The Book of Daniel

by E. L. Doctorow

  “It’s marvelous!” the reporter says.

  “You hear that?” Sternlicht says to his girl. It develops that she is the artist.

  The reporter is really impressed. “You’re fantastic! How long did it take to do this?”

  Sternlicht’s girl says, “Well, actually I haven’t finished yet. I go on a, y’know, collecting binge, and when I have a lot of stuff I plaster it up there. There’s stuff underneath you can’t even see anymore. I’m thinking of covering, y’know, everything, the whole house. See?” She has picked up a handful of clippings and pictures from a table in the corner. She lets them drift out of her hands, through her fingers, and they flutter and swoop all over the place. Everyone laughs.

  “You’re very casual about your work,” the reporter says, “but I think it shows immense talent. Have you ever had formal study?”

  “Well see,” the girl looks at Sternlicht and starts to laugh, “actually if anyone deserves credit for my art it’s Mr. Magruder.”

  Sternlicht breaks up.

  “Mr. Magruder is our landlord, and that’s how I, y’know, started. Just to cover some holes in the wall. Paper is very good insulation.”

  Sternlicht drops to the mattress, pulls the girl down into his lap and they laugh and hug each other. The photographer shoots.

  “She’s not shittin’,” Sternlicht says. “You know how cold it gets here in the winter? All revolutions begin with tenants. All revolution begins with tenants freezing their asses off in the winter.”

  “It’s marvelous,” the reporter insists, gazing at the wall. “It should have a name. What do you call it?”

  Artie Sternlicht and his girl look into each other’s eyes. They answer in unison, and their friends chime in: “EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE IS ALL THE SAME!”

  The reporter looks at the photographer, and you know she has her lead now, the piece is writing itself. Everyone gets happy.

  STERNLICHT RAPPING

  He talks fast in a gravel voice that breaks appealingly on punch lines. He jumps around as he raps, gesturing, acting out his words.

  “Like you said the movement couldn’t afford us. OK. I went to this coalition meeting uptown to plan for the Convention next year? And these are good kids, New Left kids who know the score. And you should hear them spin out this shit: Participatory democracy. Co-optation. Restructure. Counter-institutional. Man, those aren’t words. Those are substitutes for being alive. I got up and I said, ‘What the fuck are you all talking about. What is this with resolutions and committees? What kind of shit is this, man? I mean you don’t need the establishment to co-opt you, man. You are co-opting yourself. You see this chair? This is a chair, man.’ And I break this fucking chair to splinters—I smash it to the floor and I stomp on it and I really make a mess of the goddamn chair. And all the while I’m shouting, ‘See Sternlicht break the chair! I’m breaking this chair!’ And I hold up the pieces. ‘Let’s fuck. Let’s fight. Let’s blow up the Pentagon! A revolutionary is someone who makes the revolution. If you want to sit here and beat your meat, all right, but don’t call it revolution.’ Well, I started a riot! It was a gas! Everyone was mad as hell and that meeting came alive. You’ve got to put down anything that’s less than revolution. You put down theorizing about it, dreaming about it, waiting for it, preparing for it, demonstrating for it. All that is less than being it and therefore not it, and therefore never will be it. A revolution happens. It’s a happening! It’s a change on the earth. It’s a new animal. A new consciousness! It’s me! I am Revolution!”

  “But even Fidel has a plan,” the reporter says. This remark is greeted with absolute silence. Sternlicht looks over at his friends sitting in the corner. One, a fat kid with a bushy beard, says, “That’s right, Mr. Sternlicht, what do you say to that?” They all laugh. The journalist flushes red.

