The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [90]
When class warfare erupts in America, as it must within the next decade, it’ll start in Jackson, probably. Those citizens are not being fooled.
Anyway, I found myself driving to Jackson’s one tourist attraction, the Jackson Cascades. This guy named Sparks built it in the 1930s. He was a radio tycoon. He thought Jackson needed some waterfalls, for the view. It needed something. But there weren’t any visible waterfalls except for the ones that Consumers Power had already dammed up. So he built this thing in the central city park. It’s huge, the size of a football field. Water gubbles out at the top, where it’s been pumped, and it flows down these ten or so artificially built cascades, like a display in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas, and you sit in the chairs they have, having paid your four dollars, while computer-controlled lights play over these cascades — it only opens after dark — and the speakers they’ve attached to telephone poles play Mantovani and Neil Diamond and the 101 Strings. This is where I decided to go to collect my thoughts.
The water doesn’t flow during the day. It sits there. Mosquitoes breed in it. At night they hatch and go insane. They go after you.
This was a Tuesday night. I bought my ticket and sat down in a sort of bleacher chair. The management gives you a fly swatter, a little one with Jackson Cascades printed on it, and you’re supposed to swat the mosquitoes with this device. Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue” was blaring over these internment-camp speakers, and I was sitting there with my head in my hands wondering what I was doing in Jackson, Michigan. The colors on the water were turning from magenta to a sort of hot pink, and I was having this insight that my parents had let me loose in the world without explaining anything of importance to me.
Down below me were some families, likewise sitting, likewise watching this spectacle but perkier than I was. One child wearing Oshkosh overalls was running in widening circles. He was yelling, “I’m gonna explode!” I nodded at him. Okay with me, kid. You just explode right there. I’m watching, and I’ve got the good view.
The music switched to Mantovani, this string slop, pouring molasses over hapless George Gershwin.
In front of me this picture-perfect high school couple was sitting on a bench. He looked a little bit like the guy that Diana was seeing, and she looked a tiny bit like Diana. The resemblance was close enough to indicate God’s trickster pranksterism. They were talking. Then, God help me, they were kissing. Everywhere I went I saw people kissing. It was this smooch conspiracy. These two were holding hands, and with the hand that was free, she was swatting mosquitoes on his back, and he was swatting mosquitoes on hers.
I found them unbearable. Another couple in love, this time at the Jackson Cascades, swatting mosquitoes off each other’s backs, and they both looked dirt-poor, knowing the system was rigged against them, and they didn’t care because they were both sedated with amour.
Down with love, I thought, and all its theatrics. I felt a sort of energetic, visionary despair.
I raced back toward my car. As I drove home, typically, I was arrested for speeding. I, Mr. Toad, was traveling eighty-five miles an hour on I-94. I was given a breath test. Sober sober sober. Oh, I am a sober man, and the state trooper wrote me a ticket to confirm my sober crime.
Back in Ann Arbor, Bradley greeted me with great joy, which for once was not contagious. I walked into