Actually, the story begins unnervingly plainly. The bleached two-color cover of Mortal Scent's Walls Pushed Back is an obvious nod to Sarah Records, and the line-art style of the logo in the center of disk is, I have to believe, a deliberate reference to the drawing of Harriet the Spy on Harriet singles, but both the two songs here and the relatively brief (by Hill's later standards) notes on the insert come off less like a parody of indie pop than a generalization of it. Hill's vocals on "Walls Pushed Back" itself are wispy nearly to the point of unintelligibility, but puzzling them out reveals a song that is at once a paradigmatic example of bedroom-recording reticence, and a short essay about the process and its meaning. "Is this reaching out / Or fending off? / Are my windows / Legacy apertures / In what I would have left walls?", Hill asks, pointing out the essential dilemma of painfully introverted pop. If you really want to be left alone, making records about this wish is pretty clearly a bad idea, but what else do you do with these thoughts, acid if you swallow them? Maybe the answer is that you make the records, and then publicize them so meekly that your audience has to demonstrate their allegiance before they can even get to hear you.

Disneyland Pipe-Bomb is WC012, meaning we've missed such highlights as the Impracticals' "Where She Alights" (WC008), in which a five-piece ska-punk band apparently take up a cello and four violas with, we're forthrightly informed, mixed success, and Coronation Alley's "That's Only Part of It", described tersely as a "political lullaby". I'm disinclined to complain, as "Disneyland Pipe-Bomb" itself would be a classic even in a real catalog. Superficially, the song is meant as an attack, albeit rather after the fact, on the admittedly shaky political convictions of first-wave punk, the titular chorus shouted out in the cadence of the Jam's "Eton Rifles" but with three-part harmony, the verses a clever pastiche of "London Calling", the Sex Pistols' "Holiday in the Sun" and the Bluebells' "Cath". The song's ostensible complaint is that punk too often picked targets that, like Disneyland, are symbolic and symptomatic, but not production centers for true evil. While defending this as a blanket criticism might be arduous, it's easy enough to pick prominent examples, the Sex Pistols going after the Queen or the Clash after Spanish fascists. As obviously as the tune mocks Paul Weller, though, and the scenario proffers a shiny, Americanized relocation of "'A' Bomb in Wardour Street", the lyrics could be products of studying some of Weller's less-blunt songs, and the ultimate pathos (all the more striking because the Atlanta Olympic bombing was still two years away) is that our social structures for celebration are literal, and thus susceptible to physical injury. Amusement parks are cumbersome, failure-prone machines for fun, and part of the DIY genius of punk, revived by indie pop, is that music need not be so precious or precarious. If a pipe bomb shuts down Disneyland, half the world freezes in their tracks; if something happens to one or two pop songs (like they go out of print before you can find them, or they never get made in the first place), we'll just make up more.

Eventually I learned one detail about Mark Hill's personal life, but it doesn't come until later, so I can't tell you whether the burst of imaginary activity in Wishing Court's third year (Imagine Me Taller leaps ahead to WC0026), almost all of it with overtones of romantic frustration, is the result of a crisis in his own life, or just a study of pop's penchant for fixating on such things. Either way, the catalog entries between April Fool's Days 1994 and 1995 are a litany of intricate relationship and dependency laments, my favorite being the vampiric "Reunion Crasher", by Her Latest Hour (WC015), about a woman so dependent on external perceptions that she invades other people's nostalgia looking for misinformed affirmation; Mortal Scent's third single, "Plymouth Settlement" (WC019), which Hill claims interweaves the moral resolve of the pilgrims' landing with a divorce squabble over a beat up convertible (a joke that probably only works in paraphrase, if at all); and "Brittle Wings", by Demeanor Tells (WC021), whose catalog blurb reads, in its entirety, "When Superman turns out to be Daedalus, what happens to Lois?" If "Imagine Me Taller" were a country song, it would probably be a plea for one lover to compensate for the other's inadequacies in their mind, recognizing, healthily, that love is always at least partly a consensual hallucination, and you feel what you want to feel, not vice versa. In Hill's hands, though, set in a driving pop song so awash in reverb that it ends up sounding like the Housemartins remixed, angrily, by My Bloody Valentine, the title turns self-destructive, the narrator trying to raise his lover's standards so that he will not reach them. "I'm not the boy of my own dreams", in the second verse, is lifted nearly-verbatim from Game Theory's "The Real Sheila", but where Scott Miller followed it with "And if I were a girl with dreams, / I'd have dreams as big as you please", which is depressing enough, but does leave a little room for compromise, Hill's grim correlate is "The girl in my dreams / Dreams better than this, / And better than you", and it's hard to see how they'll recover from that.

