Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  And so, though circuses and theater generally fail to move him, though he distrusts mobs and is dubious about the selection of Times Square for the executions (as Mother Luce has said: “New York is in the bloodstream of America and America flows hot through New York. But New York is not America, son… New York is the fascination of America—where vices easily become virtues and virtues vices…”), here is where he must be tonight. It is, as his mother would say, his “manifest duty.” And he is not without defenses. If worse comes to worst, he will do what he has always done. If he bursts through the scrim of phenomena and grasps the whole of tonight’s events, he will celebrate them; if they overwhelm him, he will belittle them. He’s a professional, after all.

  19.

  All Aboard the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special

  “I been busy as a one-armed paperhanger with the nettle-rash,” stormed Uncle Sam, “copin’ with riots and wars, payroll robberies, murders, and onscrofulous sabotage! Them parleyvoos, who can’t even get a damn guvvamint together, are tearin’ up our Embassy, the Bolsheviks are massin’ for a riot in Munich, I’m exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions from within stirrin’ a ‘ruption in me equal to a small arthquake, time is fast runnin’ out, I need ever’ able hand at my command at full strength and manly firmness—and Holy Foley! what do I find you doin’?!”

  I stood with my back to him at the marble fireplace, flushed with shame, afraid even to look up at my own face in the mirror, trying to unjam the zipper on my fly—he’d startled me so, I’d leapt out of my swivel chair like an Eisenhopper, nearly castrating myself on the edge of the desk as I’d slammed past, and, trying desperately to yank shut my fly, had trapped my shirttail deep into the zipper.

  “Remember, you shall have joy, or you shall have power,” admonished Uncle Sam, “but you cain’t have both with the same hand! These repeated abuses and usurpations ain’t such as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for flyin’ the flag! You cain’t Tippecanoe and till her, too!”

  I struggled desperately with the snagged zipper, not even trying to puzzle out whose voices were leaking through him now, in fact I could hardly hear him, all my senses seemed blocked off somehow—yet I knew he was there, omnipresently there, jamming up all the corners. I longed for the privacy of the old bell tower over our store in Whittier, where things like this never happened. My trouble, I thought, is that I’m an introvert in an extrovert profession.

  “So what’s the matter, son? Pat pregnant again?”

  “No! No, I… I don’t know,” I whispered hoarsely. “It’s like…like I’ve been going backward… I’m sorry…it’s silly—backward in time! It’s hard to explain…”

  “Aha,” mused Uncle Sam, “backward in time, is it?” I caught a furtive glimpse of him in the mirror over my shoulder. His face was in shadows, his back to the window. He might have been giving me a look of utter disgust. Or he might have been laughing. Either way, I knew, the fat was in the fire. I’d recognized from the time I became a member of HUAC, and particularly after my participation in the Hiss case, that it was essential for me to maintain a standard of personal conduct that was above criticism, and now—ah, I had faced some problems in my life perhaps more difficult than this one, but none could approach it in terms of personal embarrassment and chagrin. “Sounds like the fortieth-birthday blues to me,” he said.

  “Uh…” Was this an excuse? It didn’t sound like one. “That was five, uh, five months ago, I don’t think—”

  “You were busy then, Inauguration and all, it usually doesn’t hit you until a few months go by…. Say, boy, you want me to give a jerk on that thing for you?”

  “No!” I cried. “No, I… I have it now… I almost have it…!” But I didn’t. I couldn’t even see the damned thing, everything was blurred, and my hands were shaking. Heart whamming away like ninety. This crisis is worse even than the fund, I thought. “It’s not my…it’s just my shirttail…”

