Liquidation
Tom
LeClair
Everything flows, the
ancient Greek said from the river bank. Coming at you on the interstate,
we say everything fails. Retail and wholesale, manufacturing and service,
ingenious start-ups and old-line standards, the narrow-niched and the
broad-based, the local and the international, businesses, companies,
firms, conglomerates, they all fail. Margin shrinks, profits plummet,
losses mount, and we dissolve the assets, turn movable goods into liquid
money, transform trailers of objects into lines of digits on liquid
crystal displays.
To compete with other road shows--monster
trucks, heavy metal acts, wrestlemanias--and undersell local discounters,
we're a tour de force, a surprise attack. We're force on tour, thirty
high-cab Kenworths filling the right lane like a military convoy, tractors
and trailers all the same gun-metal gray. From the two-lane highways and
access roads, our closed nose to tail formation looks like
boxcars--MIDWEST LIQUIDATORS, MIDWEST LIQUIDATORS, MIDWEST
LIQUIDATORS--trundling toward some final depot. From closer up, the rest
stops and weigh stations, the diesels' roar and smoke demonstrate that our
over-the-road Army-Navy store carries every American service's surplus.
At a steady fifty-five miles an hour, we're a forced march with all the
products of forced sales. And to oncoming traffic, our daytime headlights
show that, like a funeral procession, we're hauling the heaviest weight,
the dead weight of failure.
Since 1973, when wages stagnated, we've seen
affluence run its course. Home and abroad the dollar declined and America
contracted. Even words failed. In the age of global competition,
"foreign aid" became taboo and then an added "s" finished "aid" as
goodness, stained giving with incurable disease. Before AIDS and before
charity concerts, those extravaganzas that hyphened "aid" to defunct
groups, we could quietly announce our arrival in your city. Before the
Community Chest emptied out and the United Fund was plundered, we could
subtly advertise our altruism with a minor misspelling: Midwest
Liquaidators. Now we're forced to cast a major spell, come in sudden and
come on strong, if we're to aid the all we serve: the sinking
entrepreneurs, the family concerns going under, the franchises drowning in
debt, the corporations that can't be bailed out, and you, all of you who
walk our aisles, survey the products in piles like the wrack of flood, and
buy the goods we offer at savings only liquidation allows.
We saturate you with unexpected air power in
Tuesday drive time. "Whump whump whump" the ads begin, helicopter blades
reminding veterans and moviegoers of bullets from the sky. Then my voice
screams over the noise: "Everything fails. The Liquidators are coming,
the Liquidators are coming. Out past the loop, traffic is backing up."
(The sound of downshifting, the surge of torque in a lower gear.) "Cars
are lining up behind the Liquidator trucks. It's a mile-long caravan
following the Liquidators to the arena." (The beep beep of happy horns.)
"Bring your trailers and vans and pickups and empty trunks," I shout and
hesitate before identifying the appeal of returning armies, "collect the
spoils." Then, over the returning helicopter whump, I yell "Thursday
through Sunday while they last, America's best deals on wheels." Finally,
almost covered by the noise, a fading trailer: "Only once this yeeaarr."
Once a year every year, our tour of duty
takes us to the Midwest's forty-five largest cities, a 1,500-mile jagged
loop from our base in Middletown, Ohio. The Liquidators arrive without
warning. We're our own advance guard, Marines of sale my radio voice
suggests, victors in the American price war, the kind of road warriors
who'd put competitors in cement footwear. To give our show of force
respectability, to show you we're not like gypsy roofers or those
rear-door distributors who sell direct from stolen trailers, we rent the
biggest buildings available, metropolitan arenas, coliseums with
surround-around seats, small-city domes, homes of minor-league
franchises. We steer away from exhibition halls and convention centers,
spaces designed to show off future success, low track lighting burnishing
the gloss of next year's boats and campers, mezzanine booths with
high-definition screens to project trade-show dazzle. With our
marked-down goods we need to be at the bottoms of buildings that have no
basements. We want the high space over our heads, the empty seats, canvas
tarps covering courts, rough wooden flooring over ice. If stadium
managers would let us, we'd spread dirt like the rodeos to remind our
customers that Liquidators are the lowest link in the chain of sale, the
chain of chains: the high-rise department stores dropping goods down to
their outlets, the outlets dumping to the alphabet of marts, the marts
dispersing the unsold to odd-lots and seconds shops, those one-room
collections of ill-made and damaged objects in abandoned strip malls. If
the goods change hands after us, it's underground, the underworld of flea
market, trading stall, or garage sale.
