More or less, the alien said. Watergate we’ve learned a lot about already. The question is why when those tapes were found out in July of 1973 which showed your president had taped every word spoken in his offices for four and a half years didn’t Nixon at once dispose of them? We have no such parallel in our own history. It seems inexplicable, really.
Oh, it’s not so inexplicable, Winogrand said. He was thinking of the pieta at Kent State, that famous photo taken in May 1970 after the Ohio guardsman had shot five students during the campus protests, the girl screaming over the body of the dead boy. The girl it turned out had been a runaway and seeing the picture in the paper was the first the parents had heard of her in a year. She had come home but then there were more troubles with drugs and somehow nothing had worked out for the girl. Nothing had really worked out for any of them, even though Winogrand had put the drugs and the peace signs away, had transferred to a university nearer home and had resolved to get a degree in something not very controversial. It’s not inexplicable, Winogrand said, because Nixon had himself on tape probably promising Ford that he would make him vice president in October of 1973 if Ford would agree to a pardon if Nixon got jammed too tight. Ford would have known about that and it would have gotten him nailed for obstruction of justice if it had come out. So it was useful, I guess, to have a lot of things on a lot of people. That was the decade, Winogrand said. Everybody had something on everybody else. The FBI broke into the office of the psychiatrist of the guy, Ellsberg, who had stolen the Pentagon Papers to try to get something on him. On Ellsberg. If they could have found some interesting crazy stuff back then in 1971, they figured that they could get even with him for releasing that stuff proving that everyone in the Pentagon had known that Vietnam was a lost cause from the beginning. You get it? Getting something on someone was just an instrument of national policy, then. If everybody was wired, then everybody was protected. The Houston Plan, Winogrand said. The Plumbers. Deep Throat in the bowels of the White House, meeting Woodward and Bernstein at the Lincoln Memorial with fancy, private stuff on Nixon. The whole ten years was tattletale, that’s all. If the sixties were the caldron with the lid off, the seventies were in the oven. The Philharmonic had had enough of Leonard Bernstein and his fund-raising for the Black Panthers so it got this real tight French guy, Boulez, in 1968 and until he got fired in 1977 Boulez wired the whole program with pots and pans and electrolysis.
This is very interesting, the alien said. It seemed in the half-light of the interrogation room to be drained now of malice, to be in the same broken, vulnerable, querulous posture that Winogrand had imagined himself occupying for most of that miserable decade. Really a strange, a miserable time, perched on his knees, not always metaphorically, waiting for first one humiliation, then the next to softly descend upon him. Wallace lying in the shopping plaza in Maryland in May 1972, shot by Bremer, paralyzed for life two days before Wallace won the Michigan primary anyway and then had to quit the race due to incontinance, paralysis, pain and an understanding of the mortuary arts. A sinkhole, that was what the seventies had been, Wallace lying on his back on the stones in the same posture as RFK in that kitchen in Los Angeles and the wife, Cornelia, over him screaming. A missed assassination, though, just like the two attempts on Ford, Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore two months apart in 1975. A cold decade, the seventies, but not as efficient for all of its sleekness, as the sixties. In the sixties people got put down, the seventies though were just for hanging around and around, sometimes until the eighties or even nineties. Bush had been chairman of the Republican National Committee during Watergate at Nixon’s behest. McGovern had backed Eagleton a thousand percent in August 1972 when word got out about the shock treatments Eagleton had incurred and then three days later had dumped him from the ticket in favor of Shriver. No, it was not an efficient decade.
It had more bark than bite, though, Winogrand said pointlessly. I mean, you could tough it out, you could get through it. Not like the sixties. The sixties could kind of sneak around and sneak around on you and then burn out your brainpan but even though the seventies started out tougher with that failed Apollo 13 and the secret bombing of Cambodia, they wimped out in the malaise speech. A clear arc toward extinguishment, Winogrand said. Is there anything else you need to know? Can I go now? Are we finished?
It’s hard to understand you people, the interrogator said. You take all of your history so seriously and yet nothing happens.
I told you that to start, Winogrand said earnestly. I told you that it was a cold gray time. You said you knew, that everyone else had told you that too. Well, that’s what it was. It was a cold gray time. The Oakland A’s won three world championships in a row from 1972 through 1974 and then Steinbrenner and Martin and Jackson had the New York Yankee follies in the late seventies so it wasn’t all a matter of recycling at a lower level. A few things changed. Even I changed, Winogrand said. He could feel the slow throb of change moving within him although maybe it was inertia or a kind of moral paralysis. There was no difference amongst all of these—change, fear, moral paralysis, sexual desire, the whole grabbag of virtues and vices—and that was another thing the seventies had taught him.
Believe me, Winogrand said, you don’t want this place. The more you learn about it the less you can see, am I right? I’d like to be excused now.
