Autonomy these days – surprise! – is moving up
in the corporate structure. She’s thrown over
the old laid-back lifestyle, repudiated its
green-haired prophets, and gotten married
(pre-Raphaelite red velvet, a sheaf of roses,
hair falling in two long blond tresses). She’s
now at home on a rural route, its row of mailboxes
a mile and a half from the Freeway. Not-quite-
two-year-old Autonomy Junior spends long days
with the sitter, can count up to five, and sees
the world moving past so fast, he delivers daily
not slow words but quick, predicated word-clusters.
Up before dawn three days out of five, at the
bathroom mirror Autonomy swiftly, with brush and
hairdryer, concocts a frame for her face of that
temporal gold, like the gilding of the aspens
in the Rockies, like every prototypical true
blonde who began as some other color; puts on
her boardroom clothes – flounced denim with
boots and weskit, or spiked sandals and pallid
executive knit – to drive off into the just-
stirred mother-of-pearl of the day, the velour
of hoarfrost’s transient platinum on the blacktop
of a piece with the pristine pale upholstery
of the brand-new Brougham – into the ductile
realm of the Freeway, that reentry into the mystery
of being betweenwheres, alone in the effortless
anteroom of the Machine, of the Many. The Company
these days is paying her way to an earlybird
course in Econ at the University. At eight-
thirty, while her wedded bedfellow, in the other
car, the red Toyota, drops off their offspring
with the sitter, her class over, she’ll be taking
the Freeway again to headquarters. These days
she’s in Quality Circles, a kind of hovering
equipoise between Management and not-Management,
precarious as the lake-twinned tremor of aspens,
as the lingering of the ash-blond arcade of foliage
completing itself as it leans to join its own inversion.
Whatever fabrication, whatever made thing
she is thus vertiginously linked to, there’s no
disconnecting the image of Autonomy contained but
still moving – toward what is unclear – up through
the heady apertures of the Gross National Product,
from that thing, the ambiguous offspring of the Company –
through whose dense mansions, burbling with unheard
melodies of the new, her pal and bedfellow is moving up too.
Evenings, while he heads for his course at the University,
she collects the not-yet-two-year-old from the sitter,
kicks off her stiltwalker’s footgear, peels away
the layers of the persona she takes to Quality Circles,
and slides into iron tight jeans, the time-honored
armor of mellowing out; picks up yesterday’s litter
around the playpen, puts together a quick concoction
via the microwave oven, and resumes – her charge,
all the while, voluble at her hip or underfoot –
the improbable game of move-and-countermove-between-
mother-and-child. Whether, back at headquarters,
back there in the winking imaginary map that leaps
from the minds of the computer programmers, there’s
a mother-lode of still smarter bombs, the germ
of an even cleverer provocation to instability
within the neutron or of God knows what other, yet
inviolate speck at the core of the cosmos, who knows –
or whether playing at mothering, the mirage of a
rise into ethereal realms of the managerial – of
hoarfrost at dawn along the edge of the Freeway,
the hurtled ease of finding oneself betweenwheres,
alone in the evolving anteroom of the Machine, of
that artifice of the pursuit of happiness – will be,
as the green-haired prophets of punk would have it,
a total, or only partial
apocalyptic freakout.