On Wednesday we dolly in the crates and
boxes, remove the merchandise, pile the containers in walls, and make a
maze. We set our wares on the floor, fanning out irregular shapes--wooden
duck decoys, coffee-makers, pillows--and stacking up rectangles and
squares--socket sets, VCRs, and tool boxes. No shelves or tables or bins
raise and organize our low-tide remnants. Narrow aisles coil and loop
through the almost solid mass of solids. Hypermarket grids don't section
and suspended signs don't name our display of dense disorder--bathroom
tissue stacked next to touch-up guns, Ninja Turtle back packs spilling
into Hocking microwave cookware, layers of industrial tarps across from
stands of beer logo pool cues. Our design is unpredictable combination,
the familiar scrambled into strangeness, a rapid succession of surprises
whatever curling path you choose. Around the curve ahead, over the wall
of brand-name boxes, or far across this huge floor are, somewhere, air
ratchets next to wicker baskets, boomerangs sliding into surge
protectors. Without clear sight lines or consumer categories, somewhere
is anywhere, anywhere is everywhere, and the scale of our show seems
prodigious, a Kenworth cornucopia, a feat of skill as well as strength.
The banked seats of the arena, visible in the distance, are like the
shoreline of an inland sea we've drained to reveal detritus that centuries
have amassed in strange heaps and meandering folds, all present and
waiting under this imaginary body of water the Liquidators have turned to
air, this dead sea of failure.
Wednesday mornings we give away the catalog
to our exhibition, a supplement in the newspaper, a booklet delivered to
the doorsteps and apartment entryways of poor neighborhoods. For those
who don't read, the flyer jams into its eight pages hundreds of two-inch
black and white photos partly covered with yellow blazes and red prices.
Crowded in among the pictures and fire-sale splashes are, for readers,
facsimiles of brand names and brief descriptions. The cheap paper and
lurid colors, the jumbled photos and blazoned warnings--"prices subject to
change," "limited quantities available"--make the flyer an album of
impermanence, throwaway catalog of a temporary installation never heralded
by banners on downtown lightpoles. Although pages appear hurriedly
composed, artlessly assembled like a hyperactive child's collage, they map
the floor's maze. On the front and back pages and next to the margins is
light reading, photos of men in tee shirts and women in brassieres,
pictures of plastic bracelets and plaster knick knacks, come-ons for kids
like baseball cards and barets. These goods line the edges of the floor,
penny items for pockets, dollar buys for handbags. Moving inward from
front or back, the browser finds double digit prices--skateboards for
$14.95, vanity mirrors at $11.95, bottle jacks at $23.95, boom boxes for
the whole family, "only $79.95, compare with name brands." At the
centerfold is the heavy reading, the heavy-duty items at the center of the
floor: a Campbell Hausfield portable winch, $179.95; a forty-pound
sandblaster system, $199.95; a six-inch long-bed joiner, $299.95; a
Voltmaster 6000 Wat generator, $399.95. Garlanded by hand tools and
housewares, games and adornments, these durables are the load we've toted,
the lodestone to which our prized customers gravitate, leading their women
and children inward--and downward if our center-weighted space seems like
a bowl--to merchandise with force like the force that moved it, power
tools requiring power to take them home. At the newsprint crease and
coliseum axis, anachronism is the Liquidators' appeal: an all-male band of
teamsters and stevedores bringing machines to fellow anachronists, men who
still make things at home.
