His eyes must shimmer with unmatched intelligence.
Mason beheld the pre-dawn vista: Badlands to infinity.
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BADLANDS BY GEORGE WEHRFRITZ 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 136
Mason uncoiled as best he could high up a Dakotan ridgeline on scaffolding fastened to the rock wall with bolts the size of cars. Another double shift. Another night for meagre compensation beyond the dignity of patriotic service, logged under phosphorescent lighting commandeered from a prison yard.
“Three hots and a cot,” chain-gang pragmatists once muttered, though survivors were lucky to grab two colds and a board. Even so, many transformed into zealots.
“Pyramids,” his professor once said, “don’t rise without loyalty to pharaohs.”
Why Mason was pressed is no mystery. Long ago, his restoration of a toppled Charlottesville landmark grabbed their attention even though he’d pitched in to hone skills, not grievance.
“Less said the better,” Mason’s mentor advised.
Wise man. A sculptor’s sculptor inclined to impart the esoteric skills vital to this, their grandest challenge. Generous to the moment he’d lost favor and toppled from the very scaffolding where Mason stood stiffly on thin boards, another “elite expert” vanquished.
Mason beheld the pre-dawn vista: Badlands to infinity, yesterday’s heat still shimmering as a desiccating breeze rippled huge tarps printed in red, white, and blue.
He worked kinks from his neck as technical concerns reasserted.
Mason engaged the safety line and retraced ladders to the valley floor, landing as sunbeams crested the eastern horizon and loudspeakers blared.
“O beautiful for spacious skies…”
.
The first eye was almost textbook. A tad sleepy, it anchored the trademark expression.
Early on, Mason had suggested widening the ocular span slightly from the 11 feet 4 inches specified in the drawings.
“Do it, but this stays between us,” his mentor concurred. By then the old man was calling the subject’s look “a smirk”. Until the day…
Too dangerous to mourn the dead or count bodies, Mason thought reflexively as he contoured the second eye solo beneath a brow-ridge he categorized Remnant Neanderthal, if only to himself. But nothing fit. In shape, balance and projection from the skull, the unblinking eye seemed inhuman.
Once, near delirium, he’d imagined climbing inside to fathom its darkness for himself.
Don’t poke the hornet’s nest, darling, his mother chided in absentia.
“Slowly, slowly,” he repeated mantra-like as pneumatic hardware buzzed in his hands until they bled.
July already. Hot wind and days without end. He pondered art marking time; figureheads etched into stone. Imagined mastodons roaming the steppe.
.
“Sculpting saved your life, darling,” Mother would say of his chosen vocation. Art school, not the army.
So far, darling, he’d amend each time in his mind. His ancient craft, that tentative salvation, contorting under tectonic pressures. Pigment infusion, veneering, dissimilar stone grafts commercialized under the rubric “sculptural curation”—a term stolen, it was said, from the time when average people used hand-held computers for unregulated self-projection.
Before the Second Civil War.
“His eyes must shimmer with unmatched intelligence,” the latest New Rushmore Master Plan demanded. A political directive from sycophants and paper-pushers.
“Not our problem,” the bosses said in rebuff to every practical concern.
The alchemy fell to Mason. Daydreaming about Granddad’s old army watch he theorized a solution: radium. It glows pearlescent and could be infused into a course igneous host. The danger: it emits toxic radon gas for 15,000 years and ablates by friction.
Hazmat gear should shield me okay if I work fast, he’d reasoned, mindful of the project’s other downside.
Blasting teams blew every end date. Helicopters shuffled loads overhead in thunderous battles against the season. The slogan Freedom Isn’t Free swirled like anthrax spores in spring air. Overruns mushroomed like clichés in the heartland.
His torn hazmat suit would need to suffice, Mason was informed the day two crates appeared on the scaffolding. One contained C-rations sufficient for the next week. The other, 24 vials of the photo-luminescent isotope Ra-226 in lead-lined receptacles, three bags of zinc sulfide, and a block of his chosen bonding agent, tree sap.
Symbolism dangled beneath choppers, blocks quarried in every corner of New America: Maine granite, Hawaiian basalt from a vanquished rebel redoubt on Mauna Kea, Vishnu Schist cut from the Grand Canyon’s deepest floor before the dam was built in record time. And slabs of Texan sandstone pre-carved into an interlocking tsunami of golden hair designed to crest exactly 47 feet higher than the tallest existing figure on the Pantheon. (Junior had called Him “47” in the eulogy per officialdom’s new numerology, having already claimed the moniker “48” for himself.)
Mason sweated radiation sickness. Recalled a story his mentor once shared about two Republican Guards who’d flown in from Florida to demand that He be positioned not on the ridge’s jutting left flank as planned, but in a cleft at the center, replacing a lesser luminary named Teddy.
“So,” said the old man one night over whisky, “the site team does a clay mock-up, and guess what? In that spot, due to the 47-foot lift, the summer sun would cast the subject’s unmentionable saggy jowls in sinister shadow beginning mid-afternoon. Someone joked about a remedial space mirror. Troopers caught wind and denounced ‘far-left saboteurs masquerading as real Americans.’”
The old man chuckled, poured another slug and finished his story. “That night,” he whispered, “both RGs jumped from the same airplane.”
.
Mason dreamed of annals lost to history. Of abstract labor, forgotten vistas, tinny anthems obscured. He awoke atop wormy planks dappled by nosebleed.
During an afternoon unrecorded, Mason steps back, lets the dust settle, and grasps that The Eyes are done. Each glitters like a submarine dial in copper-ringed platinum. As choppers drone and distant rockslides roar down scree slopes in angry mobs.
Weeks pass. Mason pulls double shifts working the hairline until, in predawn light that final morning, the car-sized bolts begin popping a reveille as scaffolding separates from rock.
When Mason feels the mountainside slump, he drops his tools and turns westward to bestow the Badlands a final time. Dawn breaks and the music starts.
“O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majes—
GEORGE WEHRFRITZ
Badlands is stark and lacking in even the darkest humor. I’ve been reluctant to put it out there due to my concern that it’s too on the nose. That said, the Department of the Interior recently announced that it plans to issue annual passes to our national parks with Trump’s face pasted alongside George Washington’s—which seems like a skit stolen from the South Park writing room, yet suggests a frightening degree of sycophancy. My story Jaws in C Minor was published in 34thParallel Magazine Issue 119 https://34thparallel.net/34mag-119.html. I started writing short fiction as a pastime during the Covid-19 lockdown. By then I was well into my second career as a technical editor, having been displaced, from what’s come to be called Old Media, in 2009, shortly before Newsweek magazine (my employer for some 14 years) was jettisoned from its long-time parent (The Washington Post Company) and sold for $1. What followed, the so-called democratization of journalism aided by new technologies, marked a radical departure. How it impacted our world is a recurring subtext to my fiction, examples of which feature in three Spoon Knife anthologies by Autonomous Press and Tales of the Unreal No. 3 (2024) by Unreal Press.