring her now, Talbot looked out through the dawn light at the converging concrete aisles. Soon the climax of the scenario would come, JFK would die again, his young wife raped by this conjunction of time and space. The enigmatic figure of Nader presided over the collision, its myths born from the cross-overs of auto-crashes and genitalia. He looked up from the wheel as the flares illuminated the impact zone. When the car surged forward he realized that the two passengers had gone.

The Acceleration Couch. Half zipping his trousers, Koester lay back against the torn upholstery, one hand still resting on the plump thigh of the sleeping young woman. The debris-filled compartment had not been the most comfortable site. This zombie-like creature had strayed across the concrete runways like a fugitive from her own dreams, forever talking about Talbot as if unconsciously inviting Koester to betray him. Why was she wearing the Jackie Kennedy wig? He sat up, trying to open the rusty door. The students had christened the wreck ‘Dodge 38’, furnishing the rear seat with empty beer bottles and contraceptive wallets. Abruptly the car jolted forward, throwing him across the young woman. As she woke, pulling at her skirt, the sky whirled past the frosted windows. The clanking cable between the rails propelled them on a collision course with a speeding limousine below the camera tower.

Celebration. For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries, the unique creation of the pudenda of Ralph Nader. The dismembered bodies of Karen Novotny and himself moved across the morning landscape, recreated in a hundred crashing cars, in the perspectives of a thousand concrete embankments, in the sexual postures of a million lovers.

Interlocked Bodies. Holding the bruise under his left nipple, Dr Nathan ran after Webster towards the burning wrecks. The cars lay together at the centre of the collision corridor, the last steam and smoke lifting from their cabins. Webster stepped over the armless body of Karen Novotny hanging face-down from the rear window. The burning fuel had traced a delicate lacework of expressed tissue across her naked thighs. Webster pulled open the rear door of the Lincoln. ‘Where the hell is Talbot?’ Holding his throat with one hand, Dr Nathan stared at the wig lying among the beer bottles.

The Helicopters are Burning. Talbot followed the young woman between the burning helicopters. Their fuselages formed bonfires across the dark fields. Her strong stride, with its itemized progress across the foam-smeared concrete, carried within its rhythm a calculated invitation to his own sexuality. Talbot stopped by the burning wreck of a Sikorsky. The body of Karen Novotny, with its landscapes of touch and feeling, clung like a wraith to his thighs and abdomen.

Fractured Smile. The hot sunlight lay across the suburban street. From the radio of the car sounded a fading harmonic. Karen Novotny’s fractured smile spread across the windshield. Talbot looked up at his own face mediated from the billboard beside the car park. Overhead the glass curtain-walls of the apartment block presided over this first interval of neural calm.

<Annotations>

The Conceptual Death.

Experiments often test the experimenter more than the subject. One remembers the old joke about the laboratory rat who said: ‘I have that scientist trained - every time I press this lever he gives me a pellet of food.’ For me, the most interesting aspect of the work of Masters and Johnson, collected in Human Sexual Response, was its effect on themselves. How were their sex lives influenced, what changes occurred in their sexual freedoms and fantasies? In conversation they seemed almost neutered by the experiments. I suspect that the copulating volunteers were really training the good doctors to lose all interest in sex, just as computerized diagnostic machines, where patients press buttons in reply to stock questions, are inadvertently training them to develop duodenal ulcers or varicose veins.

Talbot. Another face of the central character of The Atrocity Exhibition. The core identity is Traven, a name taken consciously from B. Traven, a writer I’ve always admired for his extreme reclusiveness - so completely at odds with the logic of our own age, when even the concept of privacy is constructed from publicly circulating materials. It is now almost impossible to be ourselves except on the world’s terms.

Obscene Mannequin.

The time-music of the quasars. A huge volume of radio signals reaches this planet from space, crossing gigantic distances from the far side of the universe. It’s hard to accept that these messages are meaningless, as they presumably are, no more than the outward sign of nuclear processes within the stars. Yet the hope remains that one day we will decode them, and find, not some intergalactic fax service, but a spontaneously generated choral music, a naive electro-magnetic architecture, the primitive syntax of a philosophical system, as meaningless but as reassuring as the pattern of waves on a beach.

Reassembling the furniture of his mind, Talbot has constructed a primitive antenna, and can now hear the night sky singing of time, the voice of the unseen powers of the cosmos.

A Sophisticated Entertainment.

Has a festival of atrocity films ever been held? Every year at the Oscars ceremony, some might say. It seemed likely in the late 60s, but the new puritans of our day would greet such a suggestion with a shudder. A pity - given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the wayward imagination, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim. I take it that the final destination of the 20th century, and the best we can hope for in the circumstances, is the attainment of a moral and just psychopathology.

The Image Maze.

After a dinner party in the 1970s I almost came to blows with a prominent New York poet (in fact, I tried playfully to run him down with my car, if such an act can be playful). He had derided my observation that cruel and violent images which elicit pity one day have by the next afternoon been stylised into media emblems. Yet the tragic photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a Viet Cong suspect in the head was soon used by the London Sunday Times as a repeated logo keying its readers to Vietnam features in the paper. If I remember, the tilt of the dying man’s head was slightly exaggerated, like a stylized coke bottle or tail-fin.

Towards the D.M.Z.

Max Ernst’s paintings run through The Atrocity Exhibition, in particular ‘The Eye of Silence’ and ‘Europe After the Rain.’ Their clinker-like rocks resemble skeletons from which all organic matter has been leached, all sense of time. Looking at these landscapes, it’s impossible to imagine anything ever happening within them. The neural counterparts of these images must exist within our brains, though it’s difficult to guess what purpose they serve.

Mimetized Disasters.

Most of the machines that surround our lives - airliners, refrigerators, cars and typewriters - have streamlined their way into our affections. Now and then, as in the case of the helicopter, with its unstable, insect-like obsessiveness, we can see clearly the deep hostility of the mineral world. We are lucky that the organic realm reached the foot of the evolutionary ladder before the inorganic.

The Persistence of Memory.

Dali’s masterpiece, and one of the most powerful of all surrealist images.

The Plaza.

Dealey Plaza in Dallas, re-imagined in Talbot’s eye as the end of the world.

The Annunciation.

Nader has only just survived into the 1990s, and it’s difficult now to imagine his name leaping to anyone’s lips, but at the time he sent a seismic tremor through the mind of the US consumer, challenging the authority of that greatest of all American icons, the automobile. Every car crash seemed a prayer to Ralph Nader.

Stochastic Analysis.

Believe it or not, some researcher did carry out a stochastic analysis of the Pentagon car park, translating the guesstimated flow-patterns of vehicles into a three-dimensional volume graph.

Crash Magazine.

This was written two years before my 1969 exhibition of crashed cars. Scouring the wreckers’ yards around London, I was unable to find a crashed Lincoln Continental, perhaps fortunately. As it was, the audience reaction to the telescoped Pontiac, Mini and Austin Cambridge verged on nervous hysteria, though had the cars been parked in the street outside the gallery no one would have given them a glance or devoted a moment’s thought to the injured occupants. In a calculated test of the spectators, I hired a topless girl to interview the guests on closed-circuit TV. She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless - an interesting logic was at work there. As the opening night party deteriorated into a drunken brawl she was almost raped in the back seat of the Pontiac, and later wrote a damning review of the show in the underground paper Friendz. The cars were exhibited without comment, but during the month-long show they were continually attacked by visitors to the gallery, who broke windows, tore off wing mirrors, splashed them with white paint. The overall reaction to the experiment convinced me to write Crash, in itself a considerable challenge to most notions of sanity.

I’m told that cars purporting to be the JFK Continental are often exhibited in the United States, and that a white Continental claiming to be the car in which Kennedy met his death was recently the centrepiece of a small museum on the causeway leading to Cocoa Beach, Florida.

The Optimum Wound Profile.

In February 1972, two weeks after completing Crash , I was involved in my only serious car accident. After a front wheel blowout my Ford Zephyr veered to the right, crossed the central reservation (I received a bill for the demolished sign, and was annoyed to see later that I had paid for a more advanced model, with flashing lights), and then rolled over and continued upside-down along the oncoming lane. Fortunately I was wearing a seat belt and no other vehicle was involved. An extreme case of nature imitating art. Curiously, before the accident and since, I have always been a careful and even slow driver, frequently egged on by impatient women-friends.

Unusual Poses.

Abraham Zapruder was a tourist in Dealey Plaza whose amateur cine-film captured the President’s tragic death. The Warren Commission concluded that frame 210 recorded the first rifle shot, which wounded Kennedy in the neck, and that frame 313 recorded the fatal head wound. I forget the significance of frame 230.

The Warren Commission’s Report is a remarkable document, especially if considered as a work of fiction (which many experts deem it largely to be). The chapters covering the exact geometric relationships between the cardboard boxes on the seventh floor of the Book Depository (a tour de force in the style of Robbe-Grillet), the bullet trajectories and speed of the Presidential limo, and the bizarre chapter titles - ‘The Subsequent Bullet That Hit,’ ‘The Curtain Rod Story,’ ‘The Long and Bulky Package’ - together suggest a type of obsessional fiction that links science and pornography. One shudders to think how the report’s authors would have dealt with any sexual elements, particularly if they had involved Jacqueline Kennedy (perhaps The Atrocity Exhibition fills that gap), or how their successors might have coped with the assassination of Vice-President Quayle and his evangelist wife in a hotel suite - say in Miami, a good city in which to be assassinated,

within sight of those lovely banyan trees in Coral Gables, ambling pelicans and the witty Arquitectonica building.

Speed Trials.