Wednesday nights we guide the customers from
their vehicles with videotape. The radio broadcasts and newspaper spreads
are the same in every city. The six and eleven TV ads take the local,
eye-level point of view, documentary film that might have been shot by any
customer with a camcorder: an outside view of the arena and parking lot, a
moving, bumpy shot of building entrances, a slow pan of the jammed floor,
and then the camera winds through the aisles, glancing right, lingering
left as one of those intimate home-shopping voices recites the brand
names, hushed accompaniment to the marvel of so much, the liquid sounds
and fluid sentences preparing for the quick change we Liquidators undergo
when, on Thursday morning, you follow the film and enter the show. Burly
men who yesterday wrestled crates are sitting on folding chairs squeezed
in among the offerings. Today, wearing loose-fitting smocks, these
soldiers of bad fortune look effete as museum guards. Raucous Wednesday
roadies are quiet as undertakers. You're surprised to find our power has
been exhausted. Now we're as harmless as prisoners of war waiting for a
handout.
You too have been transformed. Former
spectators in this venue, you're out of your seats and down on the floor,
all of you now suddenly athletes, men, women, and children walking where
you've never been before, unfettered by ticket stubs and officious ushers,
circulating freely where you've watched all the hometown heroes, moving
where you want, ignoring if you wish the scattered spectators sitting
still as their wares, passive observers of your motion, respondents to
your desire and will. You take any path through the floor's field of
force, wander the twisting aisles waiting for impulse or search the piles
for things you need. Sliding along like skaters in slow motion, towering
over the floor-bound goods like high-rising hoopsters, you're the winners
now. In the seller-buyer conflict we can never completely hide, you're
the ones with force. We give you the power of purchase, physical
purchase, literal leverage, a place to stand and bend and lift, every
shopper a shoplifter. Man, woman, or child, you reach down, pick up, and
hold. You lean in, stretch out, and heft. You raise your arms, grasp,
and weigh. Everything is within your reach, no sales cases or sales
persons, no display models and backroom replacements. Everything is here,
right here, up for grabbing, down for grubbing, everything almost moving
with the motion that got it here.
Even auto batteries, stacked near the
machines they start or power, seem as light as the carnival sledgehammer,
the tool that proves you belong to a line of force extending backward from
railroadmen to convicts to archaic pulverizers of rock and stone, men with
those prehensile thumbs first used for seizing, then for making tools.
You reach down into your pocket and pull up the money. At this bazaar,
it's cash and carry, no credit cards for the Liquidators. We're paying
off debt, not running it up. You grab the battery, the densest object in
our dense display, and surprise yourself with your force. We place the
light bills in our cash boxes, and you carry off the battery like a player
with a trophy. It's hand to hand business we do. No grocery baskets or
shopping carts break the bond of new possession, evidence of the change in
this exchange, the transfer of transport or the other way around--the
transport of transfer, another almost anachronism: travelers meeting at a
crossroads and conveying an object from far away, the burden of the
distance traveled adding to the thing's measurable weight. We give
ownership a caravan gravity now everywhere diminished by home delivery,
UPS robbing the world of its essential weight.
We know customers believe that so much stuff,
like the lottery's huge combinations, must conceal something beyond our
strong man's ability to bring the goods and our magician's skill in making
them disappear, some buried treasure that's unknown to us, some thing like
the million-dollar edition in the used-book stall or the
five-million-dollar painting in the junk shop but more mysterious--gold
secreted in a battery--or more miraculous--the bonanza lying just under
all our feet. Surrounded by permutations of failure, you come to believe
in long-shot success, not the self-helpers' "secret of success" that
requires implementation but a find that will in a single instant define
your earlier life as failed and the new life as fortunate, a word welded
of luck and money. Our trade secret is surprise, but like tent shows
rumored to heal those in failing health we fail your personal dream of
sudden wealth. What we offer you is public, intangible. Leaving the
arena, you notice the signs you didn't see above the doors when you rushed
in: "Thank You For Contributing To The Liquidators' Savings." Strangely
worded, our sendoff recalls our invitation on the back doors of every
trailer: "Follow Our Lead To The River Of Savings." Having saved money in
our flowing emporium, you leave as an immersed member of Midwest
Liquidators. Holding your goods, you suddenly realize you're doing good.
