by Mark Helprin
Virginia was so surprised that she couldn’t reply.
“Do you?”
“No,” she answered. “Attacked? For what reason? Who?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, and nodded in confirmation of his own suspicions. “Sit down,” he said, and proceeded to explain to her in fatherly fashion about the savagery of intellectual dispute in a city where many held the intellect above nature. “Most people,” he told her, “arrive at tortured conclusions via blind and painful routes. They don’t like it when someone like you shows up in a balloon. You can’t expect anyone to trust revelation if he hasn’t experienced it himself. Those who haven’t, know only reason. And since revelation is a thing apart, and cannot be accounted for reasonably, they will never believe you. This is the great division of the world, and always has been. When reason and revelation run together, why, then you have something, a great age. But, in the city, now, reason is predominant. To argue from any other point of view or by any other means, as you do, is subversive. You will be attacked. Perhaps if we run your pieces in the religion department, alongside the sermon summaries, they won’t create so much controversy . . .”
“What controversy?” she interrupted. “There hasn’t been any controversy.”
“There will be.”
She found this hard to believe.
“Where are you from, young lady?” he inquired.
“From Lake of the Coheeries. When I arrived in New York, I stayed with Jessica at your house. You were in Japan.”
“You are little Virginia Gamely?”
“Not anymore,” she said with a smile, because she towered over him.
“I hadn’t realized,” said Harry Penn, looking directly at her. “I’ll be interested to see your columns as they appear.”
“I don’t really remember you,” she said.
“The last time I saw you,” Harry Penn replied, “you were a very young child. You wouldn’t have remembered.”
What Harry Penn had predicted came to pass. Virginia was attacked from several quarters, and treated as if she had suggested that the city’s children be forced to drink hemlock. The Ghost hit her on its front page, ignoring the news of the world to castigate her and The Sun for “religious reactionism. There are court rulings against this sort of thing,” they wrote, “and it should be suppressed in the name of modernity and good sense.” Not that Craig Binky held that opinion (he generally didn’t know what opinions he held), but this seemed to him to be the way people were thinking. Other publications, too, rammed her broadside, but in a less than energetic, condescending fashion. This was because they thought that since she was new it would not take much to sink her. Such mistakes are often made in wartime.
Virginia had seen Mrs. Gamely pick up her shotgun and pump away at marauders in the night, and in many respects she was just like her mother, which is not to say that the course she chose was wise or correct—it was neither—but, rather, that it was spirited. Abandoning caution, she took out after her enemies.
A Ghost editorial questioned the propriety of the complex essays on esthetics that were regularly appearing in The Sun: “Does the man on the street, in his millions, be he Hincky, Lester, Jocko, Alphonse, or John, have any understanding whatsoever of the mystico-religious obsession that has seized The Sun?” Soon after, Harry Penn looked up over his ancient leather-covered desk to see Praeger de Pinto and Hugh Close standing opposite. His editor-in-chief and his chief-of-rewrite were involved in a dispute about the wisdom of running Virginia’s answer to The Ghost.
“Mr. Penn,” implored Hugh Close, “we simply cannot print this article anywhere, except, perhaps, in Editorial IV. No, not even there.” He held up a copy sheet that was titled, “Oh Ghost, where is thy sting?”
All the while, Praeger de Pinto was silent.
“Please look at it, sir,” Close pleaded. “Let me call your attention to lines such as these: ‘I would rather be torn to pieces by the poison-clawed cat, than suffer one instant of acceptance by the resident intellectuals of The Ghost. . . . Men like Myron Holiday, Wormies Bindabu, and Irv Lightningcow don’t know their asses from their elbows, much less how to see the truth. Just yesterday, for example, Myron Holiday wrote in his column that Oliver Cromwell was a famous bullfighter, and that strategic bombing was introduced in the War of 1812. . . . The rationalists of The Ghost are mechanistic beasts who thrive in darkness and wither in the light of the sun. If they pass within twenty feet of a bottle of milk, it sours. They live at cocktail parties full of unkempt women who are always smoking cigarettes, they don’t know how to swim, they frighten children, and they masturbate in bookstores.’
