Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon Page B

three-dimensional warped and wefted tapestry seeming to have movement, and that meant he’d embraced the fourth dimension.
    The chamber, although large, seemed full, almost claustrophobic, as though it could hold nothing more, not so much as an exhalation, yet I could walk through it, along narrow aisles and alleys and avenues leading into little piazzas with chairs under long, thin, cut trees, decurved into leaning bows hung with bright picked-up objects, small arbors decorated by a magpie, all of it under a beamed sky of a ceiling — the only thing keeping me from floating off into some fifth dimension.
    The nature of quoz is synergistic. Like stardust lying over the planet, quoz is potential recombinant energy seeking union with an open mind. A crevice is all it needs. Ready your emotional membranes, and it enters, passes through. To the implicit force in quoz, any idea that’s ever crossed your brain is a latent zygote. This wasn’t psychosis — it was zygosis.
    And then Q came from someplace, her hair chrome yellow, her face puce, and she said, “Where’ve you been, Little Boy Blue?” Under the haycock, fast asleep.
    But where the hell is Indigo?
And then he was there too, coming into the room on a boy’s bicycle painted in carny colors, nodding hello, and again out of the room, and soon again back into it, slowing to say, “Want a ride?” And my wambled brain thinking,
Just had one, thanks.
And here he came around again. “Thirsty or not?” And that time I got out a real answer: Thirsty!
    I sat down in a chair under one of the tree limbs in front of a large fireplace, the chimney sided by a mural of half-mad Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat.” I was fit to dance by the light of the moon. Q asked if I was all right, and later she alleged I said a candle has no opposite because if it did, you could take a couple of sticks of darkness into a lighted room and extinguish it.
    Sans wheels, Indigo reappeared carrying a tray of three ice-cubed glasses and three bottles of Grapette, the old-style little fellows, and he poured us a round of Uncle Benjamin’s secret formula in the very room where inventor Fooks used to take his, and Q asked again, “Are you okay?” and I said, For a minute or two, I think I transitioned.
    Indigo may have smiled. His art had succeeded.
    Sitting, sipping, collecting myself, I could see the room now more clearly. It wasn’t airborne, but I still felt it could be if my attention wandered, because it was deliberately fitted out to permit the ordinary to transmogrify into the alien in an auxiliary cosmos where the immutable laws were those of fancy, and the goal was to unhitch a visitor from the mundane and the presumed in order that he might flitter like a bat through the darks of imagination. An emporium to disorient one’s sensorium.
    At the center of the Great Parlor, for that’s what it was in its lodgelike setting, were large wooden tables topped with spired towers made entirely from found objects gathered by an artist on jolly terms with that elusive chimera of the late last century, one’s inner child. But the craftsmanship was from experienced hands. If you know Erastus Salisbury Field’s huge painting
Historical Monument of the American Republic,
you’ll have an idea not of the architecture but of the folk vision inherent in Indigo’s world of spires. Or perhaps closer is the fabled Watts Towers in Los Angeles, structures Indigo loved. Nothing was pointless or daffy, although everything was whimsical.
    On the far side of the room was a four-by-eight-foot spacecraft, airborne except for a small, hidden pedestal. A compact person could board it. Oh, to be again nine years old! Cross a hydroplane with a jet fighter, add in a few details from a Formula 1 race car, paint it in harmonious metallic pastels, tip the nose with small nodules of stained glass, and you’d have Indigo Rocket’s rocket-ship, a piece of sculpture waiting for its gallery. He said