Dead Languages

by David Shields

  My metal brace was belted so tight it had begun to cut off the circulation in my left leg. I wanted to sit down and rest and celebrate the victory, but Alicia sidestepped all the questions surprisingly well and came clawing back. There’s a particular rebuttal technique which, when successful, brings the other person out from behind his barrier of formal language. Through feigned belief and outright accusation, you attempt to force your opponent into asinine emotionalism, into some eleventh-hour plea for compassion and love—the death knell for any debater. Alicia appeared to have heard of this technique.

  “Do I understand you correctly,” she asked, “to be saying that, re capital punishment, the state should be not just but merciful? Would that be a fair assessment of your position?”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Then I am confused. What exactly is your position?”

  “That, re capital punishment, the state should be not retributive but just.”

  “A fine distinction indeed.”

  She meant “fine” in the sense of “minute,” but I decided to receive it in the sense of “excellent” and said, “Thank you, Miss Stephens.”

  That was the beginning of the end. That got her mad. She paced up and back on the stage, flipping through her index cards, looking for a loophole somewhere, while I gripped the podium, trying to stay on my feet the final four minutes.

  “You claim,” she said, “that in 1971 North Dakota had the lowest murder rate in the country, .2 per hundred thousand, whereas that rate was actually 1.2 per hundred thousand, and the year must have been 1970, since 1971 figures have, to my knowledge, not yet been released.”

  Only much later did I discover she was making all of this up. At the time I thought she just wanted to set the record straight.

  “Is that right,” I said, “1.2 rather than .2? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. And ’seventy rather than ’seventy-one? I don’t know how I could have made such errors. Thank you, Miss Stephens, for pointing them out. My argument, however, remains essentially the same: North Dakota, which didn’t and doesn’t enforce the death penalty, had and has the lowest murder rate in the country, whereas Alabama, which did and does enforce the death penalty, had and has the highest murder rate in the nation. QED: capital punishment, so far from functioning as a deterrent of death, creates a climate of blood.”

  We had been passing the microphone politely back and forth, but this time she fairly yanked it out of my hands, attempting to arouse the audience as she entered the last two minutes of her cross-examination tirade.

  “‘Deterrent of death,’ Mr. Zorn, ‘climate of blood’? Aren’t you regressing now to sheer rhetoric? And yet I do sympathize with your strategy, since all you have left is language.” She actually said that, Sandra. Somewhere in her dark heart she knew. “Alabama didn’t have 13.7 murders per hundred thousand but, rather, 13.45 and it didn’t lead the nation in murders-per-capita in 1970; Mississippi did. Furthermore, you earlier cited a case in which a Portland man was proven innocent in 1965 after he’d been executed in 1964 whereas, if you’d read the October 11, 1966 issue of the Portland Gazette, you’d have discovered he was found guilty again.”

  General, heartfelt applause from the Doerner girls. Hoblock waving an anthropological spear at me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. My left leg was swollen. I wanted to sit down.

  “It doesn’t matter?” she said, slapping her hand to her head like a cartoon character and eliciting shrill whistles from the crowd. “Are you attempting to derive valid principles from invalid premises? This is certainly a novel interpretation of the rules of the Revised Illinois Formal Debate.”

  Loud laughs from the balcony section.

  I don’t know why at this point, with a minute left, I descended to asinine emotionalism. I don’t know why I grabbed the mike back from her, limped to center stage, and started shouting. I suppose there was something in Alicia’s tone that, like a chemical, converted pain to anger. I forgot all about debaters’ decorum and hollered into the floodlights: “No, of course it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. The Portland man was guilty. The man he killed, the judge who sentenced him, the foreman of the jury, they were all guilty. We, all of us here, are guilty. We’re all murdering ourselves and each other. We’re all going to die. Instead of tossing more bodies onto the bonfire, we might try treating one another with a little pity. That’s not a very original idea, but then neither is the notion of revenge. I’ve never been a great fan of Portia’s, I’ve always tended to side with Shylock in that particular confrontation, but we could do worse than respond to her benediction: ‘The quality of mercy is not strained,/It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath.’”

  I’ve never been sure just what happened next. According to most accounts, I droppethed upon the place beneath—slipping from the stage into a front row seat. Apparently my left leg gave out and I lost my balance. Dr. Hoblock stabbed himself in the heart with his spear. Leo never spoke to me again. Our assistants tossed their cards at some giggly girls. I attempted to get the clasps on my brace locked so I could stand up. The crowd clapped compassionately. And Alicia cartwheeled across the stage, for she knew she had won.