Special Agent William R. Greer of the Secret Service was the driver of the Presidential limousine. One can’t help wondering how the events in Dealey Plaza affected him. Has his sense of space and time been altered? What role in his imagination is played by the desperate widow? The facilities exist for a complete neuro-psychiatric profile, though one will never be carried out. The results would be interesting, since we were all in a sense in the driver’s seat on that day in Dallas.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ASSASSINATION WEAPON

Thoracic Drop. The spinal landscape, revealed at the level of T-12, is that of the porous rock towers of Tenerife, and of the native of the Canaries, Oscar Dominguez, who created the technique of decalcomania and so exposed the first spinal landscape. The clinker-like rock towers, suspended above the silent swamp, create an impression of profound anguish. The inhospitability of this mineral world, with its inorganic growths, is relieved only by the balloons flying in the clear sky. They are painted with names: Jackie, Lee Harvey, Malcolm. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Here, time makes no concessions.

Autogeddon. Waking: the concrete embankment of a motorway extension. Roadworks, cars drumming two hundred yards below. In the sunlight the seams between the sections are illuminated like the sutures of an exposed skull. A young woman stands ten feet away from him, watching with unsure eyes. The hyoid bone in her throat flutters as if discharging some subvocal rosary. She points to her car, parked off the verge beside a grader, and then beckons to him. Kline, Coma, Xero. He remembered the aloof, cerebral Kline and their long discussions on this terminal concrete beach. Under a different sun. This girl is not Coma. ‘My car.’ She speaks, the sounds as dissociated as the recording in a doll. ‘I can give you a lift. I saw you reach the island. It’s like trying to cross the Styx.’

Googolplex. Dr Nathan studied the walls of the empty room. The mandalas, scored in the white plaster with a nail file, radiated like suns towards the window. He peered at the objects on the tray offered to him by the nurse. ‘So, these are the treasures he has left us - an entry from Oswald’s Historic Diary, a much-thumbed reproduction of Magritte’s “Annunciation”, and the mass numbers of the first twelve radioactive nuclides. What are we supposed to do with them?’ Nurse Nagamatzu gazed at him with cool eyes. ‘Permutate them, doctor?’ Dr Nathan lit a cigarette, ignoring the explicit insolence. This elegant bitch, like all women she intruded her sexuality at the most inopportune moments. One day . . . He said, ‘Perhaps. We might find Mrs Kennedy there. Or her husband. The Warren Commission has reopened its hearing, you know. Apparently it’s not satisfied. Quite unprecedented.’ Permutate them? The theoretical number of nucleotide patterns in DNA was a mere 10 to the power of 120,000. What number was vast enough to contain all the possibilities of those three objects?

Jackie Kennedy, your eyelids deflagrate. The serene face of the President’s widow, painted on clapboard four hundred feet high, moves across the rooftops, disappearing into the haze on the outskirts of the city. There are hundreds of the signs, revealing Jackie in countless familiar postures. Next week there may be an SS officer, Beethoven, Christopher Columbus or Fidel Castro. The fragments of these signs litter the suburban streets for weeks afterwards. Bonfires of Jackie’s face burn among the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. With luck he finds a job on one of the municipal disposal teams, warms his hands at a brazier of eyes. At night he sleeps beneath an unlit bonfire of breasts.

Xero. Of the three figures who were to accompany him, the strangest was Xero. For most of the time Kline and Coma would remain near him, sitting a few feet away on the embankment of the deserted motorway, following in another car when he drove to the radio-observatory, pausing behind him as he visited the atrocity exhibition. Coma was too shy, but now and then he would manage to talk to Kline, although he never remembered what they said to each other. By contrast,

Xero was a figure of galvanic energy and uncertainty. As he moved across the abandoned landscape near the overpass, the perspectives of the air seemed to invert behind him. At times, when Xero approached the forlorn group sitting on the embankment, his shadows formed bizarre patterns on the concrete, transcripts of cryptic formulae and insoluble dreams. These ideograms, like the hieroglyphs of a race of blind seers, remained on the grey concrete after Xero had gone, the detritus of this terrifying psychic totem.

Questions, always questions. Karen Novotny watched him move around the apartment, dismantling the mirrors in the hall and bathroom. He stacked them on the table between the settees in the lounge. This strange man, and his obsessions with time, Jackie Kennedy, Oswald and Eniwetok. Who was he? Where had he come from? In the three days since she had found him on the motorway she had discovered only that he was a former H-bomber pilot, for some reason carrying World War III in his head. ‘What are you trying to build?’ she asked. He assembled the mirrors into a box-like structure. He glanced up at her, face hidden by the peak of his Air Force cap. ‘A trap.’ She stood beside him as he knelt on the floor. ‘For what? Time?’ He placed a hand between her knees and gripped her right thigh, handhold of reality. ‘For your womb, Karen. You’ve caught a star there.’ But he was thinking of Coma, waiting with Kline in the espresso bar, while Xero roamed the street in his white Pontiac. In Coma’s eyes runes glowed.

The Impossible Room. In the dim light he lay on the floor of the room. A perfect cube, its walls and ceiling were formed by what seemed to be a series of cinema screens. Projected on to them in close-up was the face of Nurse Nagamatzu, her mouth, three feet across, moving silently as she spoke in slow motion. Like a cloud, the giant head moved up the wall behind him, then passed across the ceiling and down the opposite corner. Later the inclined, pensive face of Dr Nathan appeared, rising from the floor until it filled three walls and the ceiling, a slow mouthing monster.

Beach Fatigue. After climbing the concrete incline, he reached the top of the embankment. The flat, endless terrain stretched away on all sides, a few oil derricks in the distance marking the horizon. Among the spilled sand and burst cement bags lay old tyres and beer bottles. Guam in 1947. He wandered away, straddling roadworks and irrigation ditches, towards a rusting quonset near the incline of the disused overpass. Here, in this terminal hut, he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went off to forage, and came back to the hut with a collection of mud-stained documents and a Coke bottle.

Pontiac Starchief. Two hundred yards from the hut a wheel-less Pontiac sits in the sand. The presence of this car baffles him. Often he spends hours sitting in it, trying out the front and back seats. All sorts of rubbish is lying in the sand: a typewriter with half the keys missing (he picks out fragmentary sentences, sometimes these seem to mean something), a smashed neurosurgical unit (he pockets a handful of leucotomes, useful for self-defence). Then he cuts his foot on the Coke bottle, and spends several feverish days in the hut. Luckily he finds an incomplete isolation drill for trainee astronauts, half of an eighty-hour sequence.

Coma: the million-year girl. Coma’s arrival coincides with his recovery from the bout of fever. At first she spends all her time writing poems on the damaged typewriter. Later, when not writing the poems, she wanders away to an old solar energy device and loses herself in the maze of mirrors. Shortly afterwards Kline appears, and sits at a chair and table in the sand twenty yards from the hut. Xero, meanwhile, is moving among the oil derricks half a mile away, assembling immense Cinemascope signs that carry the reclining images of Oswald, Jackie Kennedy and

Malcolm X.

Pre-uterine Claims.‘The author,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘has found that the patient forms a distinctive type of object relation based on perpetual and irresistible desire to merge with the object in an undifferentiated mass. Although psychoanalysis cannot reach the primary archaic mechanism of “rapprochement” it can deal with the neurotic superstructure, guiding the patient towards the choice of stable and worthwhile objects. In the case under consideration the previous career of the patient as a military pilot should be noted, and the unconscious role of thermonuclear weapons in bringing about the total fusion and non-differentiation of all matter. What the patient is reacting against is, simply, the phenomenology of the universe, the specific and independent existence of separate objects and events, however trivial and inoffensive these may seem. A spoon, for example, offends him by the mere fact of its existence in time and space. More than this, one could say that the precise, if largely random, configuration of atoms in the universe at any given moment, one never again to be repeated, seems to him to be preposterous by virtue of its unique identity . . . ’ Dr Nathan lowered his pen and looked down into the recreation garden. Traven was standing in the sunlight, raising and lowering his arms and legs in a private calisthenic display, which he repeated several times (presumably an attempt to render time and events meaningless by replication?).

‘But isn’t Kennedy already dead?’ Captain Webster studied the documents laid out on Dr Nathan’s demonstration table. These were: (1) a spectroheliogram of the sun; (2) tarmac and take-off checks for the B-29 Super-fortress Enola Gay; (3) electroencephalogram of Albert Einstein; (4) transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite; (5) photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression; (6) Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’. He turned to Dr Nathan. ‘You say these constitute an assassination weapon?’

‘Not in the sense you mean.’ Dr Nathan covered the exhibits with a sheet. By chance the cabinets took up the contours of a corpse. ‘Not in the sense you mean. This is an attempt to bring about the “false” death of the President - false in the sense of coexistent or alternate. The fact that an event has taken place is no proof of its valid occurrence.’ Dr Nathan went over to the window. Obviously he would have to begin the search single-handedly. Where to begin? No doubt Nurse Nagamatzu could be used as bait. That vamp had once worked as a taxi-dancer in the world’s largest nightclub in Osaka, appropriately named ‘The Universe’.

Unidentified Radio-source, Cassiopeia. Karen Novotny waited as he reversed the car on to the farm track. Half a mile across the meadows she could see the steel bowls of the three radio telescopes in the sunlight. So the attempt was to be made here? There seemed to be nothing to kill except the sky. All week they had been chasing about, sitting for hours through the conference on neuro-psychiatry, visiting art galleries, even flying in a rented Rapide across the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. Her eyes had ached from keeping a lookout. ‘They’re four hundred feet high,’ he told her, ‘the last thing you need is a pair of binoculars.’ What had he been looking for - the radio telescopes or the giant madonnas he muttered about as he lay asleep beside her at night? ‘Xero!’ she heard him shout. With the agility of an acrobat he vaulted over the bonnet of the car, then set off at a run across the meadow. Carrying the black Jackie Kennedy wig as carefully as she could in both hands, she hurried after him. One of the telescopes was moving, its dish turning towards them.