You too are giving aid, not full-fledged salvation of distressed
businesses but the dignity-saving payment of some outstanding debts. Like
us and with us, you're transforming total failure into partial success,
participating in our fractional philanthropy and decimal deliverance.
Satisfied customer, you pack your trunk or load your van, drive home the
weight we've hauled across state lines. No matter your class or race, age
or ethnic heritage, you are part of a purifying process as necessary as
sewage treatment plants beside the polluted rivers of the Midwest we
circle. Diffusing the collected waste of our nation's commerce, you're a
local rep of the Liquidators' All-American altruism.
*****
You’ll enter the front door at ground level,
the only entrance. You’ll buy your ticket--cash for individuals, credit
cards for groups--and walk through a dark passageway to a stairwell. Down
the winding, barely lighted steps you’ll go, grasping the hand rail,
groping your way forward. On the uneven basement floor, cement as lumpy
as the earth beneath it, you’ll bend over or, if you're a large person,
you’ll crouch down to enter the tunnel before you, black as a grave,
narrow as a grave. The floor is damp, the rough walls seep water, the
irregular roof drips and is harsh on heads that refuse to bow.
You’ll enter a room, close to six feet high,
where a black man or a man in black-face sits on a stool. His clothes
look like a gladiator's and he's wearing crude sandals. In his right hand
he holds an ugly-looking whip, multiple strands with little lead balls
attached to the ends. He speaks loud gibberish to you, gestures to a
wooden basket full of dark stone and earth, points to another tunnel. The
person in front of you is entering the tunnel backward, hunching forward
over the basket, smelling its contents, almost tasting them while dragging
the basket into the tunnel. Your basket is heavy, and it smells bad, like
the sensation when, as a child, you put your tongue on the metal of an
unpainted swing set. You bump your butt against the walls because the
tunnel winds and weaves like a subterranean brook. You are bumping
backward into the past, forward, you hope, toward some light at the end of
this tunnel.
After time you can't tell down here in the
dark, you back out into a large room, dimly lighted. Another strangely
dressed black man or man blackened by the dirt helps you heave the
contents of your basket onto a slightly sloping table made of hacked
wood. You stand and watch as water is released from somewhere above and
courses through the piled earth, flushing away light matter, leaving
behind heavier substances. With your bare hands, you and your fellow
miners scoop up the wet remainder, load it into other baskets, and
together carry them down yet another dark tunnel. You smell smoke; your
eyes begin to water. You turn a corner and before you is a scene like
that in the haunted houses of your childhood: men dumping baskets into a
contraption, perhaps a stone furnace, but you can't see clearly because of
the smoke. Other men, dressed only in loincloths, throw wood into a fire
under the apparatus. All the men are coughing and hacking as they work;
several men are lying on the ground and convulsing. "Drop your basket,
keep moving forward, ignore the slaves," a voice screams, so you don't
have time to look carefully at the scene you've passed, ascertain if these
were real men or only animations like those in amusement park tunnels of
horror. In the smoke and shadows, the men doing forced labor looked like
apparitions, and you wonder if mining and smelting preceded or followed
the ancient underworlds you read about in school or saw on the CD ROM of
Hell.