  18

  I FIND IT DIFFICULT but necessary to admit that no matter what we do, whether we stutter, stay silent, or break into declamation, we inevitably embarrass ourselves. The point never quite gets across, the communication is never completed, we fall off the stage and attempt to stand up again…. But perhaps I’m generalizing too grandiosely from personal experience. I can, after all, speak—or not speak—only for myself. Perhaps it would be better to stick to personal experience: I fell off the stage, I attempted to stand up again, I stood up again, the metal brace came off later that spring, from early May until the end of August I walked without the aid of anything except a cane, the cane served more than one purpose and was misperceived in more than one way at a midsummer rally in Golden Gate Park to stop the Cambodian bombings.

  There were rallies all across the country that afternoon—in San Francisco and Los Angeles, in Eugene, in Chicago, in Ann Arbor and Madison, in Chapel Hill, in Washington, Boston, and New York—and by far the largest demonstration, the one that attracted the most attention to itself and caused the most damage to people and public property, was in San Francisco. Initially, I had preferred not to attend. I was pleased with the progress my left leg was making and didn’t especially want someone to poke the wooden point of a placard into my still-healing wound. Mother, though, explained how it was part of my duty, as a burgeoning citizen, to protest the policies of the state; and Father chanted “Helen Gahagan Douglas,” an ex-congresswoman who was scheduled to speak and whom I adored because Nixon red-baited her out of office, until I agreed to go.

  It used to be possible to gather five thousand people in Union Square to protest a dramatic increase in perceptible fog, so I was expecting a large accumulation but was completely unprepared to come upon people occupying hill after hill of cordoned city blocks for as far as I could see in any direction, carrying placards and posters, pressing bullhorns to their mouths, yelling at the red-eyed helicopters that buzzed overhead. Before the march began, posters and banners were distributed and now we were instructed to hold the signs above our heads until our arms ached. A man drove by in a painted truck, shouting at us to stand in a straight line. Mother told me to tuck in my shirt. Beth wrapped a banner around her waist, aping beauty. A woman carried a baby in a backpack, pushing a quadriplegic veteran in a colorfully festooned wheelchair. She took my left hand (the one not carrying a cane) and, without saying a word, ushered me into the veterans’ camp. She must have thought I’d been injured in combat, though to anyone who wasn’t Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds it was obvious I was closer to sixteen than twenty-two. Mother and Father came running after me. Never quite sure whether she was participating in life or covering it, Mother alternately chanted slogans and took notes, while Father, intent upon producing a fine photo es
say for, if not the Chronicle, at least the family photo album, was trying to get a good light reading. Both of them were proud I had become—had been dragged by my heels into becoming—an integral part of the parade. Beth straggled, chatting up a graduate student in military history from Berkeley.

  I didn’t like being mistaken for a maimed ex-marine. I didn’t like having to overemphasize my limp to keep pace with the men in electric wheelchairs. Although they were all wearing khaki, none of their uniforms fit quite right, since they all had a leg missing, or no hands, or a steel left arm. I couldn’t stomach so many cripples in such a small space. I walked backwards for a while, painfully, and shouted at Mother, who was taking notes, and Father, who was taking pictures: “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home. Can’t we at least take a rest?”

  A man dressed to look like Lt. Calley carried a sign that said: WE ARE ALL LT. CALLEY. This was a theme with which I had next to no trouble aligning myself: universal human guilt. I paused to share a power shake with the lieutenant and wound up with slivers from a sort of wooden sword he held in his right hand. Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the rally kept repeating, NLF is gonna win.

  “I feel twinges all up and down my leg,” I told Mother when she caught up with me. “It hurts.”

  “Look around you, Jeremy, and you’ll see some hurts,” Mother said, twirling a poster that urged, in syntax a little too complicated to untangle at first glance, the immediate end of all U.S. combat missions and the retroactive repeal of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Henry Kissinger. One or the other or both. I looked around and saw men so attenuated, so incomplete they seemed to be wheeling along in some country almost beyond pain.

  “I know,” I said. “I know what you mean. I just don’t want to hurt my leg again.”

  Mother returned a raised-right-eyebrow-head-tilted-left-eyes-wide-mouth-pursed-supremely-ironical look that could be best translated: “There are war veterans standing or, rather, sitting next to you who don’t even have legs any more. Don’t you dare speak of the little wound to your left leg in the same breath.”