Madame Butterfly. Holding the wound under her left breast, Nurse Nagamatzu stepped across Webster’s body and leaned against the bogie of the telescope pylon. Eighty feet above her the

steel bowl had stopped revolving, and the echoes of the gunshots reverberated among the lattice- work. Clearing her throat with an effort, she spat out the blood. The flecks of lung tissue speckled the bright ribbon of the rail. The bullet had broken two ribs, then collapsed her left lung and lodged itself below her scapula. As her eyes faded she caught a last glimpse of a white American car setting off across the tarmac apron beyond the control house, where the shells of the old bombers lay heaped together. The runways of the former airfield radiated from her in all directions. Dr Nathan was kneeling in the path of the car, intently building a sculpture of mirrors. She tried to pull the wig off her head, and then fell sideways across the rail.

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Pausing outside the entrance to the tea terrace, Margaret Traven noticed the tall figure of Captain Webster watching her from the sculpture room. Duchamp’s glass construction, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, reminded her of the ambiguous role she might have to play. This was chess in which every move was a counter-gambit. How could she help her husband, that tormented man, pursued by furies more implacable than the Four Riders - the very facts of time and space? She gave a start as Webster took her elbow. He turned to face her, looking into her eyes. ‘You need a drink. Let’s sit down - I’ll explain again why this is so important.’

Venus Smiles. The dead face of the President’s widow looked up at him from the track. Confused by the Japanese cast of her features, with all their reminders of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he stared at the bowl of the telescope. Twenty yards away Dr Nathan was watching him in the sunlight, the sculpture beside him reflecting a dozen fragments of his head and arms. Kline and Coma were moving away along the railway track.

Einstein.‘The notion that this great Swiss mathematician is a pornographer may strike you as something of a bad joke,’ Dr Nathan remarked to Webster. ‘However, you must understand that for Traven science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography. How different from Lautreamont, who brought together the sewing machine and the umbrella on the operating table, identifying the pudenda of the carpet with the woof of the cadaver.’ Dr Nathan turned to Webster with a smile. ‘One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops.’

Rune-filled Eyes. Now, in this concluding phase, the presence of his watching trinity, Coma, Kline and Xero, became ever closer. All three were more preoccupied than he remembered them. Only Coma, with her rune-filled eyes, watched him with any sympathy. It was as if they sensed that something was missing. He remembered the documents he had found near the terminal hut.

In a Technical Sense. Webster’s hand hesitated on Karen Novotny’s zip. He listened to the last bars of the Mahler symphony playing from the radiogram extension in the warm bedroom. ‘The bomber crashed on landing,’ he explained. ‘Four members of the crew were killed. He was alive when they got him out, but at one point in the operating theatre his heart and vital functions failed. In a technical sense he was dead for about two minutes. Now, all this time later, it looks as if something is missing, something that vanished during the short period of his death. Perhaps his soul, the capacity to achieve a state of grace. Nathan would call it the ability to accept the phenomenology of the universe, or the fact of your own consciousness. This is Traven’s hell. You can see he’s trying to build bridges between things - this Kennedy business, for example. He wants to kill Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense.’

The Water World. Margaret Traven moved through the darkness along the causeways between the reservoirs. Half a mile away the edge of the embankment formed a raised horizon, enclosing this world of tanks, water and pumping gear with an almost claustrophobic silence. The varying levels of water in the tanks seemed to let an extra dimension into the damp air. A hundred yards away, across two parallel settling beds, she saw her husband walking rapidly along one of the white-painted catwalks. He disappeared down a stairway. What was he looking for? Was this watery world the site where he hoped to be reborn, in this fragmented womb with its dozens of amniotic levels?

An Existential Yes. They were moving away from him. After his return to the terminal hut he noticed that Kline, Coma and Xero no longer approached him. Their fading figures, a quarter of a mile from the hut, wandered to and fro, half-hidden from him by the hollows and earthworks. The Cinemascope billboards of Jackie, Oswald and Malcolm X were beginning to break up in the wind. One morning he woke to find that they had gone.

The Terminal Zone. He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralizing the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune, the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.

<Annotations>

Thoracic Drop.

Oscar Dominguez, a leading member of the surrealist group in Paris, invented the technique of crushing gouache between layers of paper. When separated they reveal eroded, rock-like forms that touch some deeply buried memory, perhaps at an early stage in the formation of the brain’s visual centres, before the wiring is fully in place. Here I refer to Ernst’s ‘Eye of Silence’.

Googolplex.

Oswald’s Historic Diary, which he began on October 16th, 1959, the day of his arrival in Moscow, is a remarkable document which shows this inarticulate and barely literate man struggling to make sense of the largest issues of his day. Curiously, many prominent assassins have possessed distinctive literary styles, as if they had unconsciously rehearsed and rationalized their crimes on the verbal level long before committing them. Arthur Bremer, who critically wounded George Wallace, composed his own diary with great literary flair, while Manson has a unique apocalyptic style. ‘Paycheck whore wears a dollar bill gown to the funeral of hope and love . . . ’ (The Manson File, Amok Press).

Xero.

These three figures, who are shadows projected from Traven’s unconscious, had been in my mind since the end of the 1950s (see Re/Search #8/9, pages 38-40). They materialized in The Atrocity Exhibition, but then exited and never returned. I wait patiently for them to reappear.

Beach Fatigue.

Guam in 1947. The B-29s which bombed the airfield beside Lunghua Camp, near Shanghai, where I was interned during the Second World War, had reportedly flown from Guam. Pacific islands with their silent airstrips among the palm trees, Wake Island above all, have a potent magic for me. The runways that cross these little atolls, now mostly abandoned, seem to represent extreme states of nostalgia and possibility, doorways into another continuum. It was from the island of Tinian, in the Marianas, that the atom bombs were launched against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the war unexpectedly and almost certainly saved the lives of myself and my fellow internees in Shanghai, where the huge Japanese armies had intended to make a last stand against the expected American landings.

‘But isn’t Kennedy already dead?’

Kennedy’s assassination presides over The Atrocity Exhibition, and in many ways the book is directly inspired by his death, and represents a desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy, with its huge hidden agenda. The mass media created the Kennedy we know, and his death represented a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into

the popular psyche that have not yet closed.

[rocketwerks]

Henry Mansfield Cannon Memorial Chapel

36 Westhampton Way

Built, 1929

Architect, Charles M. Robinson

VDHR 127-0364-009

December 2019

A masterpiece of Late Gothic Revival nestled away on the UR campus.

December 2019 — front/north façade

Rising from a concrete foundation veneered with concrete incised to look like cut stones, the walls are constructed of steel frame clad with red brick laid in Flemish bond. The entries have original doors of paneled wood with iron detailing. A large rose window highlights the primary façade and Gothic pointed-arch and lancet windows are found on the remaining walls. The window openings on the east and west elevations have stained glass replacement windows with concrete tracery. The front-gabled roof is sheathed with variegated slate tiles.

December 2019 — detail of pinnacles

A rectangular apse at the back of the chapel also has a slate-covered gabled roof. The eaves of the roof are trimmed by brown metal gutters that drain to brown metal downspouts. Rooftop elements are restricted to parapets that mask portions of the roof on the front and back walls of the building. A rich deployment of original stone and molded and cast concrete decorative elements is a character-defining feature of the building. Pinnacles at the east and west ends of the primary façade, window and door surrounds, drip molds, belt courses, and accents on brick buttresses all were constructed using molded concrete.

December 2019 — showing quoins & quatrefoils

Concrete quoins of varying sizes are located at the edges of walls and around some windows and doors. Other concrete features include decorative reliefs and sculptural elements in foliate and other patterns above doors and windows and at the corners of walls on all sides of the building. Other concrete features include decorative reliefs and sculptural elements in foliate and other patterns above doors and windows and at the corners of walls on all sides of the building; these typically mimic quatrefoil or other designs found in Gothic tracery.

December 2019 — trumpet-playing angel relief

Quatrefoil ornaments flank the pointed arch. Above the pointed arch, a stone carving that reads “Cannon Memorial” in stylized Gothic lettering spans the entry bay, and is flanked by trumpet-playing angel reliefs. This name block is topped with a gabled parapet that has three foil arch reliefs. To either side of the entry, recessed bays include small windows with stained glass panels and concrete drip molds and quoin surrounds.

December 2019 — rose window detail

On the main block, the primary façade features symmetrical composition, with a centered entry block on the first story, a rose window above the entry, double foil arch and opening in the gable, and a cross on top of the gable. Set within a slightly projecting bay, the rose window has twelve foil arch traceries radiating from the central circle. The stained glass was installed in the rose window during the mid-1980s.

December 2019 — entry bay detail

On the west wall, an entry bay projects from the fourth bay, beneath the stained glass window. Accessed via a brick wheelchair ramp, the entry is similar in style and ornamentation to the primary entry on the north façade. Double-leaf, original wood doors are surmounted by a molded concrete surround and pointed arch with a large cinquefoil design. Above the pointed arch, a gabled concrete parapet bears a centered blank shield flanked by leaf ornamentation. At each corner is a relief of a kneeling angel.

December 2019 — rear/south façade

The rear wall of the chapel has battered brick buttresses at each corner, each with concrete accents. A sloped, slightly projecting bay topped with concrete incised to look like stone is between the buttresses. A concrete water table extends the length of the wall. Immediately below the water table, at the ground level are two vents and one small window, each with a simple concrete surround. The window appears to be original to the building, while the vents likely were added at a later date to accommodate mechanical systems.

December 2019 — memorial garden

A memorial garden is on the east side of Cannon Chapel. A brick and stone wall encloses the garden, with iron gates placed on the north and south walls. On the west wall, a wood gate leads to the neighboring Wilton Center. The landscaped area features brick and stone walkways, benches, ornamental plantings, and a central fountain. Low wing walls extend from the base of each buttress on the chapel’s east wall. Each wing wall is composed of brick and stone block and is topped with a concrete planter. The memorial garden is intended for the scattering of ashes.