“We can’t print things like that. Her brush is far too broad.”
“However,” said Harry Penn, holding up his index finger in a patriarchal gesture, “what she says is true. Put it on the front page.”
“But, Mr. Penn,” Close begged. He was the paragon of exactitude, and such a careless, all-encompassing attack was contrary to his nature. “It makes us so goddamned vulnerable!”
Praeger de Pinto turned toward the window to hide his smile. He knew Harry Penn better than anyone alive.
“Close, our indiscretions sometimes serve us well,” Harry Penn wheezed. “For a divinity shapes our ends. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Runneth it on page one.”
“Page one?” Realizing that he was not going to win, Close tried to trim his losses.
“Page one.”
“Page one?”
“What are you?” Harry Penn asked. “A parrot?”
Virginia was pacing back and forth in the roof garden. The Sun did fire people, and she had gone too far. Defiance and remorse alternated in such strong waves that she felt as if she were in the crow’s nest of a ship with a fifty-degree roll. When Praeger approached her with a grave and frozen look set upon his face, she thought the worst.
He stared at her for a moment, watching her begin to fall apart. Then he launched her to the moon by telling her that he and Harry Penn were going to print her polemics on the front page. But he told her as well that it had been a close call, and that if she wanted to live dangerously she could make a lot more money driving nitroglycerine trucks. Nonetheless, she walked across the roof garden with a May stride. When she went down to the city room to tell Hardesty, he, too, cautioned her to be careful.
She was, for an entire day. After that, she reverted to her old ways. She was afraid, but she pushed ahead unmindful of the hazards. Perhaps it was because the Coheeries people were descended from the audacious raiders of the French and Indian Wars. Perhaps it was because she felt that she was caught in a deep and clear backwater of time, or because she was a daring believer well versed in the omnipotence of God and nature. Or perhaps it was because she was just a little bit out of her mind.
Virginia’s conflict with The Ghost’s intellectuals and their followers was soon stalemated, as both sides exhausted themselves heaving into one another’s camps huge unsupportable generalities that were more taxing to deliver than to sustain.
Each article brought pressures for her removal, both from within and from without The Sun. At every juncture, however, Harry Penn intervened to protect her. No one understood why, especially in light of the fact that even his own daughter, Jessica, sometimes received scathing reviews in double salvos from Sun and Whale.
After the first reprieve, Virginia had felt the near miss reverberating through her in the same way that a knife-thrower’s assistant feels the vibrations of the board against which her back is motionlessly pressed. The second time, she had swung gaily in a hammock supported by the twin posts of relief and gratitude. The third time, it had seemed rather humorous. The fourth time, after a column entitled “The Mayor Looks Like an Egg. Period,” she had expected it. And the fifth time, after “Craig Binky and the Question of Mental Nudity,” she would have been surprised had the reprieve not come.
No one on The Sun had ever been treated with such def
erence. She was free to do anything she wanted to do, and took risks enough in a week to last a lifetime. Those of goodwill suspected that Harry Penn’s advanced age had led him to experiment in folly. According to loose tongues, she had become his mistress. But Harry Penn remained alert and dapper. Always in tweed, he sported a gold-handled ebony cane with which he poked dogs who were fouling a footpath, and though he was still able, every now and then, to toss a harpoon, he clearly was well past the age for having a mistress, or even trying. His solicitude for Virginia Gamely remained a mystery.
. . . And The Ghost
LOOK, THERE is no sane organized way to describe The Ghost, and no place to start. The Ghost was circular and rotund in time, and it was laid out in complete chaos. It crawled with absolutely serious people demanding an infinite variety of insane things. For example, at one time, a major crisis occurred when the newspaper divided into two factions—those who said that white wine came from fish and those who maintained that it didn’t, although they either would not or could not say where it did come from. They shunned each other like Huguenots and Walloons and for eight or nine months, The Ghost appeared with many blank spaces, missing pictures, and upside down or sideways articles, because the factions would not cooperate. Craig Binky conferred with his advisers, and then did exactly what he had wanted to do anyway. Calling the board back together, he announced: “Gentlemen, you remember the story of the Accordion Knot. Pepin the Short, when presented with the Accordion Knot, couldn’t untie it. So he set it on fire—just like the Russians and their Pumpkin Villages. I plan to follow the same strategy, with adaptations for this, a more euphonious age.” He then proceeded to fire every single one of The Ghost’s eleven thousand employees. The next day, The Ghost was completely empty, even of rats, and this might have knocked some sense into the feuding employees, had Craig Binky not given each of them three years’ severance pay. For five or six weeks, The Ghost and its subsidiary enterprises were as dark as a moonless night in a cave, while an army of professional skip tracers roamed the French and Italian Rivieras.