  “No, listen,” Artie says holding up his hands. “It’s a legitimate question. OK. Like in Cuba they find out what their revolution is by working it. They’re a bunch of crazy spies who try it first and then see what it is. If something’s no good they change it. But say Fidel has a plan. The lesson is not that our revolution must be like Fidel’s. The lesson is that it must be our own revolution. Dig? I’m gonna answer your question. Your question is tactical. Fidel bounced his revolution off some fifth-rate spic gangster and the United Fruit Company. But we are in revolution from this—” He points at the collage. “Corporate liberalism, and George Washington and the fag peace movement, and big money and hardware systems, and astronauts. We are in revolution from something with a pretty fair momentum of its own. And you’re not going to bring it down by going into the hills with some rifles. OK? The only people in the U.S. who know they’re slaves are the black people. The spade kids today don’t have to be organized. I mean they are born with absolutely no tolerance for shit, they are born willing to die. And the white dropout children, the derelict kids, the whole hippie thing, the free store, is a runaway slave movement. It really is. So maybe they know it. But the rest—the kids who go to school for careers and the blue-collar sellouts and all the suburban hustlers in the land who make the hustle system work, who carry it on their backs and think they’re its beneficiaries—I mean it’s a doublethink system, it is not ordinary repression, right? My country knees you in the neck and you think you’re standing upright. It presses your face in the muck and you think you’re looking at the sky. I mean you cannot make connections between what you do and why they hate you in Chile. You are hung up on identity crises. You think you are a good guy. You’re not prejudiced. You believe in making money honestly. You believe in free speech. You have allergies. You have strokes. You have mortgages. Your lungs are garbage pails. Your eyes go blind with the architecture. You think the white folks are learning. You think the black folks are lifting themselves up. YOU THINK THERE’S PROGRESS. YOU THINK YOUR CHILDREN HAVE IT BETTER. YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING IT FOR YOUR CHILDREN!”

  “Hey Sternlicht, shut the fuck up!”

  “Hey Artie, blow it out your ass!”

  “Sternlicht sucks!”

  The voices come from the street. Sternlicht rushes to the window and climbs out on the fire escape. He raises his fist and jumps up on the railing. “EVERYONE IN THIS BLOCK IS UNDER ARREST!” There is laughter from outside. The people in the room crowd onto the fire escape. Badinage between the friends one flight up and the friends on the sidewalk. Avenue B is humming. Cars come through the narrow street, people are out in the hot night. Two blocks away is the park at Tompkins Square and from it emanates a pulse of energy composed of music and shouting and the heat of many people. The world came to America down Avenue B. The bar across the street is crowded and Daniel can see through its window the old polished wood and tarnished mirrors, and the light of the TV screen. He suddenly sees the Lower East Side with Sternlicht’s vision: It is a hatchery, a fish and wildlife preserve. It seems created for him. With the poor people of this earth I want to share my fate.

  I tried to distinguish the sound from any one radio or record player, near or far. It was impossible. Music came from everywhere, it was like an electrification of the air, a burning up of it.

  amazing grace, amazing grace, there is still in this evening on the fire escape floating in the potsmoke like an iron cloud over Avenue B someone who knows what he says or does is important With importance his life or self concerned, and the surroundings are suddenly not obscure and the voice is amplified and a million people hear and every paint chip of the rusted fire escape its particular configuration and archaeology is truly important