December 2019 — nave

Cannon Memorial Chapel is a nave plan with a center aisle, small side aisles, and an alter area. The narthex and small rooms to either side are contained within the entry block on the north façade. The narthex features original paneled woodwork, historic-period tile flooring, and a plaster ceiling featuring a raised geometric pattern. Double leaf, paneled wood doors lead to the nave. Within the nave and to either side of the narthex doors are single-leaf wood doors. The east door opens to a prayer room, while the west door leads to the chapel guild room.

December 2019 — nave

The interior of the chapel features a soaring, vaulted timber ceiling supported by arch braces. Wood pews flank the aisles. Carpet covers the aisles while the remaining flooring is wood. The space is lit by stained glass windows on all sides. A cast concrete molding runs around the entire interior space just below the bottom edges of the pointed arch windows. The area below the molding has been painted to look like blocks of stone in varying shades of tan. Raised wood panels with molded surrounds are beneath each window and include a name plate with a dedication for each window. Above the molding are white plastered walls.

December 2019 — detail of stained glass windows, east side — “Law and Justice” (left), “Commerce and Industry (right)

The theme for the windows is “Let All the Universe Praise Thee, O God.” From north to south, the stained glass windows on the east wall are titled “Praise” (installed 1985), “Law and Justice” (1986), “Commerce and Industry” (1986), “Creation” (1987), “Prophets” (1986), “Incarnation” (1986), and “Redemption” (1986). From north to south on the west wall, the windows are titled “Prayer” (1985), “The Sciences” (1985), “Art and Humanities” (1987), “University Window” (1986), “Hope and Renewal” (1985), “Pentecost” (1986), and “Resurrection” (1985).

(Stetson University) — Rudolf von Beckerath, of Beckerath organs, plays the 'house organ' at the home of Music School professors Paul and Janice Jenkins on North Sans Souci in DeLand, Florida — 1961

In 1936, a Hammond electric organ was installed in the chapel. In 1961, the present pipe organ was constructed. The German organ builder, Rudolph von Beckerath, prepared the drawings, and the University's music director, Dr. John White, and the University organist, Professor Suzanne Kidd (later, Bunting) guided negotiations. The organ pieces were fabricated in Hamburg, Germany, then shipped to Richmond in 36 crates. Three German workmen from Hamburg installed the instrument in nine weeks under White’s and Bunting’s supervision. Von Beckerath supervised the final installation and voiced the pipes. 

December 2019 — pipe organ

The third Beckerath organ in the United States, it has 1,200 pipes (40 ranks) of tin, lead and wood, the largest measuring 16 feet, the shortest being smaller and thinner than a soda straw. A direct connection between each key and each pipe creates the sound. Robert Noehren played the dedicatory organ concert on Feb. 9, 1962. Within a short time the von Beckerath organ became known to organists in Europe and America as one of the finest installations in the country. The organ is included in “A Collection of Noted Organs and Organists of the World,” by H.J. Winterton.

(Rocket Werks RVA Postcards) — University of Richmond campus, circa 1915

The original conceptual plans for the University of Richmond campus were conceived by Ralph Adams Cram, a Richmond architect and principal of the firm Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson. Cram had extensive experience designing institutional campuses, and believed that the Collegiate Gothic style was most appropriate for college campuses.

The University’s new chapel would be dedicated to Henry Mansfield Cannon, like T. C. Williams, a Richmond tobacco entrepreneur with a soft spot for UR. The architect selected to design it was Richmond’s own Charles M. Robinson, who would have considerable success with the design of public school campuses in Virginia over the course of his career.

(Mary Washington University) — Charles M. Robinson — 1867-1932

For James Madison University in 1908, Robinson developed a comprehensive plan for the campus with a Beaux Arts scheme. He also developed plans for Radford University and Virginia State College in 1913, and also designed eleven buildings for the latter. He would go on to serve as William and Mary’s College Architect from 1921-31, where he would design over 60 buildings in support of his Georgian Revival master plan.

Robinson’s work on Cannon Chapel followed the Collegiate Gothic architectural precedents set by Cram, but it also displayed his own interpretation of the style, with more elaborately embellished and decorative Gothic features than the Cram buildings. (VDHR)

(Conproco) — 2013 repairs 

Old buildings need renewal and the chapel has twice received makeovers, in 1976 and 2013. 

(In 1976) the acoustics were improved by removing felt covering from the perimeter walls and placing carpet over the tile flooring. The roof, windows, front stairs, and walk received repairs. New lighting, heating, ventilation, and public address systems were installed. The renovation budget was not sufficient to install central air conditioning, but a forced air circulation system was installed. Several pews were removed from the front rows of the chapel, allowing the chancel to be reshaped by building the aforementioned wood platform in their place. At the same time, the choir loft was restructured to have a capacity of 80 people. (VDHR)

The 2013 work was more extensive where parapet stones and pinnacles were  removed and repaired, thru-wall flashing and copper caps were installed, and corroded rebar and masonry cracks were addressed. (Conproco)

(VDHR) — 2012 nomination photo 

But that’s good. You give 84 year-old buildings all the TLC they need so that they’ll be around for another 84 years. Cannon Chapel continues to serve a vital mission for the university. Yes, it’s a unique alternate venue for meetings, concerts, and special events. It’s also a place of worship and where ceremonies of faith, like weddings or interments, can be observed. It speaks well to UR’s Baptist roots.

It’s also Mac-Daddy beautiful, so what’s your excuse? Check it out.

(Henry Mansfield Cannon Memorial Chapel is part of the Atlas RVA! Project)

[lboogie1906]

Ruth Inge Hardison (February 3, 1914 – March 23, 2016) was a sculptor, artist, and photographer, known for her busts entitled “Negro Giants in History”. Her collection called “Our Folks”, which features sculpted portraits of everyday people is of note. Her artistic productions surround historical African American portraiture, and she was interested in representing the unspoken voices of the African American past. She was the only female in the Black Academy of Arts and Letters.

She was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, her family moved to Brooklyn. She acted in the Broadway Productions of “Sweet River” and “Country Wife”. She began sculpting as a hobby. When she took part in the year-long “What a Life” production, she created a sculpture of its cast, which was displayed at the Mansfield Theatre. She studied Music and Creative Writing at Vassar College. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and Tennessee State University.

Her works began as clay, wax, or plaster molds, and were cast into cast stone or bronze. Her first bust in that series was of Harriet Tubman, which measured eight inches in height; she has created busts of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Sojourner Truth, and Mary McLeod Bethune, among others. Her bronze Douglass bust, for example, was unveiled at Princeton’s Firestone Library. Other public works include a 7-foot abstract figure called “Jubilee” which stands on the campus of Medgar Evers College, a series of 18 children on an outdoor wall of I.S.74 in Hunts Point in the Bronx, and a five-foot mother and child given to Mount Sinai Hospital to express her gratitude for their help in delivering her only child. She created a series of Ingenious Americans, little-known African American inventors, and other notables commissioned and sold by Old Taylor Whiskey. The series of nine busts included Benjamin Banneker, Charles Richard Drew, Matthew Henson, Frederick McKinley Jones, Lewis Latimer, Garrett Morgan, Norbert Rillieux, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, and Granville Woods. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[maurrodriq6547-blog]

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[nsula]

President’s List Fall 2018

NATCHITOCHES – Six hundred and fifty-four students were named to the Fall 2018 President’s List at Northwestern State University. Students on the list earned a grade point average of 4.0. Those named to the President’s List listed by hometown are as follows.

 Abbeville – Annemarie Broussard, Heather Mayard;

 Alexandria – Eric Weinzettle, Brandi Beaudoin, Leslie Bordelon, Claudia Gauthier, Ian Grant, Angela Hardin, Martha Hopewell, Jaliyah Jasper, Kasey Lacombe, Hunter Lewis, DeShonta Manning, Allison McCloud, Jalyn Mvcneal, Madeline Mitchell, Jennifer Prevot, Jabari Reed, Sailor Reed, Shacora Simpson, Kayla Whittington;                            

 Anacoco -- Nicole Fitzgerald, Brittany Lewis, Caitlin McKee, Cassandra Osborne, Seth Ponthieux, Casey Williams, Megan Williams;

 Anchorage – Sydney Bulot;

 Arcadia – Antavious Roberson, Ralyn Simpson;

 Arnaudville -- Zachary Leboeuf, Alayna Moreau, Misti Richard;

Ashland – Victoria Roderick;

Baker – Katelyn Kennedy;

 Ball – Nickolas Juneau, Joseph Reynolds;

 Barksdale, AFB – Kimberly Ventura Gonzalez;                  

 Basile – Adam Elkins;

 Bastrop – Nikkia Lewis;

 Baton Rouge – Meagan Barbay, Diamanisha Betts, Madison Harris, Hannah Knoff, Jordan Lancaster, Tremia Lockett, Henrietta Mercer, Daniel Midyett, Emma Rivet, Victoria Simmons;                              

 Belcher – Sierra Lang;

 Belgrade, Serbia -- Emilija Dancetovic;

 Belmont – Kelly Bass;

 Benton – Victoria Berry, Tamara Korner, Bridget Miller, Jessica O’Neal, Finnley Plaster, Comis Waddell, Kathryn Watts;

 Bienville – Julie Martin;

 Boise, Idaho – Jessica Anderson;