The lesson of Craig Binky was quite simple. As Virginia wrote to sum up her interview with the editor and publisher of The Ghost: “Too much power makes for the ridiculous. It is as true for politics, in which the powerful are often brought down by their own pomposity, as it is in religion, in which the man who sees angels returns most times with a tale of harlequins; as it is in newspaper publishing, in which being a mirror to the world makes fools of those who would say what it is and what it is not. Of course, someone always has to risk saying what is and what is not. Those who do so in ignorance of their place in nature, however, bring down upon themselves things such as Craig Binky’s carefully rendered judgment that ‘white wine does not, in fact, come from fish, or from any other mammal. It is made by pressing the juice of the immature zucchini.’”
But The Ghost’s board of directors were irreversibly intimidated by the Binky zillions, and dared not contradict their chief. Although at times they would beg him not to do this or that, it was always in the tones of garden mice. His power over them was nearly absolute. For example, he made them change their names to the guide words on the bindings of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. This was so that he could remember better who they were, since he spent a lot of time staring at his encyclopaedia. Reluctantly, they became Bibai Coleman, Hermoup Lally, Lalo Montpar, Montpel Piranesi, Scurlock Tirah, Arizona Bolivar, Bolivia Cervantes (the only female member), Ceylon Congreve, Geraniales Hume, Newman Peisistratus, Rubens Somalia, and Tirane Zywny, who, to his everlasting shame, shared his appellation with the rat-catching Zywny, a type of dog.
Flanked by his two blind bodyguards, Alertu and Scroutu, Craig Binky marched into a monthly board meeting. As usual, he had a sheaf of new proposals and projects (which he called “projectiles”), all of which the board was obliged to approve.
“First of all,” he said, “I want to let me thank you for the compliment of calling you here. What I mean is to say that, frankly, how nice I am to meet you. Well! How the day is! The sun shines in blarts and twines, and everything sustantiates. So, you see, what a pleasure it is to address you, from me, your friend and chairman—always concerned, never happy, and quite willing to talk it over, yesterday, today, or tomorrow.” Then he swiveled in his chair and stared out the window for five minutes. It bothered him not at all that his board members were sitting rigidly at attention behind him. Sometimes he left them that way for an hour. What did he care? He paid them each $200,000 a year to applaud politely when he came in, to nod and widen their eyes at his suggestions and proposals, to call each other by the names he had made them adopt, to discuss the things he said, in big words that he didn’t understand, and then confirm that it was a brilliant idea, for example, to grow mushrooms in unused safe deposit boxes. He swung back around.
“Lalo, Hermoup, Bolivia, Bibai, Montpel, Newman, Tirane, Ceylon, Geraniales, Arizona, Scurlock. I’m glad you’re all here, glad you’re all mortal. Listen to this.
“What would happen if we took everything that exists in the universe, and divided it by one? I’ll tell you. It would remain the same. So, therefore, how do we know that someone isn’t doing that right now, at this very instant? It makes me shudder to think of it. We might be constantly divided by one, or multiplied by one for that matter, and we wouldn’t even know it!”
Everyone feigned a look of wonder, turned to his neighbor, and sat erect again, waiting for what was next.
“Let me enumerate today’s points, if I will, beginning with number A.
“Number two. I’ve thought about it, and I don’t like it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s out the window, finished, caveat.”
“Good idea,” said Scurlock Tirah (whose real name was Finny Pealock).