Unless I'm misinterpreting things completely, then, Harris' wan, distracted voice is only one of the details on 1996's The Helipad's Dream of Flight that has become dissatisfied with its lot in life. Hill manages not to break character, but the strain is beginning to show. The catalog and Hill's label-update fit on a single piece of paper again, and both stick to statistics (sardonic itemizations of sales failings, pressing errors, manufacturing delays, etc.; the paragraph about getting back, in the mail, every distributors' copy of the label's first and only non-seven-inch, the ten-inch Her Latest Hour EP Bibliophobe (WC030), like they're homing pigeons, is especially plangent) and snippy attacks on other bands and labels (an afraid-to-fail savaging of Boyracer is surely intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but strikes some real blows), as if extending the Borges-ian fiction directly would require energy he can't quite muster any more. If you pretend to do anything for long enough, a part of you will start taking it seriously, and learn to operate, instinctively, within your arbitrary constraints (or, as the Clash put it, "He who fucks nuns later joins the church"). Neither of the two songs here, the galloping drum/bass/violin anthem "Anodyne Rack", like a less facile Camper Van Beethoven, on the front, and the ragged, polyrhythmic, stop-start thrash "Staring Down Headlights", as if seven-chord-punk is a genre straining to be born, on the back, have any trace of satire, or at least not of anything I've heard. I honestly believe, and there's nobody to shout me down, that this is Hill's whole-hearted attempt at producing two songs that validate all the fictions he has spun around them. If I'm right about Harris, that she doesn't know the full extent of the role in which she's been cast, then her presence here is the catalyst, if not the motivation itself. Faced with a real girl, and unable to woo her into a fiction, Hill is forced to cross over, at least partway, into the nearest reality. Harris, in a voice that sounds suspiciously like Helium leader Mary Timony's, provides an elaborate, sighing duet part on "Anodyne Rack", and a several-track backing rondo on "Staring Down Headlights", and Hill actually essays some drum fills, where the earlier songs stick to basically straightforward drum-machine loops, and although part of me hears the creaks of the soundstage and wonders whether Harris/Timony's lines haven't been flown in via sampler from elsewhere, I want desperately to believe that that isn't how this trick was done, that these songs really did emerge, sleepily, from long nights locked in a dark studio, Marik and Cleo learning how their voices fit together, either as proxy for a relationship outside of music, or perhaps in place of one, as voices can often intertwine far more tightly than bodies. The title is explained in a verse on the back, attributed amusingly to Goethe: "The helipad dreams of flight, / The mirror dreams of light, / And you and I dream, drowsy, / That some patient god will say we might". A tiny helicopter has been added to the familiar sketch of the fountain on the b-side label, suggesting that the label is the helipad, and that Hill knows, even as he tries to trick himself into believing that Cordon must be a real rock band because he's not its only member, and these are real rock songs because he wasn't thinking about other ones when he wrote them, that indirection and sincere pretense are the souls of his art, and that however well he can write songs, his capacity to imagine them will always be greater. Is this true of women, too? I don't forget, for an instant, that these two songs are parts of a larger meta-fiction, but I cling to the ways in which they affect me like real songs. The howling, distended "No more / Nights like this!", in "Anodyne Rack", is like the "In the name of love" sections of U2's "Pride", only with a better sense of purpose. The hushed background repetitions of "Maybe now, maybe now" in "Staring Down Headlights" are a persistent, hopeful prayer that perhaps the impossible will have, in the two seconds since the last time we checked, finally transpired. And although I think "Push on 'til morning" is supposed to be a Peter Pan reference, it makes me think, instead, of the boorish wedding guest that Hugh Grant rescues Andie MacDowell from, in their first encounter in Four Weddings and a Funeral, not because the idea of drinking 'til dawn appeals to me, but because dawn is something two people can stand against together, and it's long seemed to me, viscerally, like staying up all night, together or alone, ought to be progress, like morning is a destination, and if we can get there tonight, all our tomorrows will be effortless.

Panoramic dawns, however, for spectacles whose calendars are a matter of public record, are irritatingly elusive. I see a lot of 3ams, most 2ams, and I can't remember the last midnight I missed, but the truths I'm trying to isolate, like the people, always seem to lie one more hour out of my grasp. Quests are self-perpetuating. There is always something else you'll learn tomorrow, to make a better-informed decision than you could today, someone else you'll meet, and so decisions never get made. What use are premature conclusions?, a voice asks. The goal isn't resolution per se, it's correct action. I don't know enough yet. This seems profound, when I'm really tired, but it's not, it's petulant, irresponsible and self-indulgent. Truth isn't always receding, it's right at hand. I'm close, I'm so close.