You enter a well-lighted room with white
walls. From the ceiling is suspended a sign--"Lavrion, Greece, 1000
B.C."--and now that you're in history you’ll understand the language and
clothes and primitive technology you couldn't fathom in the dark. Under
the sign on a large table is a scale model of this ancient mining village
on the Aegean near Athens. Unlike the orderly towns of your
model-railroad youth, Lavrion is an ugly sidehill jumble of one-storey
houses, stone smelters, slag heaps, pathways, and water cisterns. Green
is missing from this scene. The stone is gray, the earth brown, the trees
lack leaves, and no grass grows in Lavrion. People are also missing, as
if Lavrion was a necropolis or is now a ruins. On a plaque attached to
the model is the truth of Lavrion's history: the silver in Lavrion's lead
was largely responsible for the wealth of classical Athens and, 3,000
years later, lead is still mined at Lavrion. A voice says in a soothing
mortuary tone, "Please exit to your right." But when you do, you're back
in a dark tunnel and you think "Hell is the place no one leaves."
You come into another well-lighted room.
"Leadville, Colorado, 1890 A.D." is printed in large letters at the top of
the wall on your left. Moving around the room, you see blown-up black and
white photos of tents and shacks and pitiful people, strike-it-rich
pioneers who look like Civil War prisoners. In the background are slag
heaps, muddy roads, turbid brooks, clouds of smoke and dust. After
comparing ancient ignorance and modern stupidity, you see next to the exit
evidence of contemporary forgetfulness: a large color photo of Lavrion's
harbor, blue sea and a few white sails surrounded on all sides by giant
heaps of crushed black ore waiting to be loaded on ships. Next to it is a
summer photo of Fremont Pass from the Leadville side: a whole mountainside
dug out, white tailings flowing from the site. After this series of
unpleasant surprises, memories school didn't give you, you're pleased to
see a lighted stairway, thankful that you're an upwardly mobile tourist in
earth's bowels, that you're saved from a past that's an eternity to those
trapped in it. In this basement, you miss the Liquidators’ bargains, the
show’s freedom of movement.
At the top of the stairs, you’ll enter
familiar space, high-ceiligned, windowed and well-lighted, a long and wide
display space broken up by eight-foot-high room dividers. Embedded in the
wooden floor is a yard-wide trough covered by plexiglass. In the trough
moves a reddish liquid that looks molten. "Lead," you hear on a
recording, "has always been valued for its low melting point." You follow
the flow of lead like the colored line on the floor of a hospital corridor
as the trough zigs and zags a path that connects room-divided
civilizations. In an area labeled "Mideast, 4000 BC--" is a glass case
containing dishes of a white powder applied to the face as a cosmetic and
skin-lightener. "White lead," you hear, "was the first chemical industry
in the history of man. Traces were found in the six-thousand-year-old
ruins of Ur." In other cases are lead-glazed pottery in bright whites and
yellows, fine necklaces and lumpy bracelets, lead amulets worn next to the
skin to ward off disease. Egyptians brought lead to water: sinkers for
fishing nets, plummets used to measure the Nile's depth, small lead
statues of the liquidated and transformed god Osiris. Leaving the room,
you see on a divider contemporary artists’ renderings of Egyptian faces,
eyes destroyed by lead mascara, cheeks pocked by lead rouge.
"Lead has always been valued as a casting
material,” you hear, “Some of the objects in this museum are true lead
casts of original lead objects in museums around the world."
In an area labeled "Greece, 1000 B.C.--" are
cases with cosmetics like those used in the Mideast, many more samples of
brightly glazed pottery, dull drinking vessels, candleholders, and a few
imperfectly round coins. "When silver was scarce, Greeks made money from
lead." They conquered other peoples using lead shot in slings and
commemorated victories with toy soldiers made of lead. The Greeks cursed
their enemies on lead tablets, taught children how to record history on
easily-scratched lead slates, and told the future by reading the way small
drops of lead congealed in water. Lead was added to bronze to make heroic
casts easier to produce. In one case are several "pigs" of lead, chunks
and bars and wires used for caulking. "The Greeks," you hear while
leaving, "gave civilization lead as a way to contain and transport
liquids."