 Bossier City – Maddison Abreo, Jayde Barnett, Brittany Batchelor, Hannah Brooks, Kendall Caple, Izabela Carabelli, Callie Crockett, Peyton Davis, Hannah Gates, Joshua Greer, Jada Grigsby, Peyton Harville, Caylin Head, Savanna Head, Nicholas Hopkins, Kijah Johnson, Brandon Larkin, Chelsea Laverdiere, April Lebick, Katherine Parson, Colby Ponder, Taylor Powell, Jade Reich, Jami Rivers, Jalyn Robertson, Reid Rogers, Madison Rowland, Donna Spurgeon, Savannah Stevens, James Taylor, Kaitlyn Walker, Eric Zheng;

 Boutte – Samantha Vernor;

 Boyce – Katelyn Brister, Dylan Frazier, Sonya Hill;

 Breaux Bridge – Beyonkan Heine, Emily Roy;

 Broussard – Dylan Dunford;

 Brownsville, Texas – Emily Saldivar;

 Brussels – Leyla Fettweis;

 Bunkie – Emily Arnaud,

 Burleson, Texas -- Addison Pellegrino, Cassandra Smith;

 Calhoun – Grace Cummings, Robert Mccandlish;

 Calvin – Erin Price;

 Campti – Alisha Bedgood, Rebekah Cole, Madelynne Greer;

Carencro – Melody Woodard;

 Carrollton, Texas – Victoria Miller;

 Cartagena, Colombia – Aura Hernandez Canedo, Jorge Ojeda Munoz, Hassik Vasquez Narvaez;

Cheneyville -- Katelyn Baronne;

 Clarence – Jalicia Small;

 Clifton – Brittany Shackleford;

 Colfax – Alyssa Coleman, Lessie Rushing, Elizabeth Slayter, Morgan Vandegevel;

 Conroe, Texas – Sidney Salmans;

 Converse – Shayna Brown, Hayley Farmer, Wade Hicks, Mallory Mitchell, Hannah Womack, Logan Woodward;

Cotton Valley -- Nicholas Smith;

 Coushatta – Sydney Anderson, Kaylee Antilley, Debra Hanson, Jon Hester, Mary James, Cynthia Lawson, Baley McAlexander, Precious Smith;

 Covington -- Henri Blanchat, Justin Brogdon, Rachael Coyne, Sarah Shiflett;

 Crowley -- Ma'Kayleen Milson;

 Custer, South Dakota – China Whitwer;

 Cypress, Texas – Alexis Warren;

Dakota Dunes, South Dakota – Eryn Sandwell;

 Denham Springs – Joni Burlew;

DeRidder – Delia Amadiz, Lauren Callis, Tabitha Deer, Colten Denning, Falon Drake, Rebekah Frantz, Shydae Hammond, Karli Kennedy, Briana March, Brittney March, Shayla Miller, Jessica Mullican, Hannah Plummer, Rebecca Richmond, Cheyenne Vander, Michael Waryas;

 Des Allemands – Emily Blanchard, Claire Schouest;

 Destrehan – Hannah Boquet, Stephanie Webre;

 Deville – Briana Ashley, Allison Deglandon, Amber Kreideweis, Aubree Lampert, Kenedy Lampert, Madison Lejeune, Maci Mayeux, Caleb Rhodes;

 Diamondhead, Mississippi – Melissa Boyanton;

 Dodson – Rachel Broomfield;

 Doyline – Lucas Darbonne;

 Dry Prong – Jared Boydstun, Ashlee Elliott;

 Edmond, Oklahoma – Payton Hartwick, Ashley Medawattage;

 El Paso, Texas – Christopher Barron;

 Elizabeth – Amanda Cloud, Sadie Perkins;

 Elton – Kayla Bellard;

 Endicott, New York – Tonya Rackett;

 Evergreen – Walter Armand;

 Falfurrias, Texas – Marco Arevalo;

 Farmerville – Malissa Loyd;

 Florien – Shayla Duhon, Amber Lewing, Caroline Matthews, Dylan Roberts, Jordan Weldon;

Folson – Shaylee Laird, Sarah Moore;

 Forest Hill – Rafael Sierra;

 Forney, Texas – Jobey Rusk, Jared Walker, Jayden Wheeler;

 Fort Polk – Brittany Chadwick, Kyley Cole, Shaunda Gordon, Miranda Illsley, Cynthia Schwartz, Sasha Trevino, Cherie Martel;

 Fort Worth, Texas – Corban James;

 Franklin – Emily Kutchenriter;

 Franklinton – Crystal Newman;

 Frisco, Texas – Caroline Shepherd;

 Garland, Texas – Sierra Stone;

Glenmora – Alan Crowder, Reagan Humphries, Melissa Lanier, Faith Lawrence;

 Goldonna – David Day, Harley Godwin;

 Gonzales – Rebecca Marchand, Nicole Moody, Molly Moran, Bailee Ramey, Denee Smith;

 Grand Prairie, Texas – Clayton Casner;

 Grapevine, Texas – Margaret Black;

 Greenwell Springs -- Cheramie Kravitz;

Greenwood -- Char'Tarian Wilson;

 Gretna – Nadia Johnson;

 Haughton – Luther Cain, Jessica Chase, Brittony Cole, Randi Corley, Bethanie Couch, Alexis Hoeltje, Victoria Lodrini, Savanah Molina, Amber Simmons, Heather Wooden, Dawn Young;

 Heath, Texas – Megan Lohmiller;

 Henderson, Texas – John Floyd, Emily Ortiz;

 Hermon, Maine -- Allessa Ingraham-Albert;

 Hessmer – Ryan Armand, Lacee-Beth Cazelot;

Hineston – Gabrielle Merchant Langley, Tylee Stokes;

 Hope Mills, North Carolina -- Taylor Camidge;                          

 Hornbeck – Brandy Alford, Lane Alford, Kimberly Runyon;

 Houma – Alexis Dardar, Billy Gorr, Sarah Lajaunie, Corinne Paris;

Houston, Texas – Kendall Westfall;

 Humble, Texas – Aiyana Bean;

 Huntington, Texas – Travis Carrell;

 Iowa – Keiona Guy, Matthew Phillips;

 Irving, Texas – Darria Williams;

 Jacksonville Beach, Floria – Katherine Medlin;

 Jefferson – Jaleia Parker;

 Jena – Christian Aymond, Alanna Hailey;

 Jennings – Aimee Boothe, Alyson Brown, Janee Charles, Rachel Edwards, Rachelle Edwards, Wesley Simien, Lydia Williams;

 Jonesboro – Jordan Winston;

 Kaplan – Gabriel LeMoine;

 Katy, Texas – Erik Carver;

Keithville – John-David May, Cora Procell, Janae Richardson, Joanna Sims;

 Kenner -- Brooke Petkovich, Parul Sharma;

 Kentwood – Jenna Morris;

Kileen, Texas - Temitope Buraimoh, Arlyn Johnson;

 Kinder -- Jonathon Villareal;

 Lacombe – William Simpson;

Lafayette -- Jeffrey Blossom, Abbey Broussard, Luke Dupre, Michael Joseph, Emilee Leger, Robert Middleton, Andrea Saelios, Dante Saelios, Forest Strang;                            

 Lake Charles – Jovan Avery, Abigail Brady, Shawn Becton, Ashtyn Heap, Amanda Mustian, Sarah Sargent;

 Larose – Eric Bourg;

 Las Vegas, Nevada – April Ficarrotta;

 Lawtell – Karoline Guidry;                            

 Lecompte – Hannah Glaze;

 Leesville – Sara Bishop, Autumn Boggs, Anthony Cantrell, Raven Collins, Carter Coriell, Junette Cutshaw, Cameron Davis, Chloe Dowden, Sarah Gibbs-Jarrell, Geoffrey Goins, Jessica Gray, Cheyenne Grigg, Jessica Herring, Ashley Hunt, Leigha Jackson, Bethany Kay, Emilee Keuten, Mercedes Mattes, Kelsea Mckinney, Paula Pilkenton, Linsey Preddy, Danielle Smyth, Peggy Stanley, Linda Strauss, Megan Tucker, Kristin Whistine;

 Little Elm, Texas – Hunter Gagnon;

 Logansport – Trenton Timmons, Rebecca Tomlin;

 Longview, Texas – Gustavo Corrales, Kelli Hickerson, Samantha Morris;

 Lyons, Kansas – Jennifer Rogers, Mary Rogers;

Machesney Park, Illinois – Alicia Teran;

 Mamou – Alex Chapman, Meggie Granger, Nicholas Saucier;

 Mandeville -- Shannon Roussell;

Mangham -- Rebekah Aultman;

Mansfield – Brooke Smith, Madylin Sullivan;

 Mansura – Bailey Quebedeaux, Distiny Thompson;

 Many – Skyler Ezernack, Heidi Knight, Jaleah Lee, Lathan Meyers, Xavier Montgomery, Chas Pilcher, Tessa Reeves, Samantha Simmons;

 Marksville – Zachary Moreau, Paulette Thomas;  

 Marrero – Lorn Bourgeois;

 Marshall, Texas – Laurann Graham, D’Sherrick Williams;

 Marthaville – Emeri Manasco, Hanna Pardee;

Maurepas – Cameron Mayfield, Abigail Smith;

 Maurice – Adam Courville;

 Melissa, Texas – Kylah Banasky;

 Merryville -- Kalan Townsley;

 Metairie – Kaitlyn Arena, Morgan Nuss, Holly Schiler, Mary Strickland, Sadye Treadway;                          

 Minden – Aubrey Dennis, Jess Easley, Laura Gryder, Taya Hester, Kiara Jenkins, Abigail Reynolds, Amanda Rogers, Heather White;

 Mississauga, Ontario, Canada – Kayla Bomben;

 Mobile, Alabama – Emily Cristina;

 Monroe – Demonta Brown, Aaron Hunt, Grace Underwood;

 Montgomery -- Shelly Crew, Katelym Feazell;

 Mooringsport – Abigail Wolfe;