  “No doubt,” snorted Uncle Sam. Hands in pockets, he kicked heedlessly across the room through the clutter of notes and documents. “Well, lemme tell you, hoss, backward in time is one place Americans don’t never go, grand climacteric or no! Herbert Hoover was born a penniless orphant, but he didn’t look back, and at the age of forty he was worth four million smackeroos—and he wasn’t even President yet! In fact, later on, bein’ a mite skittyish, he finally did look back—and got royally creamed for it, too! You know what Henry Ford done when he turned forty? He gave up small-time mechanics and went out and founded him the goddamn Ford Motor Company, that’s what! Forty, yes, he was forty! Now his boy, who ain’t even as old as you, is pullin’ in upwards of a hundred million bucks a year, not bad for a kid, and even payin’ taxes on some of it, just to show his heart’s in the right place!” He picked up one of the Greenglass sketches, turned it one way, then the other, finally shrugged and tossed it back on the floor. “‘At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; at forty, the judgment’—old Ben Franklin wrote that, and passin’ forty hisself, sold off his press and bought up Dr. Spence’s do-it-yourself electrical kit—if he hadn’t a flown that kite, we wouldn’t be here today! When Paul Revere was forty, he spread the alarm through every Middlesexed village and farm, and Ulysses Grant used his fortieth year to put the squeeze on Vicks-burg and that ain’t just another name for your old John Thomas! Now, what woulda happened if them snorters had opened their pants, got bird in hand, and looked backward in time? Eh? No, my friend, remember the Prophets: Look not mournfully into the Past, it comes not back agin!”

  “It wasn’t…exactly my own past exactly…more like…” Never mind. Just make matters worse. I struggled to recall that line from Shakespeare about hearts and hell that I copied down years ago when I was in the Navy, I knew it would be useful. When I was away from Pat for a while…. But it wouldn’t come to me. Instead, what I did remember suddenly was the name of that old Clark Gable movie: It Happened One Night. This scene, however, was not in it.

  “I will say to your credit, though, you’re more natural at that than you are at golf or politics—if you loosened up like that out in public, might make all the difference! You’d probably be floggin’ a lot fewer problems at home, too….”

  “I’m not having problems!” I protested. Did he know about Pat and me? Politicians lived in glass houses, I knew, but surely there were decent limits…maybe not, though—I’d only really come under the gaze about nine months ago, I was still mapping this out. “It’s…it’s got nothing to do with that…”

  “No?” Uncle Sam, his white locks curling down around his shoulders, was peering at me as though over the top of Ben Franklin’s reading glasses. “Maybe not. But remember just the same, lad, a little wife well tilled, willed, I mean—in a word, don’t keep it to yourself, boy, stand beside her and guide her, a used key is always bright along the Wabash!” His voice had softened to a throaty rumble—like that of Raymond Massey playing Abraham Lincoln. His playful fade had calmed me somewhat, and I’d managed to work a tooth or two of the zipper free from the cloth, but the rest wouldn’t budge. “Listen, you’re fightin’ the problem, son,” he said, leaning toward me as though he might come to help.

  “I’ve got it!” I cried, and in a panic gave a great yank on the zipper: it parted and my shirttail was free at last! My fly, however, would never close again. My shoulders relaxed—I began to feel the tension going out. I felt defeated and liberated at the same time. “The most virtuous hearts have a touch of hell’s own fire in them.” That was the line. Probably not Shakespeare, though. Or useful either.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” demanded Uncle Sam.

  I hadn’t realized I was talking out loud. I was very tired. And depressed. Shit, I thought. What a mess. Maybe I ought to get sick. “Just…just something I—”

  “Cock’s body,” swore Uncle Sam, kicking through the papers on the floor, “I ain’t seen so much shit piled around in one place since we cleaned out Harry Gol
d’s basement! You know, I think your problem is, you been spendin’ too much time indoors. I know how much your famous Iron Butt means to you, and I reckanize it gets you more votes than your face does, but you don’t wanta get musclebound in one joint while the rest just withers away! You probably ain’t eatin’, drinkin’, eliminatin’, bathin’, whoopeein’, and sleepin’ like you ought neither—you get aholda Dr. Calver’s Ten Commandments, fella! You look worse’n John Brown’s molderin’ body!”

  Maybe Napoleon said it, I thought. Or else Mark Twain. I wondered how I was going to get home in time to change into a new pair of pants before tonight—have to buy a whole new suit maybe…

  Uncle Sam picked up one of my large lined yellow legal pads, and, peering down his long white nose at it, commenced to read: “‘I can’t speak for the lives of other men, but my own has always seemed to me to have purpose, and so events which might have seemed like accidents or casual decisions to others’—what the hell is this?”

  “It’s a…a position paper…”

  “Yeah, some position all right—it’s all flat and sprawled and bends ever’ which way! I ain’t seen such wretched penmanship in high places since the days of the early railroad barons! Gotta give you credit, them ‘t’s’ are real killers, but the rest is all stingy and crabbed and outa balance! And why is it, boy, when I set you to cogitatin’ a problem like this case, you think only about yourself?”