  The friends leave and Artie picks up his rap as we stand at the fire escape railing in the hot September night. “So how do you bring change to something this powerful. How do you make revolution. The same way a skinny little judo freak throws a cat three times his size. You don’t preach. You don’t talk about poverty and injustice and imperialism and racism. That’s like trying to make people read Shakespeare, it can’t be done. Look there, what do you see? Little blue squares
in every window. Right? Everyone digging the commercials. That is today’s school, man. In less than a minute a TV commercial can carry you through a lifetime. It tells the story from the date to the wedding. It shows you the baby, the home, the car, the graduation. It makes you laugh and makes your eyes water with nostalgia. You see a girl more beautiful than any girl you’ve ever seen. Giants, and midgets, and girls coming in convertibles, and knights and ladies, and love on the beach, and jets fucking the sky, and delicious food steaming on the table, and living voices of cool telling you how cool you are, how cool you can be. Commercials are learning units. So like when the brothers walk into the draft board down in Baltimore and pour blood all over the induction records—that’s the lesson. And the Yippies throwing money away at the stock exchange. And marching in the parade on Flag Day and getting the Legionnaires to chase you and the pigs to chase you and tearing up your flags, American flags, on Flag Day! You dig? Society is a put-on so we put on the put-on. Authority is momentum. Break the momentum. Legitimacy is illegitimate. Make it show its ass. Hit and run. You got forty seconds, man. The media need material? Give them material. Like Abbie says, anyone who does anything in this country is a celebrity. Do something and be a celebrity. Next month we’re going to Washington and exorcizing the Pentagon. We’re gonna levitate the Pentagon by prayer and incantation and blowing horns and throwing magic invisibilities at the Pentagon walls. We’re gonna lift it up and let it down. We’re gonna kill it with flowers. Be there! We’ll be on television. We’re gonna overthrow the United States with images!”

  I have an idea for an article. If I write it maybe I can sell it and see my name in print. The idea is the dynamics of radical thinking. With each cycle of radical thought there is a stage of genuine creative excitement during which the connections are made. The radical discovers connections between available data and the root responsibility. Finally he connects everything. At this point he begins to lose his following. It is not that he has incorrectly connected everything, it is that he has connected everything. Nothing is left outside the connections. At this point society becomes bored with the radical. Fully connected in his characterization it has achieved the counterinsurgent rationale that allows it to destroy him. The radical is given the occasion for one last discovery—the connection between society and his death. After the radical is dead his early music haunts his persecutors. And the liberals use this to achieve power. I have searched and searched for one story from history that is invulnerable to radical interpretation. I mean it is harder than it sounds and if you think not give it a try. Here is one from the AMERICAN HERITAGE HISTORY OF FLIGHT—I found it today and it might just stand up: In 1897 three Swedes decided that the way to get to the North Pole was by means of a free balloon flight. They set off from Spitzbergen, floating up in a northerly direction, and they were never heard from again. Then, thirty-three years later, in 1930, a party of Norwegian explorers came upon a camp in the frozen Arctic wastes and there were the three ice-cake bodies of the Swedish balloonists. Also in the camp was a camera and in the camera was film. The thirty-three-year-old film was developed and yielded snapshots of the balloonists in their last camp standing over a bear they had hunted, raising a flag, etc—

  Ascher’s homburg was pushed back on his head like a cowboy hat, and his overcoat was open. His hands were clasped behind his back under the overcoat. He tilted back on his heels and forward again, while the children’s Aunt Frieda sat on the couch weeping.

  “I’m a widow, I have no one,” Aunt Frieda said. “It’s too much of a burden. I live in three rooms. Where can I put them? I stand on my feet twelve hours a day. I get up at six-thirty every morning. On my day off I haven’t got the strength to get out of bed. How can I afford to do what you’re asking me.”

  “Mrs. Cohn, I’m not asking you to do anything. Paul is your brother, not mine. I am the lawyer. Whatever you decide, that determines what I will do.”

  “And what does my sister Ruth say?”

  “I have discussed the problem with her only on the phone.”

  “Listen, don’t waste your time. Selfish? The word wasn’t invented till Ruthie.” Aunt Frieda dismissed her sister with a wave of the hand. The gesture caught Daniel’s eye. His Aunt Frieda sat with her feet planted on the floor in lace-up shoes with thick heels. He turned quickly back to the TV set, having seen more than he wanted to of Aunt Frieda’s stocking above the knee. He found her repulsive. She had that hairy mole over the corner of her mouth. She looked like his father around the jaw, the mouth. She wore thick horn-rimmed glasses.

  “I understand her husband is a diabetic, a very sick man. In any case I somehow feel that you would know better how to handle the situation than your sister.”