His interrogator bobbed its tentacles in a way which seemed very much like a shrug of assent although of course, anthropomorphizing was pretty much a constant in the alien-human spatial relations which Winogrand had noted. What we can’t understand, the interrogator said, taking testimony on this century of yours in decade-long testimony, cutting up the century and trying to get the picture here … we simply can’t understand how and why you cling to any concept of linearity. Don’t you see how disjunctive this is? Yet you seek for connections even when there are no connections.
Well, Winogrand said, and felt the full weight of the century coursing thickly through like sludge, like knowledge, like some river of testimony, well, that’s how we were framed. We’re a linear race. We believe in chronology. We hold to chronology as if it had consequence. Everyone, Winogrand said, but Nixon that is. I don’t think that he’s linear which is why he is still around. The shadows poked from the corners of the room, seeming to dazzle in the sudden heat and Winogrand felt himself beginning to slide away, toward a lucid and grateful consciousness. Well thank you, he heard the alien say, thank you for your time and trouble. We’ll have to consider all of this but I think there’s a very good possibility that we want no part of this. None at all. Too much malaise, the alien said. You should talk, Winogrand said and then, sinking into the reconstructed unconsciousness from which time and again they had hauled him, he felt himself on the lip of a profound but casual insight which seemed to wait for him like a net just below that abyss of sleep. Linear, he thought, that was the fallacy, and then he was out and the aliens going about their continuing work which consisted of trying to find some way of reordering the century. The trouble was that like a Chinese puzzle, it didn’t seem to fit no matter how you placed those tubes of the decade. Of their eventual decision, then, the account executive remained blameless.
Le Croix
DEPERSONLIZATION takes over. As usual, he does not quite feel himself, which is for the best; the man that he knows could hardly manage these embarrassing circumstances. Adaptability, that is the key; swim in the fast waters. There is no other way that he, let alone I could get through. “Pardonnez tout ils,” he says, feeling himself twirling upon the crucifix in the absent Roman breezes, a sensation not unlike flight, “mais ils ne comprendre pas que ils fait.”
Oh my, is that awful. He wishes that he could do better than that. Still, there is no one around, strictly speaking, to criticize and besides, he is merely following impulse which is the purpose of the program. Do what you will. “Ah pere, this is a bitch,” he mutters.
The thief on his left, an utterly untrustworthy type, murmurs foreign curses, not in French, to the o
ther thief; and the man, losing patience with his companions who certainly look as culpable as all hell, stares below. Casting his glance far down he can see the onlookers, not so many as one would think, far less than the texts would indicate but certainly enough (fair is fair and simple Mark had made an effort to get it right) to cast lots over his vestments. They should be starting that stuff just about now.
Ah, well. This too shall pass. He considers the sky, noting with interest that the formation of clouds against the dazzling sunlight must yield the aspect of stigmata. For everything a natural, logical explanation. It is a rational world back here after all. If a little on the monolithic side.
“I wonder how long this is going to go on,” he says to make conversation. “it does seem to be taking a bloody long time.”
“Long time” the thief on the left says. “Until we die, that’s how long, and not an instant sooner. It’s easier,” the thief says confidentially, “if you breathe in tight little gasps. Less pain. You’re kind of grabbing for the air.”
“Am I” Really?”
“Leave him alone,” the other thief says. “Don’t talk to him. Why give him advice?”
“Just trying to help a mate on the stations, that’s all.”
“Help Yourself,” the second thief grumbles. “That’s the only possibility. If I had looked out for myself I wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“I quite agree,” I say. “That’s exactly my condition, exactly.”
“Ah, stuff it, mate,” the thief says.
It is really impossible to deal with these people. The texts imbue them with sentimental focus but truly they are swine. I can grasp Pilate’s dilemma. Thinking of Pilate leads into another channel, but before I can truly consider the man’s problems a pain of particular dimension slashes through me and there I am, there I am, suspended from the great cross groaning, all the syllables of thought trapped within.
“Ah,” I murmur, “ah,” he murmurs, “ah monsieurs, c’est le plus,” but it is not, to be sure, it is not le plus at all. Do not be too quick to judge.
It goes on, in fact, for an unsatisfactorily extended and quite spiritually laden period of time. The lot-casting goes quickly and there is little to divert on the hillside; one can only take so much of that silly woman weeping before it loses all emotional impact. It becomes a long and screaming difficulty, a passage broken only by the careless deaths of the thieves who surrender in babble and finally, not an instant too soon, the man’s brain bursts … but there is time, crucifixion being what it is, for slow diminution beyond that. Lessening color; black and grey, if there is one thing to be said about this process, it is exceedingly generous. One will be spared nothing.
Of course I had pointed out that I did not want to be spared anything. “Give me Jesus,” I had asked and cooperating in their patient way they had given me Jesus. There is neither irony nor restraint to the process, which is exactly the way that it should be.
Even to the insult of the thieves abusing me.