In a large room labeled "Italy, 300 B.C.--"
huge photographs show Roman aqueducts built with lead pipe and repaired
with lead solder. Cases display lead pots, kettles, tankards, and
plates. Cooked and served in lead, foods were sweetened with a lead-laced
concoction called "sapa." Roman women continued to use lead cosmetics,
began drinking wine treated with lead to retard fermentation, and applied
lead to the cervix to prevent conception. To cure bodily ills, Romans
went to baths lined with huge lead plates. Before their lead mines gave
out, Romans were buried in lead coffins. "In the late Roman Empire," you
read, "the use of lead achieved a per capita level almost equalling the
level in industrial nations today." Leaving the area, you see TV monitors
running clips from old films about the Fall of Rome, deranged emperors who
were, you read in subtitles, "besotted by lead-heavy wine. Lead-saturated
rulers and aristocrats did not reproduce. The line failed." Old errors,
you think, back from the bottom of recorded history, not to be repeated.
You go up the stairs to "Europe, 300
A.D.--1750 A.D." Huge woodcuts picture German lead mines discovered in
the late Middle Ages. You see the continuing use of lead to beautify,
seal containers of liquids, and to keep wine from fermenting. The
English, with lead supplies of their own, produced a gray wealth of pewter
plates, tankards, bowls, and spoons. You see enlarged medieval woodcuts
of women and men holding their stomachs, poisoned by adulterated wine and
cider. Old engravings show well-dressed European and American men made
motionless by gout. A display case holds reproductions of old texts with
magical drawings and secret designs, the pages dense with over-lapping
small pictures of odd objects, strange people, impossible animals, and
alien symbols, circles within triangles within circles within rectangles.
In one drawing entitled "Sol niger," a skeleton with angel to right and
left stands on a black sun. Other drawings are violent: a swordsman
poised over an egg, a seated king eating a child, a snake devouring
itself.
You’ll learn the purpose if not the meaning
of these designs when you turn a corner and find on a divider an
eight-foot by twelve-foot blowup of Pieter Bruegel's 1558 drawing "The
Alchemist." On the left sits a learned man reading a pile of texts and
seemingly directing his two assistants, one in the middle puffing with a
bellows and, on the far right, one mixing elements in front of a furnace.
Between the assistants, a woman empties her purse while her children,
ignored, play in a cupboard. The card beneath the drawing explains that
alchemists first reduced matter before transforming it, and fine print on
the card directs your attention to fine print in one of the alchemist's
texts: "ALGHE MIST," Bruegel's Flemish for "all rubbish" or, more
colloquially, "all shit." Laboring to discover the liquid secrets of
wealth and health--the universal solvent that would transmute lead to gold
and the elixir vitae that would prolong life--Bruegel's alchemist drives
his family to ruin. Looking through a window in the upper left corner of
the drawing, you see this same family in the future as, stripped of all
possessions, they enter the poorhouse. In a curious touch, one of the
children has a pot pulled down over his head, as if the artist saw ahead
the long-term effects of heavy metals on the young.
A guide standing next to Bruegel's drawing
will usher you and others into a tiny theater, perhaps twenty seats and a
small, darkened stage that looks like a laboratory in an old horror film,
alembics and torts and beakers. You can barely make out an old man, with
powdered white face and long white hair, lying motionless on a bed. He
doesn't speak but from behind him come laughter and then words in a
British accent: "Dead more than 250 years and fools still pry into my
papers and life, investigate my progress to gravity, speculate about why I
went mad. Of course I performed alchemical experiments for twenty years.
Alchemists knew force and sought the secret of matter I called inert. In
1693 I thought I would find that secret, but I failed and succumbed to
distemper I blame on sleeping too close to the fire of my furnace. Just
because I was afflicted by the gout, scientists ask to dig up my bones
from Westminster Abbey. What laboratory would possess measuring devices
that could prove the bones of Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of
Europe, were permeated by lead?" The figure on the bed now begins to
laugh, a low chuckle that rises to an insane howl. At the same time,
smoke issues from the laboratory behind him, obscuring the stage and
filtering out into the audience. In the dark and smoke that remind you of
the basement, you hear the usher shout "Exit left and go upstairs for the
Industrial Revolution."