 Mora – Gracy Rowell;

Moreauville – Sean Casey;

 Morgan City – Allie Atkinson, Jeremy Orgeron;

 Morse – Kierra Linden;

 Mount Hermon -- Warren McFarlain;

Muleshoe, Texas -- Caitlyn Barber;

 Murphy, Texas – Bronte Rhoden;

 Murrieta, California – LaQuitta Wilkins;

Napoleonville – Elizabeth Coleman;

Natchitoches -- Austin Aldredge, Ragan Aple, Luz Arrieta Jimenez, Rebecca Autrey, Sarah Aviles, Francisco Ballestas-Sayas, Joshua Below, Dylan Bennett, Sarah Bergeron, Allison Berry, Sara Coates, Anna Coffey, Fabian Correa Guette, Haley Dahlhoff, Elliot Davis, Ruth Garcia Rodriguez, Samantha Hall, Kaitlin Hatten, Taylor Johnson, Anthony Jones, Mary Keran, Colby Koontz, Scott Macqueen, Miranda Mayeaux, Rylie Mcfarlain, Jordan Mitchell, Maina Ibn Mohammed, Kaitlyn Nieman, Brooklyn Noe, Abigail Poe, Jonah Poe, Melissa Remo, Shelby Riedel, Alyssa Roberts, Kayla  Roquemore, Emily Ryder, Emily Salter, Madison Shade, Melissa Slaughter, Madeline Taylor, David Thibodaux, Kristan Valdez, Lantz Vercher, Elizabeth Vienne, Madysen Watts;

New Iberia -- Jaci Jones, Grace Kerns, Payton Romero:

 New Llano – Nicole Naral;

New Milford, Connecticut -- Lisa Rosenberg;

 New Orleans – Jerome Baudy, Haleigh Giorlando Wall, Jaime Hendrickson, Tayla Oliver;

Noble – Allie Ebarb, Collin Procell;

Noyen sur Serthe, France -- Emma Miachon;

Oakdale -- Cheyenne Bertrand, Alyssa Cole, Katelyn Johnson, Coriana Moreaux, James Obrien;

 Oil City – Ryan Connella;

 Olla – Brianna Corley, Kristen Smith;

Opelousas -- Lauren Hebert, Keshayla Jackson, Alexia Rubin, Jaylen St. Romain;

Pacifica, California -- Nicholas Pierotti;

Palmetto, Florida --   Cindy Hernandez;

 Paris, Texas -- Jordan Whatley;

 Pearland, Texas – Tanisha Williams;

 Pelican – Mary Myers;

Pereira Risaralda, Colombia -- Mariana Ospina Rivas;

 Pineville – Malek Abdelhadi, Taylor Bailey, Riley Bell, Tasha Blanchard, Christian Boudreaux, Latasha Cain, Noelle Carruth, Amber Edmisson, Erin Fallis, Kara Johnson, Michael Martin, Emily McCarty, Cade Mitchell, Wendi Powell, Morgan VanBuren, Corbi Walters, Wesley Williams, Alan Winegeart;                        

 Pitkin – Mattie Stewart;

 Plaquemine – Kameron Landry;

 Plaucheville -- Brooke Dauzat;                            

Pollock – Jadynn Giles;

 Pontotoc, Mississippi – Elizabeth McCullar;

 Port Allen – Makayla Lacy;

 Port Barre – Madison Estis;

 Port Orange, Florida – Sean Logan;

 Prairieville – Rebekah Bonner, Colleen Carline, Roy Cobb, Andrea Gathercole, Sarah Makin;

Princeton – LeKayla Smith;

 Provencal – Kara Gandy, Rebekah Orsborn, Bailey Scarbrough;

Ragley – Elizabeth Jaycox, Cole Spponer;

 Raleigh, North Carolina – Aleida, Alfonso;

 Ringgold – Regan Edwards;

 Riverview, Florida – Robyn Larson;

 Robeline – Jessica Clark, Patricia Goodwin, Alyssa Maley, Bergen Oge, Caleb Wester;

 Round Rock, Texas – Evan Nafe;

 Ruston – Jena Green;

 Saint Francisville – Sara Baggett, Jordan Bringedahl;

 Saint Martinville – Blake Blanchard, Alli Douet;                        

 Saint Rose – Alexis Mancuso;

 Saline – Madelyn Cheatwood;

 San Antonio, Texas – Tiffany Rubin;

 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan – Loren MacLennan;

 Scott – Sydni Larriviere, Kristen Prejean;

 Seabrook, Texas -- Amy Whitecotton;

 Searcy, Arkansas – Lora Wood;

 Shenzhen, China – Yinglin Yuan;

Shreveport -- Lindsey Adkins, Mackenzie Allen, Hannah Angell, Yasmeen Bader, James Baldwin, Katelynn Benge, Maddison Benge, Hallie Bloxom, Erin Brown, Kaysie Burgess, Abigail Davis, Jackson Driggers, Jennifer Eaves, Jennifer Elliott, Samantha Freeman, Peyton Gamble, Leah Gould, Melina Johnson, Tatyanna Kinsey, Kaitlyn Knighton, Katherine Mckay, Maxey McSwain, Madison Milligan, Myles Mitchell, Cayla Morris, Megan Osborn, Mallory Parker, Bailey Patton, Zachary Person, Haley Pickett, Taylor Poleman, Patricia Reed, Madelyn Ruiz, Catherine Shaw, Shelby Sowers, DeAndre Stevenson, Khaila Tucker, Ansonia Wisner;

 Sibley – Julianna Schober;

 Simmesport – Bailie Marsh, Elise Normand;

 Simsboro – Autumn Smith, Shelby Wall;

 Slaughter – Ciara Gibbs;

 Slidell – Ayrianna Edwards, Katherine Gallinghouse, Parker Gwaltney, Abigail Miller, Sabrina Miller, Holly Penta, Rachel Reed, Jourdan Waddell, Olivia Warren;                      

 Spring, Texas -- Sydney Normand;

 Stinnett, Texas – Dalin Williams;

 Stonewall – Mildred Hooper, Mallory McConathy, Emily McConnell, Brooke Meade, Clinton Oliver, Mackenzie Panther, Kassidy Parker;                          

 Stuttgart, Germany -- Antonia Blattner;

 Sulphur – Tiffany Lyons, Bryttani MacNamara;

 Sunset – Lindsay Thibodeaux;

 The Woodlands, Texas – Tyler Rapp;

 Thibodaux – Sheridan Duet, Maegan Davis;

Tool, Texas – Kimberly Kidney;

 Toronto Ontario – Rhea Verma;

 Trout – Makayla King, Zachary Long, Deana Poole, Devon Smith, Andrea Walters;

 Venice, Florida – Alexis Weaver;

 Ventress – Racheal Gaude;

 Ville Platte – Gabrielle Chapman, Joshua Galland, Alex Gautreaux;

 Waco, Texas – Isabella Hudson;

 Walker – Johnny Brister;

 Washington – Tarik Andrus;

 Welsh – Alisha Ledoux;

 West Helena, Arkansas – Brittani Arana;

 West Monroe – Julianne Cousans, Laura Lovell;

 White Castle – Cassidy Blanchard, Gavin Landry;

 Whitehouse, Texas – Jackson Allen;

 Wilmington, Delaware – Amy Bourett;

 Winnfield -- Tamierrea Alexander, John Collins, Simona Curry, Michael Duke, D’Tyria Duncan, Joshua Goins, Kassidy Grantadams, Kelsey Jordan, Elizabeth Parker, Caroline Womack, Maggie Womack;

 Winnipeg, Manitoba – Tyra Duma;

Woodworth – Christian Jeansonne, Jonathan Magnano;

Wylie, Texas – Alexis Perry;

 Yaroslav, Russia -- Polina Mutel;

Youngsville – Jessica Gilmore, Brandon Granger;

 Zakopane, Poland -- Patrycja Polanska;

 Zwolle – Shakelia Maxie, Holden Rivers.                          

[hrhduchessoflancaster]

Chapter Seventy-Three: Getting Real

As they returned to their normal lives at the end of the week, Harry and Elle were entrusted with attending the Royal Variety Performance at the Royal Albert Hall on the thirteenth. On the day before the performance, a week after they had returned, the couple had yet another appointment with Dr. Yates, who had informed them that Elle was going to begin feeling the baby’s movements within the week. Needless to say, the parents-to-be where very excited about this and longed to feel their child’s movements as soon as possible. From then on, Elle had her hand constantly on her lower stomach, trying to feel the baby. She often massaged her belly and hoped it lured him or her to move or kick in any way she could feel.

Knowing it was all getting closer and closer to the baby’s arrival, Harry and Elle decided on finally putting together the nursery. They had ordered a few furnitures online and they had finally arrived,Harry, William and Ed being the laboured hands who put them together, while Elle, Kate and Valerie put together the colour schemes for the nursery. The couple had decided on pale yellow as the main element, with savannah animals on the walls and a bit of toys and wooden furniture to finish the decor.

It took two days to get everything in place but, as the room was set, the furniture put where she wanted and the decorations hang according to her plan, Elle was left alone to properly unpack the baby clothes she had gotten from her mum and a few new ones she had bought herself. She was idly humming a little lullaby when she felt a kick in her lower stomach. It surprised her and she instantly put her hand on the place she had felt it.

“ Nugget? Was that you baby?”, she whispered. A few seconds later, another kick followed and Elle giggled with joy.

“ Harry!”, she shouted. “ Harry, come quickly!”

In a instant, her husband came rushing through the door, face red and out of breath. “ What's wrong? What’s happening? Do we need to go to the hospital?”, he asked quickly, coming to her side at once.

“ No… no… it’s nothing like that. We’re fine. We’re more than fine actually.”, she replied and Harry let out a loud sigh.