* * * *
Alive to the tenor of the strange and difficult times, I found myself moved to consider the question of religious knowledge versus fanaticism. Hard choices have to be made even in pursuit of self-indulgence. Both were dangerous to the technocratic state of 2219, of course, but of the two religion was considered the more risky because fanaticism could well be turned to the advantage of the institutions. (Then there were the countervailing arguments of course that they were partners, but these I chose to dismiss.) Sexuality was another pursuit possibly inimical to the state but it held no interest for me; the general Privacy and Social Taboo acts of the previous century had been taken very seriously by my subdivision and I inherited neither genetic nor socially-derived interest in sex for its own non-procreative sake.
Religion interested me more than fanaticism for a permanent program, but fanaticism was not without its temptations. “Religion after all imposes a certain rigor,” I was instructed. “There is some kind of a rationalizing force and also the need to assimilate text. Then too there is the reliance upon another, higher power. One cannot fulfill ultimately narcissistic tendencies. On the other hand, fanaticism dwells wholly within the poles of self. You can destroy the systems, find immortality, lead a crushing revolt, discover immortality within the crevices. It is not to be neglected; it is also purgative and satisfying and removes much of that indecision and social alienation of which you have complained. No fanatic is truly lonely or at least he has learned to cherish his loneliness.”
“I think I’d rather have the religious program,” I said after due consideration. “The lives of the prophets, the question of the validity of the text, the matters of the passion attract me.”
“You will find,” they pointed out, “that much of the religious experience is misrepresented. It leads only to an increasing doubt for many, and most of the major religious figures were severely maladjusted. You would be surprised at how many were psychotics whose madness was retrospectively falsified by others for their own purpose.”
“Still,” I said, “there are levels of feeling worth investigating.”
“That, of course, is your decision,” they said, relenting. They were nothing if not cooperative; under the promulgated and revised acts of 2202, severely liberalizing board procedures, there have been many improvements of this illusory sort. “If you wish to pursue religion we will do nothing to stop you. It is your inheritance and our decree. We can only warn you that there is apt to be disappointment.”
“Disappointment!” I said, allowing some affect for the first time to bloom perilously forth. “I am not interested in disappointment. This is of no concern to me whatsoever; what I am interested in is the truth. After all, and was it not said that it is the truth which will make ye?”
“Never in this lifetime,” they cut me off, sadly, sadly, and sent me on my way with a proper program, a schedule of appointments with the technicians, the necessary literature to explain the effects that all of this would have upon my personal landscape, inevitable changes, the rules of dysfunction, little instances of psychotic break but all of it to be contained within the larger pattern. By the time I exit from the transverse I have used up the literature, and so I dispose of it, tearing it into wide strips, throwing the strips into the empty, sparkling air above the passage lanes, watching them catch the little filters of light for the moment before they flutter soundlessly to the metallic, glittering earth of this most unspeakable time.
* * * *
I find myself at one point of the way the Grand Lubavitcher Rabbi of Bruck Linn administering counsel to all who would seek it.
The Lubavitcher Sect of the Judaic religion was, I understand, a twenty or twenty-first reconstitution of the older, stricter European forms which was composed of refugees who fled to Bruck Linn in the wake of one of the numerous purges of that time. Now defunct, the judaicists are, as I understand it, a sect characterized by a long history of ritual persecution from which they flourished, or at least the surviving remnants flourished, but then again the persecution might have been the most important part of the ritual. At this remove in time it is hard to tell. The hypnotics, as the literature and procedures have made utterly clear, work upon personal projections and do not claim historical accuracy, as historical accuracy exists for the historicists, if anyone, and often enough not for them. Times being what they are.
It is, in any case, interesting to be the Lubavitcher Rabbi in Bruck Linn, regardless of the origins of the sect or even of its historical reality; in frock coat and heavy beard I sit behind a desk in cramped quarters surrounded by murmuring advisors and render judgments one by one upon members of the congregation as they appear before me. Penalty for compelled intercourse during a period of uncleanliness is three months of abstention swiftly dealt out and despite explanations that the young bride had pleaded for comfort. The Book of Daniel, reinterpreed, does not signal the resumption of Holocaust within the coming month; the congregant is sent away relieved. Two rabbis appear with T
almudic dispute; one says that Zephaniah meant that all pagans and not all things were to be consumed utterly off the face of the Earth, but the other says that the edict of Zephaniah was literal and that one cannot subdivide “pagans” from “all things”. I return to the text for clarification, remind them that Zephaniah no less than Second Isaiah or the sullen Ecclesiastes spoke in doubled perversities and advise that the literal interpretation would have made this conference unnecessary, therefore metaphor must apply. My advisors nod in approval at this and there are small claps of admiration. Bemused, the two rabbis leave. A woman asks for a ruling on mikvah for a pre-menstrual daughter who is nonetheless now fifteen years old, and I reserve decision. A conservative rabbi from Yawk comes to give humble request that I give a statement to the congregation for one of the minor festivals, and I decline pointing out that for the Lubavitcher fallen members of the judaicists are more reprehensible than those who have never arrived. Once again my advisors applaud. There is a momentary break in the consultations and I am left to pace the study alone while advisors and questioners withdraw to give me time for contemplation.
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 29