You’ll probably be wondering about this
Museum and your progress from earth to air. Museums display surprising
achievements, not widespread failures. Knowledge, not repeated
ignorance. Even exhibitions that aren't really museums show labor-saving
devices and life-saving objects, not elements of self-destruction. But on
the third floor, you're no longer funneled and channeled, led forward
through time by a trough in the floor. In the last 250 years of this
millennium, you'll be free to wander among the display cases,
free-standing exhibits, photographs, TV monitors, and flashing LED
lights. The windows, you may read on the card beneath each, are leaded
glass, sealing out the rain and cold. A huge display shows other
protective uses of lead: in nineteenth-century gutters and downspouts, as
a lining in drums holding corrosive liquids, in batteries filled with
acid, as a sheathing on electric cables, in a wall for acoustic
insulation, in the apron you've worn at your dentist's, in a mock-up of an
atomic reactor. None of these would have been possible without the use of
lead in printing presses, the machines that drove the revolution. You see
hundreds of sets of type, raw data ready to be moved, printed, and be
transformed into new data. Another display shows a large array of lead
weapons--irregularly shaped blunt objects, cannon balls of every size,
home-made bullets and shot, then engineered hollow points and dum dums--the
force that helped spread the revolution from Europe to and through the
Americas. On one wall are photographs of huge pipe organs and stained
glass windows in churches that have celebrated the revolution all around
the world.
Suspended from a ceiling is one of those
electronic signs that usually tell the time and temperature. On it flicks
for a second some of the occupations exposed to lead while contributing
labor force to the global revolution. The sign doesn't flash the
obvious--plumbers, scrap workers, miners, smelters, the makers of lead
flooring, lead salt, and lead stearate--but only workers who unwittingly
sacrificed themselves for the betterment of all: auto mechanics,
babbitters, bookbinders, bottle cap makers, brass founders, braziers,
brush makers, cable splicers, canners, chippers, cutlery makers,
demolition workers, diamond polishers, electronic device makers,
electroplaters, emery wheel makers, enamelers, farmers, file cutters,
flower makers (artificial), galvanizers, glass makers, gold refiners, gun
barrel browners, incandescent lamp makers, japanners, jewelers, linoleum
makers, lithographers, match makers, mirror silverers, musical instrument
makers, patent leather makers, pearl makers (imitation), plastic workers,
putty makers, riveters, roofers, rubber makers, shipbuilders, shoe makers,
steel engravers, stereotypers, tannery workers, telephone repairers,
temperers, textile makers, tinners, wallpaper printers, welders, and wire
patenters.
Below the sign in a mound of refuse are some
mass-produced discards of the revolution: for late nineteenth-century
women, "Ali Ahmed's Treasures of the Desert" skin cream, and for men,
"Hall's Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer." More contemporary objects in
the pile include empty wine bottles with lead foil, toothpaste and
ointment tubes, tin cans with lead seals, broken-legged toy soldiers,
cracked crystal, loose beads, divers' jackets, and the newest
additions--computer monitors with their eight pounds of lead, processors
with their five pounds. At the edges of the pile are lead-glazed pottery,
Grecian Formula hair darkener, and bottles that held moonshine liquor.
Yes, still lead-glazed pottery like that at Ur, still liquid lead that
could be from Lavrion, still adulterated alcohol like that in Rome despite
the information in all the new still-leaded computers.
In the middle of all these displays, you’ll
come to the Museum’s climax, the most revolutionary use of lead:
scientists' suspension of this easily liquefied but heavy substance in
fluids. At the center of the floor you’ll see the liquidation of lead:
stacked cans and drums of leaded paint, piled drums and barrels of leaded
pesticides, and the centerpiece: a Stonehenge ring of old gas pumps--Esso,
Sunoco, Amoco, Gulf. Executives in these corporations knew in 1925 that
lead could be a health hazard, so they changed its name to “ethyl” before
putting it in gasoline.