  “Not…not only—”

  “What are you jerkin’ around like that for? You got the Saint Vitus Dance? And look at me when I’m talkin’ to you!”

  “I… I can’t—!”

  “No, you’re in bad shape, mister! The solid earth, that’s what you need!” What I needed right now was to lie down, but he was blocking my access to the sofa. A man ought to be judged by the decisions he made or didn’t make, I thought light-headedly, not by how he dots an “i” or crosses a “t.” “The actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! There are times when in the course of human events, you gotta let the dead Past bury its dead, and act—act in the livin’ presence! No more time-outs, son, it’s out-under-the-open-sky-root-hog-or-die time!”

  I turned and stared dismally out the window on the balmy June day. Perhaps he’s right, I thought. I could go on a speaking tour, see America. Anything would be better than this. On a patch of grass, far away, I could see a group of people. They seemed to be playing croquet. Or else taking snapshots of the Capitol. Or carrying pickets. Ah, why did nothing in America keep its shape, I wondered? Everything was so fluid, nothing stayed the same, not even Uncle Sam. Of course, this was what stayed the same…. “Aren’t we making too much of all this?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from breaking. Foolhardy maybe, but I knew the rules: stay on the attack, find your opponent’s weakness and lean on him, and if he attacks you, don’t answer, don’t go on the defensive. I was scared, though. I didn’t know where I was with him any more. I tried to recall the arguments the Phantom had used on me, but all I could remember was Ethel Rosenberg doing the Dirty Crab, slapping the stage with the cheeks of her ass, and the bit about Native Dancer and Sonja Henie. I gritted my teeth. “All these old, uh, acts…we’ve made our point…”

  “Where the battle against the Phantom is concerned,” said Uncle Sam ominously, “victories are never final so long as he is still able to fight!” This was familiar. I’d heard it somewhere before. I turned to face him: he was staring at me darkly. I knew what was coming next, it was as though we were in some play, I felt like I’d fallen into a river and was getting swept helplessly along: There is never a time…. “There is never a time when it is safe to relax or let down!”

  “No,” I said, groping for my lines, my place. “No…but what can the Phantom do? Like you said, this one’s in our home, uh, ballpark…”

  “Yeah, well, so was Grant’s second Ordination and look what that onry galoot done to that!” replied Uncle Sam.

  “Grant?” I gasped in disbelief. I didn’t know whether I was on dry land again, or going down for the third time. “You mean the…the Phantom? Way back—?”

  “You durn tootin’! Cast such a outdacious petterfactin’ shadow that all the thermometers went bust in the freeze, coldest goddamn Investiture in national history, Grant never got over it! Oh, that sarpint had us all on the skids in that one, I never felt such a awesome chill—except for the time I tried to incarnate myself back into Warren Harding, not noticin’ he was dead! And whoopee! what a wind! It come rippin’ hell’s bells outa the north big as all outadoors and gettin’ blacker by the minute—seemed like it was tryin’ to push all the District real estate clean over into Prince Georges County! It whistled bucklety-whet through the parade like shit through a tin horn, whippin’ away decorations, clothing, wives, horses, and even Old Glory—blasted Grant’s daughter Nellie all the way to England and broke his goddamn heart! It sure tore up jack! And cold? The champagne at the Ball froze solid as the rock a Prudential, not to mention the poor little singin’ canaries and emancipated jigaboo servants! I swear to Jesse, if we hadn’ta got one helluva dance revved up, he mighta turned the whole Tabernacle to ice crystals, shattered it with his twister, and blowed it clean off the face of the earth! No, son, you don’t fuck about none with the Phantom!”

  “But…you mean—? but it’s the middle of June—!”

  “Of course it’s the middle of June!” roared Uncle Sam. “My God, it ain’t hard to see why you bombed out as a used-car salesman and orange-juice czar, you haven’t got the brains for anything faster than politics! I’m warnin’ you, mister, you had better set yourself for a mighty carnage, a evil hour of darkness and adversity and bodacious peril, a most horrible contwisted embranglement that’ll tar up the earth all round like that Worcester tornado and look dreadful kankarifferous!” He strode violently through the room, lean and long-legged, kicking through my paperwork as through a snowdrift, a pile of dead leaves, hands clutching his blue lapels, whirling on me from time to time and riveting me with a fiery glance—terrible those eyes: you could see the lightning coiled behind them, ready to flash out, that incredible power…that could be mine…if only…“On accounta we are up against the archenemy of the whole human race, sir, the meanest son of a misbegotten wildcat on the skin of the goldurn globe, all hot sulphur but the head and that’s aquafortis!”