“ What is it, then?”, he asked her. Elle extended her hand to him, which he took, and placed it on her stomach, where she had felt the previous kick.

“ Come on, Nugget. Show daddy what you did.”, Elle said. It took a while, but he felt it. A powerful kick, just to the right of where his palm was. He looked up at Elle’s face in awe and extreme joy. His entire face lit up, feeling his child kicking.

“ Nugget is kicking? That was really our baby kicking?”, he asked her in bewilderment. She nodded her head and they chuckled together, feeling yet another kick.

“ I think Nugget likes it when we laugh.”, said Elle and they chuckled even harder. Dropping on his knees, Harry pulled her blouse up, caressing her skin and kissing her lower stomach, as his wife hand her hands on his hair.

“ Daddy already loves you so much, Nugget. So, so much. Your mama, too. We both love you… and I love you both.”, he said, bringing tears to Elle’s eyes.

************

That evening, Harry and Elle arrive at the Royal Albert Hall to the flash of photographers and a few shouts from the crowd. At the entrance, they were greeted by Laurie Mansfield and Giles Cooper, the president of the Royal Variety charity and a chairman respectively. After posing for the photographers, the couple made their way to the Royal Box.

Upon arriving there, they stood together, side by side, as the national anthem was played and sung. Once it was over, they took their seat, with Daniel, Lisa and Ronald being them, followed by John, Leo and Ingrid.

“ Your Royal Highnesses, lords, ladies and gentleman, please welcome your host for this evening, Mr. Jack Whitehall.”, said the presenter.

“ Ah, ladies and gentleman, good evening and welcome to the Royal Variety Show two thousand and sixteen!”, said Jack Whitehall and the people applauded. “ And and extra special welcome to the royal couple making their debut tonight at the Royal Variety, Their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex!”, he continued and the people roared in applauses. Harry and Elle smiled and nodded their heads, Harry shaking his in amusement.

“ I’m so excited to be here tonight, specially because I’m standing in front of one of my heroes. Prince Harry is genuinely one of my heroes.”, said Jack and Elle chuckled beside Harry, squeezing his arm gently.

“ Do we have any Prince Harry fans here this evening?”, the host asked and was met by a resounding cheer from the audience. “ I knew it! But ladies, ladies and some gentlemen, you must contain yourselves. His Royal Highness is a married man now. And a future daddy as well.”, said Jack and the audience cheered again, louder this time.

“ Yes, yes, congratulations Your Royal Highnesses! We’re thrilled to have another royal baby to stamp our windows with more royal baby merchandise.”, he continued and the audience laughed.

“ No, but truly, we’re are indeed very, very happy for you both, and I also would like to thank you, Your Royal Highnesses… on behalf of the ginger population.”, he said and the audience laughed even more. “ Yes! Since you’re both ginger, our future prince or princess is bound to be a ginger too. And might I say, what a beautiful shade of ginger hair you have, ma’am. I hope he or she get’s it from you.”, said Jack and Elle and Harry laughed hard, along with the audience.

“ Oh good, they’re laughing. Well, I think I might just get on with the show then. Your Royal Highnesses, lords, ladies and gentleman, please put your hands together for the biggest band in the planet, One Direction!”, he exclaimed introducing the band. Harry and Elle clapped and listened to the performance. After a few performances and a break, which Elle was immensely thankful for, Jack Whitehall introduced Josh Groban to Elle’s delight.

“ Oh I adore his songs! And his voice…ahh…”, Elle said to Harry who rolled his eyes and shook his head. Then, as he sang, she felt a small kick inside her belly. A smiled sprung to her face and she put her hand on her protuberant bump.

“ I think, Nugget likes his voice too.”, said Elle to Harry in a whisper, close to his ear. Harry turned his head and looked quizzically at her then, when he noticed where her left hand stood, his eyes widened. Elle nodded and he smiled. He looked at Elle in amazement and she took his hand and placed on the lower side of her abdomen. A few seconds later, another kick was felt. Harry and Elle looked at each other and smiled. Their baby was happy and moving and they couldn’t be more overjoyed by the little miracle they had created.

The host continued throughout the night, making jokes and introducing new bands, artists, comedians and performers, occasionally messing with the young royal couple. Finally, when the performance came to and end, with all performers and the host onstage, Elle and Harry stood from their seats and clapped along with the audience the amazing performance.

“ Oh what a fantastic evening it’s been! And now ladies and gentleman, if you please, give me three cheers for Their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex!”, said Jack Whitehall which was followed by loud cheers from the audience. Harry and Elle smiled and waved at them, nodding their heads in thanks.

Then, the couple makes their way the stage to meet the performers. They were introduced to One Direction, Rick Martin, Little Mix, the Corrs, comedians, cast members from two musicals, who all gave Elle and Harry congratulations for the baby. Then they were introduced to Josh Groban, giving Elle a bit of a fangirl moment.

“ It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Groban.”, said Harry shaking the man’s hand.

“ Oh it’s a honour to meet you both, Your Royal Highnesses.”, said Josh Groan shaking Elle’s hand.

“ My wife is a big fan of yours!”, he continued and Elle chuckled. Josh Groan turned his head to Elle with a charming smile plastered on his face.

“ It’s true. And it seems this little one is already a fan too.”, said Elle touching her belly. “ Little Nugget couldn’t stop moving while you sang.”, she continued and both men laughed.

“ Well I’m glad to have such important and wonderful fans.”, replied Josh Groban. Then, Elle and Harry finally reached Jack Whitehall.

“ Thank you for tonight, Mr. Whitehall.”, said Elle greeting him with a handshake.

“ The pleasure was all mine, Your Royal Highness. And forgive me if any of my jokes offended you.”, he said smirking.

“ Oh no… it was fine…”, Elle replied chuckling. “ They were funny. And I’m not speaking only for myself. I’m sure my husband felt very entertained as well.”

“ Well… that’s a relief!”, said Jack, sighing. Harry then came to her side and shook hands with the presenter.

“ Thank you, Jack. That was a very nice show.”, said Harry smiling. “ But, if I’m honest, I think the king of banter here it is you not I.”, joked Harry and the trio chuckled.

“ One can only hope to achieve your standards, sir.”, joked Jack and they chuckled once again. Feeling another kick, Elle smiled and put a hand on her bump.

“ Oh my… this one is a kicker!”, she said and they men turned to look at her, smiling.

“ Maybe there’s a footballer or rugby player in there, ma’am.”, said Jack smiling.

“ Oh who knows? All I know is that he or she has a very powerful pair of little legs.”, said Elle chuckling.

************

Over the next week, Elle and Harry had arranged and rearranged the baby’s room hundreds of times, always adding a little something to it. First, there were gifts from Rick and Mary; George’s and Charlotte’s rend-me-downs from William and Kate; Ed then decided to buy a super fancy, over the top stroller for the baby because, in his words, he was going to be the best uncle this child could ever had and he was determined to beat William for that title.

Then, Melissa had come for a visit with her husband and the children, and brought a notebook, full of pro-parenting tips she had compiled for her and Harry. “ Trust me, you’re gonna need those.”, she had said to them.

Finally, Elle had decided she need more books on the nursery because she was adamant Nugget would have as many age appropriate books as he or she possibly could. She stocked on the classics, which had been her own, as well as putting in the shelves a few new ones she’s gotten from Trevor, who had been such a sweetheart when he came for tea. “ If this baby is going to be half the book worm you are, he or she needs to begin well and start their reading ASAP.”, he had said to her.

All in all, the nursery had become a very good mix of her and Harry. Their likes and personalities were combined in the room, just like their child was going to be. Speaking of which, Elle had finally began with her cravings. She didn’t think she was going to have them, but boy, was she wrong. Georgiana had warned them and assured the couple it was perfectly normal and advised she’d get a nutritionist to keep her diet well balanced.

Following the doctor’s recommendations, Elle stuck with her programme but occasionally got a little off the books. From salty popcorn with chocolate syrup to watermelon juice and chewing on ice, Elle was obsessing over very different things in a matter of few days.

Harry thought it was all very amusing and, most of the time, joined her on her crazy preferences. As they neared December and the weather got colder, Elle had began craving hot chocolate with tiny marshmallows and traditional Welsh cakes. But mostly, Welsh cakes.

“ They’re just so good! The spongy texture, the raisins and sultanas… the perfect combination of spices… heaven on every bite.”, said Elle dreamingly, as she took a another bite of her Welsh cake. The Cambridges, who were currently having breakfast with them, chuckled as they watched the pregnant woman eat.

“ I’ll take your word for it, sister.”, said William grinning.

“ Oh you should try it! Here, take some!”, said Elle excitedly, pushing a Welsh cake unto his plate. He eyed the round, sightly burnt, sugar covered bun and raised his eyebrows.

“ Elle, darling, you know I can’t eat things with cloves in them, right?”, said William. Elle’s face went blank and she opened her eyes wide.

“ Oh my goodness! I had completely forgotten about your allergy! I could have killed you! I’m so so so sorry!”, said Elle, starting to panic. Seeing her stress level was raising, Harry who was sat beside her, took her hand into his and squeeze it gently.

“ Love? Look at me, please.”, he said and she turned her face towards him.

“ Deep breaths… that’s it…”, he coached her and she slowed down. “ Better?”, he asked her and Elle nodded her head.

“ Thank you, my darling. I’m sorry Will. I’m just a little over the edge. I have so much on mind, the baby’s been kicking me constantly and I haven’t been sleeping that well, so the stress level are a tad high.”, she confessed.

“ Don’t worry. I know how it gets. Kate was like that as well, right poppet?”, said William.

“ I was… Charlotte was quite the kicker. George, not as much, but I still found it bothersome at times.”, said Kate, sympathetic.

“ You know what helped calming them down whenever they went on a kicking spree?”, said Kate and Elle waited patiently for her to answer.