Suddenly a hologram figure--a traditionally
dressed magician--appears within the ring. When the figure stretches his
arms, his black cape spreads behind him, making him look like the angel of
death.
"Before pulverizing the atom," you’ll hear my
best bombastic voice announce, "technology's closing act was dissolving
lead in liquid and making that liquid disappear into thin air, turning the
air thick, polluting our cities, our farms and forests, even the polar ice
caps thousands of miles away."
To the sound of a Kenworth engine slowly
revving, the magician dissolves into a holographic black cloud that seems
to rise and spread beyond the ring of gas pumps.
You brought your children here to view
things, not to be addressed by frightening voices. You know lead has been
removed from gasoline, but you’re not out of danger yet. You turn a
corner and enter intimate reality, an inner-city apartment, this year's
calendar on the refrigerator. Paint is peeling from the walls, and chips
are on the floor along the baseboards and under the radiators. No adults
are working or resting, no children are playing, but a baritone voice
instructs you in weight, small amounts, heavy micrograms: "A child who
licks a finger dusted by this lead paint doubles the maximum daily
absorption of 100 micrograms." Beyond the apartment, there are life-size
models of a man and woman, transparent plastic skin over working organs.
They harmonize in synthesized voices: "From air and food and drink, lead
enters our systems and is spread by the blood. The toxin affects the
stomach, kidneys, and brain, the organs with which we process substances,
liquids, and information." Now the voices begin to slow down and break
apart. "Anemia, gastritis, nephritis, and peripheral paralysis are the
continuous diseases in adults with continuous exposure." The wrists of
the models drop, go limp. The voices slow further. "Retardation and
brain damage are permanent effects in children." The voices go silent,
the models don’t move. You turn another corner and see a lead-lined
coffin, advertised to give "the loved one permanent protection from the
incursion of liquids."
Lead makes people dumb, both stupid and
speechless, and the museum reminds you how long dumbness lasts, how many
times humans ignored what they knew or could have known. The museum is
the facility of forgetting and failing. But the history of lead is not
all failure. Moving toward the exit, you’ll see graphs showing the steep
reduction of lead in North America since it was removed from gasoline.
You see before and after pictures of smog-bound American cities, as well
as photographs of cities in countries that still use leaded gas. For
those with occupational exposure, contemporary medicine everywhere has the
solution in chelation, a washing of the blood like the washing of liquid
waste. Brain damage in children who’ve eaten chips of lead paint can't be
reversed but can be prevented with aggressive clean-up programs in the
decaying neighborhoods that get into kids’ blood and bones. If paint
companies will create a Superfund, Sunday children will have a better
chance to become Saturday adults. It's even possible that fewer of
Thursday's seniors will develop Alzheimer's as lead decreases in the
environment.
The very properties that led to lead's
diffusion make it recoverable, recyclable, melted back to a liquid state
and reformed in solids we are now certain are dangerous. Humankind is not
saved yet from our long exposure to what lasts, but leaving the last room
of this museum you’ll sense success. It's a partial success, you have to
realize, because in the future scientists may discover that lead is even
more pervasive than they now think or that present threshold levels are
too high. Partial, too, because lead is but one of many heavy metals,
metal is but one of many pollutants. And, as Judith reminds me to say,
pollution is but one of many failures in the past that have run up future
debts to the earth. Success will be gradual, recovery slow like the decay
of lead. That's why no sign above the exit door congratulates you on your
new knowledge or dramatically implores you to save the planet. Instead
there's a single word in caps, reminder of the on-going, ever-lasting
altruism we will all need to proffer in the future: EARTHAID.
©
2004 Tom LeClair
Tom LeClair is a Professor of English at the
University of Cincinnati. He is the author of many works of scholarship on
contemporary American fiction, like In the loop, Don DeLillo and
the Systems Novel (1986) or The art of Excess, Mastery in American
Fiction (1989). His most recent books are novels, Passing Off
(1996), Well Founded-Fear (2000), Passing on (2004).