  Aunt Frieda nodded. “God help me, I was always the responsible one. From the time we were children. If you didn’t watch Paul he would destroy himself. He never learned how to cross the street. If you didn’t put the food in front of him he wouldn’t eat. If you didn’t hold his money he would lose it or let someone take it from him. I couldn’t count on Ruthie. Ruthie was always a lazy thing. It was Frieda who solved the problems. It was Frieda, that good-natured slob, who was always there to get them out of trouble.”

  “You are the oldest?”

  “By eight years. And when I was twenty my father followed my mother to the grave and I was now the mother and father. It ruined my life. I’m telling you, Mr. Ascher, my life was never my own.”

  Her tears flowed. Ascher turned his attention to the television console shining in the corner. The children were sitting on the floor, too close he thought. Too close. He made no move to interrupt their attention. If they could get inside the television they would be better off still. On the screen that Hopalong Cassidy threw his lasso through the air. Hopalong’s horse reared up and braked to a stop. The lasso pulled the crook off his horse. The crook looked up sullenly from the dust with his arms pinned to his sides by the rope. From his white horse Hopalong laughed down at him. Ascher thought: We are a primitive people.

  “They seem to enjoy the television,” Ascher said. “Maybe we should make an exception. Do you have a television, Mrs. Cohn?”

  “What? No, no—who can afford a television?”

  “It is an expensive appliance,” Ascher said. “The man will be here soon to assess the belongings. I will tell him not to include the television.”

  The children’s Aunt Frieda opened her pocketbook and brought forth a handkerchief. She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. She wiped her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have always had such luck. My husband, God rest his soul, didn’t last. Ruthie, poor Ruthie, has her hands full with an invalid. And Paul—can there be a greater tragedy? To turn into a Red. My Pauly, a Commonist! And you know there was no more religious man than my father. Are you a religious man, Mr. Ascher?”

  Ascher shrugged. “I go to temple.”

  “My father is turning over in his grave. That his son became a Red. And worse!”

  “What do you mean worse?”

  “God only knows. I will be lucky to keep my store. If someone should make the connection with my maiden name. If my neighbors find out.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing, nothing. But how do I explain who these children are. How do I explain where their parents are.”

  “Their parents are in jail. They are in jail because their bail bond is prohibitive. Their bail bond is prohibitive because in the current climate it helps the government to establish how guilty they must be and how dangerous they must be. If the shame of that is too much for you then you can lie. You can say they are in Florida. You can say they are traveling in Europe. Isaacson is not an uncommon name.”

  Aunt Frieda put her handkerchief in her pocketbook and snapped the clasps. “I don’t blame him,” she said. “He could not help himself. I blame her. She’s the one. She was his ruination. He was putty in her hands from the very beginning. When he was in the Army in the war she went to Washington to live
with him. Before they were married she lived with him I In sin she lived with him. In school as a boy Paul never got less than A’s. On all his Regents in high school, ninety-nine in this, a hundred in that. He had a ninety-six average in Townsend Harris high school which was nothing but brilliant children. And then to get these crazy ideas—all right, so you join a club in college, it’s the thing to do. But he would have outgrown all that craziness. But she was like that, too. And she drove him. It was she who did this!”

  “Mrs. Cohn—”

  “I will never forgive her for what she has done to my Pauly. For what she has done to all of us. To all our lives. She is the one. No one else.”

  “Mrs. Cohn, do you really want the children to hear this?”

  “Don’t worry, they know how I feel. Besides, they are not listening. Mmmmm, what is going to happen to them.” Aunt Frieda held her hand to her cheek as if she had a toothache.

  “So what do I understand from your answer?”

  “I don’t know,” Aunt Frieda said. “I don’t know.”

  “They can’t stay here,” Ascher said. “The black man can’t take care of them. The neighbor woman can’t take care of them. I can’t take care of them. There is no money for the rent, there is no money for this house, do you understand, Mrs. Cohn?”

  Aunt Frieda moaned with her hand to her face.