  “Aquafortis—?”

  “Heavy water, boy! Pure sorcery and dangerous as a Massassip allagator with a tapeworm! They call him Sudden Death and General Desolation, half cousin to the cholera and godfather of the Apocalypse! He’s all what most maddens and torments, all what stirs up the lees a things, all what cracks the sinews and cakes the brain, all the subtle vinimus demonism of life and thought, that mysterious fearsome force which from time immemorious has menaced the peace and security of mankind and buggered the hopes of the holy, the Creator of—”

  “But, but I thought, uh, heavy water was—”

  “Hold your tongue, mister, whilst I’m recitin!” Uncle Sam bellowed, spinning on me fiercely, “or you shall smell brimstone through a nail hole!” I thought he was going to draw a six-shooter like Andy Jackson and gun me down. It occurred to me I ought to leap out the window to save myself, but I couldn’t even move. “I say, he’s the Creator of Ambiguities, out to conquer the world, refashion it in his own craven image, enslave it to his own Utopian ends! A warlock, a wizard is he, and lord a the wind and the sea, half wild horse and half cockeyed catamount, and the rest of him is crooked snags and red-hot snappin’ turkle! You hear me? The massacree of isolated communities is the pastime of his idyll moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of his life! Why aren’t the Rosenbergs talkin’? Who’s sewn ’em up? Why’s the whole world goin’ crazy? Who made you get a grip on your old whang-doodle insteada the problem at hand? It’s the Phantom, boy, our natural and habitual enemy, a rantankerous mean shape—”

  “But—”

  “Shut up, boy, and lissen! If you don’t say nuthin’, you won’t be called o
n to repeat it! I’m tellin’ you, true as preachin’, he’s a rantankerous mean shape a the brumal rain, and the darkness fearful and formless, lean, hongry, savage, anti-everything, the maker a deserts and the wall-eyed harbinger a deevastation whose known rule a warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions! the Hog-Eye Man! the arch-degenerate! alien to us in ever’ way—habits, hopes, blood even—and he infects everything, our litterchur, art, religion, games, deemocratic system and free enterprise, with the pizen—you remember all this, son, you can use it yourself some day—with the pizen of his evil sinister influence! Why, even our decision to burn them two lefties in Times Square mought not be ours at all, but his! A trap! That sassy rascal, he’s capable of anything!”

  “You…you think there’s a chance,” I gasped, “that the Phantom can actually break, uh, this thing up?”

  “Yea, I tell you, mister, we are at the precipice, it is a bloody desput condition what confronts us, and if we don’t mind our P’s and Q’s, we shall all be fissionated quicker’n a allagator can chew a puppy!”

  “You mean—!?”

  “I mean what I say!” Uncle Sam glared ominously at me through the storm of notes and documents now fluttering slowly to the floor, then turned on his heel and went in to use my John.

  I was struck dumb. Was this it, then? Of course, I knew it could happen, we all knew it could happen any day, we talked about it all the time, Rockefeller had his bomb-shelter business in high gear, we were already counting out the holy remnant—but now, so close, so sudden? Was this the bloody condition, the perilous fight, the evil hour? Had Uncle Sam not announced, long ago, an uproarious tumult, a time of tribulation but a redemption which shall last forever? Was this more than a mere symbolic expiation? Were the Rosenbergs in fact the very trigger—living high-explosive lenses, as it were—for the ultimate holocaust? And was this what Uncle Sam wanted me to share in? The crashing roar of his urine drowned out my thoughts—he’d smashed up more than one solid-marble toilet bowl in this building with that mighty Niagara of his, and I always worried when he used mine. Like those fire hoses on Bleecker Street, I thought, oh fuck my luck. “Whew,” he groaned from in there, “this is the most magnificent movement of all!” It was said that he could generate enough power with his flow to light up all Latin America, so long as they didn’t mind the odor, and that once, to prove he could stop time, had pissed Old Faithful back down its hole, and thereby had created the Hot Springs of Arkansas. Something to look forward to during the Incarnation…if I survived….