David Ohle is one of Ben Marcus’s biggest influences and it shows. Both Motorman and Age of Wire and String feature imaginary worlds where day-to-day objects and events have become rearranged, changed, and made unfamiliar. But, while Marcus’s stories use the unknown to create the teasing effect of knowledge, Ohle’s novel reminds us again and again that understanding is beyond our reach. Motorman is set in the future and\or another world, one largely populated by dyslexic, humanoid “jellyheads;” overcast by erratic, artificial, “government moons” and suns; and wracked by freak weather events. The (human) protagonist, Moldenke, has incurred the wrath of a (seemingly) powerful man named Bunce, possibly because Moldenke (may have) killed two jellyheads. As all those qualifiers indicate, the novel casts doubt on the motives, identity, and history of all the characters. That is not to say that the novel is a mystery—neither the facts of the situation nor the character’s motives are presented as puzzles or problems. Instead, the novel gestures toward the ideological category that Donald Rumsfeld would later term the “unknown unknown.” Though Moldenke and his friend and correspondent Dr. Burnheart are scientists who pride themselves in getting to the bottom of things, they fail to ask questions that any habitual science fiction reader would demand to know. Moldenke’s world is encased in what Victor Shklovsky calls the “glass armor of the familiar,” taken for granted and therefore unnoticed and uninterrogated. Even if Moldenke were to formulate some inquiry into planetary conditions, it becomes clear that the unknown unknown variables involved are endless. The world itself seems to take the structure of the exams Moldenke receives from his mentor: in one circuitous question, Moldenke is asked to react to a scenario in which a bone falls from a tree and hits the side of his shoe. Moldenke speculates that it is the bones of a flood victim who climbed to safety only to be bitten by a poisonous snake. Burnheart counters that no flood occurred, no poisonous snakes inhabit the unspecified region and, in fact, the bone was placed in the tree by a mischievous friend.
The import of Moldenke’s incomprehension or incuriosity becomes clear when we examine his distant and tenuous relationship to other people. To be known by others appears as a terrifying scenario: Moldenke’s tormentor, Bunce, claims to know every last detail of Moldenke’s life and has tapes of everything everyone has ever said about him. At the same time, however, the opposite is equally if not more unpleasant; Moldenke’s complete psychological alienation manifests as the inability to know other people. His relationship to his romantic interest, Cock Roberta, is characterized by absence, lack of emotion, and frustrated communication. They are described as like two “ghost crabs” that repeatedly check for one another in the same burrow but never show up at the same time. Meanwhile, Moldenke believes that his only ally Burnheart knows little of him and he isn’t even sure of who Burnheart himself really is. Then there are the jellyheads—nameless, servile entities who Moldenke seems to think nothing of, even as they die. They are inscrutable—their very faces are featureless, gray balloons—and therefore of no concern.
We only have to go as far as the text to see this attitude applied to a real world group. Over the course of the novel, we learn that all of the remaining black people—save one Roosevelt Teaset—have died in a government-orchestrated disaster. When Roosevelt Teaset’s twenty artificial hearts fail, his corpse is put on display, complete with cotton field diorama, next to the remains of the last banana plant. Moldenke sees the display and he feels that something “isn’t quite right” so, ever the scientist, he pays off the “dustboy” to let him examine the cadaver after hours—only to discover that it is a fake. These events—which, taken together, only make up about a page—pass almost entirely without comment. Moldenke simply notes: “Now I know it… What’s missing from the Teaset display. Teaset is missing” (107). While Moldenke is almost as impenetrable as any of the other characters in the novel, it’s apparent that he fails to move beyond this superficial discovery to more critical questions. What’s missing from the display—and Moldenke’s dystopia—is not merely a genuine dead body. As Moldenke slides through this bizarre setting, only becoming more confused and never quite realizing it, he seems to exemplify one of Thomas Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”