“Number L. We’re somewhat behind the times in corporate organization. Marcel Apand was telling me about a little electronics company he set up in India. He got a business school to design it from the floor up, and I really like the way they did it. So, as of next Monday, The Ghost parent corporation will be recast into clusters, macroclusters, microclusters, pods, micropods, minipods, macropods, macronuggets, supernuggets, bulbo-aggregates, and pings. Some departments will tie into other clusters, pods, nuggets, bulbo-aggregates, and pings, and some will remain essentially stable. For example, a secretary in what is now the secretarial pool of the real estate section of the classified department, will henceforth be referred to as a ping in the secretarial cluster of the real estate pod in the classified macronugget. This, of course, is in turn a bulbo-aggregate of the revenue-generating supernugget.”
The board sat with nervous smiles on their faces, feet tapping, fingers drumming, eyes darting from side to side.
For the next two and a half hours, during which he was served a seven-course lunch as everyone else looked on, empty-stomached and salivating, Craig Binky held forth, and ideas flowed from him in manic density. He firmly believed that he was the center of the universe, that, a thousand years in the future, people would refer to the late twentieth century as “The Age of Craig Binky,” to its music and art as “Binkian,” or “Binkyesque,” or “Binkotic.” He had even flirted with the idea of “Binkonian,” “Binkese” (which, in fact, did exist), and “Binkritude.”
The Ghost itself was a puzzling document. Unlike The Sun and most other newspapers, it was run by headline writers. Over the years, the success of their sensational declarations had transformed them into a caste of elevated mandarins, and they discovered that their headings did not need to have any bearing whatsoever on the copy below. A story entitled “Mercy Killing in Manila,” for example, might well be about the Norwegian building boom, or about a department store in Hartford, Connecticut. “Queen Goes Nude in London,” was about a new form of insect repellent developed at the University of Iowa. And below “African Playboy Kills Self,” was the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of a Harvard biochemist. The front page of The Ghost, as might be expected in a tabloid, was all headline, and as often as n
ot, in red. Unlike the other tabloids that it had long before knocked out of the picture, however, The Ghost had headlines unaccompanied by any story. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Millions bought the paper no matter what. Harry Penn’s favorite example of a Ghost banner headline with no further explanation was framed in his office. In huge block type, it read: “Dead Model Sues Race Horse.”
Still, The Ghost grew, and so did the billions. It was as if Craig Binky was protected by an angel.
And if one were to believe The Ghost’s editor and publisher, there was an angel. Once, Craig Binky had stormed into Harry Penn’s office, demanding that The Sun close down immediately. When asked to explain his audacity, he replied that an angel had come to him, thrown plastic nets over his body, imprisoned his will, and told him to make this exact demand. Harry Penn was eating a piece of hard candy, something which always made him seem even cooler and more ironic than he actually was. As he thought, the candy went from side to side in his mouth, like a die in a dice cup. Finally, he held it still. “Craig,” he asked, “did the angel give you a receipt?” Silence ensued, during which Craig Binky’s apparent inability to overcome this hurdle flooded the room as if it had been hundreds of silver dollars that had burst through his pockets, fallen like a waterfall inside his pant legs, paid out over his feet, and rolled everywhere. “Because, Craig,” Harry Penn insisted, “if you don’t have a receipt, we can’t accept the claim as valid.”
But little else could deter Craig Binky, for he believed that everything about him was destined to be triumphal. Harry Penn was certain that in his nearly one hundred years he had never encountered a soul more intensely marinated in self-satisfaction. Craig Binky’s pomposity was often relieved, for others, by what Harry Penn generously termed “Mr. Binky’s somewhat inexact intelligence.”
Partly to crowd out other opinions, and partly to make his views become known, he craftily filled the letters page of The Ghost with anonymous communications which he signed “Craig B.” Even if that hadn’t given him away, most people would have been able to guess who had written the letters, because his style and syntax were unmistakable: “Craig Binky says that there are too many water fountains on the third floor. Craig Binky says take some away.” His sentences frequently included a subject that was its own predicate: “The Ghost, New York’s most beloved newspaper, published and edited by Craig Binky, is The Ghost.”