The Projector

THE PROJECTOR

Instead of being on time for the nursing home interview, Critter surprised himself by doing a U-turn to rip down one of his old flyers. With the door open and pinging behind him, he walked up to the telephone pole and tugged down the brittle paper, studied it like an ancestor’s cave painting.

On the one hand it, was a masterpiece of basic Photoshop. A black silhouette of Mary Poppins glided over the skyline of Wilmington, borne aloft by a tie-dyed umbrella. Under the words, “Tie-Dye Daycare” undulated the subtitle, “Come dye with us!”

On the other hand, what had he been thinking?

            When an online review sank the whole project last Spring, Critter’s wife made him purge the internet of its existence, and he spent an afternoon blaring music out of the open Subaru windows and taking down every single one of the flyers. Except for one, apparently. 

Before starting the car back up, he sat there for a minute, looking at the blast from his past. It conjured up lot of the same feelings he got from looking back at some of his old journal writing. The heat of the moment, he supposed, must have a blinding effect on him because he often wondered who did his old handiwork, who hatched these business ideas, and what that person was thinking. 

At the next stoplight, a sticker in front of him made his palms sweat on the steering wheel.

He zoomed in and snapped a pic. “Assault Life” but in the “Salt Life” font, with an assault rifle under it. Across the rest of the glass, a swarm of American flags and Consitution stickers elbowed each other for space, taunting the Libs and giving Critter an idea for a joke. Something about big trucks being popular around here because whatever was written on the back window was the longest thing the owner’s ever read.

His photo library documented a galaxy of similar pix. Three %, 2A, Don’t Tread On Me, 1776, NRA, Blue Lives Matter, Benghazi, We The People, Let’s Go Brandon… the less obvious the pro-Trump message, the more compelled he felt to record it.

When his wife scrolled through one day he had to explain that eventually he wanted to “out” all the town’s fascists hiding in plain sight. He said their two children needed to know these stickers meant danger, like pointing out poison ivy or copperheads. 

“Another project?” she asked.

Not long ago, he had been roughhousing with the youngest on his bed. Critter rolled off dramatically and plopped to the carpet. With his cheek on the shag, he looked across dust bunnies and saw little feet stand on tiptoe, heard a single nonverbal squeak of surprise, and saw them come running around the side of the bed. Critter played dead. His littlest said “Daddy?” louder and louder until he picked up daddy’s hand. He let it fall limp to the ground. He stayed still one, two, three more seconds and then popped up in what was supposed to be a huge surprise. But there was little Marty, fat tears welling up in his eyes. One day, Critter wouldn’t be there to wipe them away. 

And so, the idea for the Anti-Fascist Sticker Sonnet Project was born. He started a spreadsheet. A few weeks later he had documented dozens, then over a hundred stickers and their license plates, all hiding some thinly-disguised messaging right under the public’s nose. No one cared, or maybe he just wasn’t finding the right vehicle for the idea. Hiding from the heat last summer while Marty took a nap, Critter had the idea to write poems. He imagined the stickers on a window in conversation with each other, and his mind took off in the conversations they could have. 

He made a Twitter handle, and posted poems that connected the stickers to each other, to the truck owner, and a larger truth. The likes trickled in.

When he put his car in park, the Assault Life poem clicked off in his head.

Critter sat in the nursing home parking lot, flipped through eight pages of transcript from his first meeting with Blanche Waugh, and realized his new “Living Wake Project” was beginning to bore him. Honestly, the byline of the project could have been “Milking family guilt into nostalgia.” He hadn’t made any promotional materials or he’d be tempted to rip them down off of telephone poles right about now.

A snippet from the end of the interview grabbed his attention. From her wheelchair, Mrs. Waugh asked her orderly to help her find an old track and field medal.

BW: I think I still have it around here somewhere. Sahara? 

CB: She’s coming.

BW: Zara, do you know where my medal is? 

Sierra: What medal Miss Waugh?

BW: The uh… the one with the ribbon on it. Bronze-looking? It should be in my top drawer. Would you mind? 

Sierra: That’s your underwear drawer Miss Waugh, so why don’t I push you in there and we can look for it together, OK?

BW: Watch out for the, the thing!

Sierra: I see it. Don’t you worry, Miss.

BW: Isn’t she the best? Well, except for that stuff in her face. And her earlobes, and those dreadful tattoos. If it wasn’t for that beautiful face under that mess she would look exactly like a sailor! 

Sierra: Oh, Miss Waugh, you on about my body art again? I bet you’d look cute with a little something right here, or here…

BW: I’d rather die. 

Looking at the printout from November 2^nd , two things occurred to him: he had forgotten to vote on Election Day, and he was over this Living Wake project. The orderly/patient dynamic, though, was unfolding before him. It made his heart beat faster. He sensed there was something there. The words “Ancient Roast Project” coalesced out of thin air, and then he realized he could do two projects at once! He could interview the Olds for their Living Wake thing, and get them to talk trash about their caretakers. They say the darndest things. He’d keep it lighthearted, of course, because no one likes the dark stuff: negligence, racism, being forgotten. He made a note to record all cross-generational ribbing and trash-talking while he did his interviews. This could be gold.

He shut the Subaru door and noticed a gray pickup with some promising stickers. The way the Constitution was printed across the back window made it look like the Ducks Unlimited duck in the lower left corner was saying it in a quote bubble. Like a weird afterthought, the Macintosh apple sticker in the bottom right corner had some explaining to do. Why this tech flex on this pickup truck?

A dialogue between these decals became the mental outline of his next Sticker Sonnet. In the first quatrain the duck will discover he can speak; in the next one the reader will discover that it’s a conservative duck; the third will allude to its father being the same way, (something about an apple not falling far from the tree?) and the final couplet would be a cheeky quip about how hunting that kind of duck requires calling them in closer, with a filibuster. 

            Critter was trying to think of a rhyme for “filibuster” when he realized that Mrs. Waugh was probably waiting for him inside, her wheelchair parked in front of the window in the hallway like last time. He pulled out his phone to take a picture of the truck, and right after the click he was startled by a friendly, “Mornin’!”

            Critter spun to see a man striding across the pavement, opening the F-150. His wife frowned as she crossed to the passenger side.

            Critter swallowed. Of course, telling this man about the Anti-fascist Sticker Sonnet Project was out of the question. So, he smiled and said Hey and slid the phone back into his pants. 

            Standing on the running boards, the man was now taller than Critter. 

            The gin blossoms on his nose and cheeks said he liked to drink, but the tucked-in golf shirt said he had a little money. His mustache said he brimmed with manliness, but the crease on his khakis said his wife still took care of him. 

            “Nice Uggs,” he said.

            Critter looked down.

            “Stop it…” chastised the man’s wife.

            “Where’d ya get ‘em?”

            Critter mumbled that they were a present from his wife.

            “They’re something.”

            Critter imagined the space between them. How it had started like regular old air and then turned into a vacuum when the guy started teasing him about his boots. How the static he noticed in the air of Wilmington seemed to rush into that vacuum and fill the space between them with the kind of invisible tension that crackled between opposite charges. 

            He thought about the old lady inside, maybe checking her loose little wristwatch and asking Sierra if she had imagined this meeting with the “freelancer” who was supposed to be interviewing her. 

            He thought about not saying anything at all, and then the wife spoke up. 

            “Danny has been on me to git him a pair a those—”

            “Well, they look sharp, don’t they?” 

            Critter realized they were both looking at him and smiling and he became uncomfortable. He said thanks, trotted up towards the sign-in desk, and in the column where it asked the purpose of his visit wrote “Project.”