“ Singing to them. Or reading. Listening to the sound of your voice can really calm them down. Harry can help on that part too.”, said Kate. “ William would often read out loud to my stomach. I know it seems a little crazy but it helps.”

“ I’ll try it. Heavens now I’ve tried a lot of things this week.”, she replied.

************

That night, as they prepared to lay side by side in bed, each other’s hands placed upon her growing stomach, Harry and Elle took turns into reading to their little Nugget. They had decided on Winnie the Pooh, one of their favourites growing up. On Harry's turn, Elle rested her head on his shoulder and quietly listened as he spoke, barely louder than a whisper, to their child.

“ How do you spell love?, asked Piglet. You don’t spell it…you feel it., replied Pooh”, Harry read it. He was about to continue when he noticed his wife was passed out on his shoulder, breathing evenly and looked so peaceful, he didn’t even want to move his head. Smiling, he closed the book and put it on the nightstand, taking great care not to wake Elle up.

“ You’ve finally let your mama sleep, hun?”, whispered Harry.

“ You know, she’s been feeling very stressed lately and I know she puts on a brave face for us but she’s a little worried. Why, you ask? Because there’s a very bad group of people trying to hurt us and, although mummy says she’s confident the police will catch them, I can see in her eyes how it’s getting to her.”, he continued.

“ But I won’t let anything happen to you or her.  She’s been through so much and she’s been so brave. Your mama is an incredible woman. And you should never forget that. She’s a heroine, even when she can’t see it herself.”, Harry whispered, gently caressing Elle’s cheek.

“ So, my little Nugget, let’s give her a prove rest and let her sleep more. Try not to kick her as much, alright?”, he told his child, as he watched his wife sleep. Smiling, her pulled her to his chest and covered them both with the fluffy duvet. Turning off the lights, Harry sighed happily as he felt Elle snuggle closer to him, while his arms held her closer to him. This is precisely where he was meant to be.

***********

“ We should really start thinking about names”, said Elle one morning as they were chilling in front of the telly, Sir Lancelot snoozing on her side. The puppy had taken to lick her stomach from time to time and both Harry and Elle thought it was adorable.

“ Yeah… I was thinking the same. How about we make a list with girls, boys and neutral names and then we can discuss it?”, suggested Harry. Chuckling, Elle reached for her phone on the coffee table.

“ As always, I’m way ahead of you, darling.”, said Elle grinning. She popped open her notes and showed him the list of baby names she had compiled.

“ Alright… that works too.”, said Harry, smiling. “ Tell me the name you have there and we can decide on favourites. Sounds good?”

“ Absolutely!”, she replied excitedly. “ Are you ready? Because remember, we have to pick at least three names for the baby. You know how your father was very insistent on that.”, reminded Elle.

_______Flashback

It was a snowy afternoon when Elle and Harry arrived at Clarence House for lunch. Charles and Camilla had insisted they had not seen enough of them lately and wanted updates on their and the baby’s lives.

“ Hello you two! How’s everything? How are you and the baby?”, asked Camilla, as they stepped into the familiar hall.

“ Very well, thank you. We’re all doing very well.”, replied Elle, smiling. Her baby bump was becoming more noticeable every week and Camilla noticed that. Harry smiled and placed his hand on her waist. Just as he was about to ask about his father, Charles came strolling down the hall, a huge smile on his face.

“ Harry! Eleanor! How wonderful to see you both!”, he said, happily greeting them with hugs and kisses.

“ You look incredible, my dear. Positively glowing, doesn’t she, darling?”, said Charles, turning to Camilla, who nodded her head.

“ And you, my boy? How’s your imminent fatherhood treating you?”, he asked in a joking mood.

“ I’m good… still grasping the idea that in a few months I’ll be holding my child in my arms, but all good. I can’t wait for it, actually.”, said Harry, smiling at him.

“ Ah… children are indeed a blessing.”, said Charles. “ I remember when you were born. Quite a pack of lungs you had there…”, he joked.

“ Let’s hope Nugget isn’t as loud.”, said Elle chuckling.

“ Nugget?”, asked Camilla.

“ Oh… it’s what we’ve been calling the baby, instead of he or she. We don’t want to know the sex so we figured a nickname would be better.”, explained Elle and Camilla nodded her head, understandingly.

“ We’ll we can talk more about the baby in a minute. But first, let’s get to the dinning room, shall we?”, said Charles. “ Vanessa has prepared your favourite, Harry.”

After lunch, they gathered at the Drawing Room for some tea. Elle begrudgingly had herbal while eyeing Harry’s English Breakfast. The jam was strawberry flavoured, one of her favourites, so it helped with the temptation.

“ So, tell us, have you began thinking on names?”, asked Camilla.

“ Oh… not yet. It’s a bit early days, don’y you think?”, said Elle.

“ Nonsense, my dear! When Diana was expecting William, we had name selections pilled up from the moment we knew.”, said Charles.

“ Well… we don’t want to rush, pa. There’s no need for that. We still have plenty of time to thin about it.”, said Harry, stepping in. His hand found Elle’s and he gave her a squeeze.

“ Of course, of course. There’s no need to get defensive. But you must start soon. And there’s a tradition to be followed, you know. At least three names. And they ought to be family staples like Charles, George, Elizabeth, Alexandra and so on. It’s tradition and nor I note your grandparents will expect less than that.”, said Charles. Noticing both Elle and Harry were getting a little irritated, Camilla decided to change the subject.

“ And how are you settling in, dear? With your marriage and so soon having a baby…”, she asked kindly.

“ It’s all been very smooth, I must say. Smoother than I thought it would be. Of course I also have Harry and a wonderful support team.”, replied Elle.

“ That’s good to hear.”, said Camilla. “ And patronages? Have you started with any yet?”, she asked.

“ I visited Historic Royal Palaces. I became a patron as soon as I got married and I though it was a good place to start. I’ve known them for years and trust the people who run it.”, said Elle.

“ Fantastic choice, I must say.”, said Charles. “ I believe we should improve and preserve history and our nation’s memory as much as we can, don’t you agree, Eleanor?”, he asked her.

“ Absolutely! It’s one of my causes as a patron. I’ve stablished a few other patronages and organizations that work with history, in many different levels. For example, I’ve decided to become a patron of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Brighton Youth Choir because they both preserve our cultural history though their craft. And that’s part of what being a historian is to me.”, said Elle and the people around her smiled at her commitment and passion.

“ I believe you’ll do incredibly well with your patronages, my dear.”, said Charles, squeezing her hand.

________ End of Flashback

“ So, here’s what I’ve got. Say yes or no, alright? Boys names first.”, said Elle and Harry nodded his head.

“ Anthony.”

“ Yes.”, replied Harry.

“ Oliver”, she asked.

“ No”, he said.

“Thomas”

“ Yes.”

“James”

“ Yes.”

“Alexander”

“ No”

“ Luke”

“ No”

“ Frederick”

“Yes”

“Arthur”

“ Yes, though it’s in my brother’s name. I don’t know how I feel about that.”, said Harry.

“ It’s also in your father’s name, so chill.”, replied Elle.

“Theo.”

“ No”

“David”

“ Kinda, yeah… I have it on my name.”, said Harry

“ I know, that’s why I put it in there. Speaking of which, do you think we should consider Henry? As a middle name I mean?”, Elle asked.

“ I don’t think so… it’s too narcissistic.”, replied Harry.

“ Alright. Next one, Owen.”

“ Yes.”

“ Jasper”

“ No.”

“ Alright then. That were the boys names. The one we both like are: Anthony, Thomas, James, Frederick, Arthur, David and Owen.”, said Elle smiling.

“ Those are good names.”, said Harry.

“ They are, right? We just have to decided which one we’re gonna use and which is going to be a possible first name.”, said Elle.

“ Yeah… that’s gonna be hard…”, said Harry and Elle nodded her head agreeing.

“ But we can think about that later. Now, girls names.”, said Elle.

“ Hit me.”, said Harry.

“ Sophia.”, said Elle

“ Yes.”

“ Alice”

“Yes”

“Emma”

“ No”

“ Amelie”

“No”

“ Victoria”

“ Yes”

“ Mary”

“ Yeah... kinda.”

“Lucy”

“No”

“ Elizabeth”

“ Yes… but only if we give her a nickname because otherwise it’ll be confusing.”, said Harry and Elle chuckled, nodding her head.

“ Louisa”

“Yes”

“ Alexandra. That’s my middle name in case you're wondering.”, said Elle.

“ Yes, and I knew that.”, replied Harry.

“ Frances, for your mother and grandmother”

“ Yes. Absolutely yes.”

“ Margaret”

“No, too heavy for a little girl. And too emotional for granny.”, said Harry.

“ Sarah, for you godmother?”, asked Elle.

“ Maybe… but I don’t really fancy the name. Too biblical.”, said Harry.

“ Okay then. We have come up with: Sophia, Alice, Victoria, Mary, Elizabeth, Louisa, Alexandra and Frances.”, said Elle smiling.

“ Now we only have decide what to do with them.”, said Harry.

“ We’ll mix and match and see what combinations we like, then we choose, ok?”, asked Elle.

“ Perfect by me.”, replied Harry, kissing her cheek. “ And we don’t need to please my father, you know that, right?”, he said.

“ I know… my I like traditions. They are part of your family’s history. It would be nice to give at least one of Nugget’s name a historical baggage for me to brag about you know?”, said Elle and Harry chuckled.

“ Ahh thank God I married you. Who else would give me a speech on ‘historical baggage’ ?”, he joked. Punching his shoulder she smiled, and looked down at her baby bump.

“ Don’t listen to you father making fun of your mother, Nugget. You’ll be proud and happy with the name we’ll give you. Because it will be full of history and sentiment behind it.”, said Elle, caressing her lower stomach.