  This was part of what always seemed to me an exceedingly delicate strategy. On the one hand, we were Against the War. Even after “victory in Vietnam” two years later, I applied for conscientious objector status on the basis of the fact that my parents had brought me up to be incapable of immorality. Physically incapable, I explained. On the other hand, when I complained once too often about the lunch Mother had packed for us on some hike in the High Sierras, she insisted nothing would improve my personality quicker and cleaner than a two-year hitch in the navy. Why the navy I haven’t a clue. I suppose it had something to do with her attachment to the Maritime Museum. At Stanford Beth was revising and revising a little too lovingly a term paper on Revolutionary War pensioners. Approximately what it amounted to was that war was bad but warriors were good.

  From the Golden Gate Park entrance to the immense field where we finally sat down and listened to purple prose (where, six years before, I’d watched Father call balls and strikes for the industrial leagues), I limped along with the veterans, leaning on my cane, and silent: in honor of all the men around me who had been hurt so bad. Every now and then I looked back at the woman carrying her baby in a rucksack and pushing her husband in a wheelchair. Though she had every right to, she was the only person in the peace march who didn’t seem to regard herself as a martyr. Her husband and her husband’s friends were actually wounded, but it was everyone else who had the same permanently pained expression on their faces, as if the burden of being right about everything had subtly bleached their blood. Everyone except her. Everyone except Lucy in the Sky. Despite the heat, she wore a long leather glove on her left hand, slacks rather than a skirt, and hard shoes. She was short and compact. And she wasn’t smiling. She was alone with her difficult family and didn’t pretend to belong to Humanity at Large. For what felt like and what may have been the first time in my life, I experienced unpremeditated desire.

  I didn’t meet up again with Mother and Father until the parade emptied out onto the field. There, beneath the dead heat of a late July sun, Mother translated her notes from shorthand into English, while Father wound another roll of film onto the spool. I ate the bag lunch Father had bought for me, then lay back on the grass, looking for Lucy, happy just to be prone for a while, trying not to listen to the Oakland assemblyman who told all of us to raise our clenched fists in defiance of the leek-green helicopters flying overhead. His sound system was turned all the way to the top. A woman behind me asked to sit rather than squat. I could tell from her voice it wasn’t Lucy.

  “Have you seen Beth?” Mother asked me. “The last I saw of her she was talking a mile a minute with that grim-looking man from Berkeley. Military history? How could she?”

  A pregnant woman stood at Father’s side until he agreed to buy three Arrest the War Criminals buttons from her. Mother pinned one on her pants pocket. Father stuck one on his camera strap and tried to hand me the third one, saying, “Here, Jeremy, wear this button.”

  We were too far away from the speakers’ platform for me to pretend Father had been drowned out by the assemblyman, so I just simply ignored the offer, rubbing my leg to eradicate the stinging tingles.

  “Look, Jeremy. I bought you this handsome button. Here, take it. Stick it on your shirt pocket.”

  I pushed his hand away, attempted to focus all my attention upon the Oakland assemblyman’s eloquence, and said, “I don’t want to wear a button.”

  “Here, take it. I’m giving you a gift.”

  “Yeah, Jeremy, wear the button,” Mother said.

  “No, thank you.”

  We were sitting near the back, so he yanked me out of the crowd and dragged me under a bush at the edge of the park, sticking the button on my shirt pocket. It pierced my skin. This was, without a doubt, one of the most impressive demonstrations of Father’s physical prowess I’d ever witnessed.

  “Why do you want me to wear this button?” I asked.

  “Because,” he said.

  “But why?”

  “Get back in the crowd.”

  INDIVIDUALLY, we aren’t so bad (or, if that’s not true, at least we’re bad only in isolation) but, why, collectively, are we quite so noxious? What happens to us all when we form a mass? Stuttering struck me as a failure of communal spirit that, nevertheless, needed to be exorcised away from the community. Way away. I never diverged very greatly from my parents’ political agenda, but I always found the enactment of their program fraught with too many contradictions to resolve. Mother said in her entire life she’d met only one person more self-absorbed than I was.

  “Who was that?” I said, thinking maybe she meant Igor Stravinsky.

  “Your father.”

  Labor Day weekend Mother, Father, and I drove to Eugene, Oregon, to meet Barry Lieberman, who was the Peace & Freedom candidate for governor. He was related to someone Mother had been fond of in the secretarial pool at the junior high school district. The goal was for Mother and Father to map out his publicity campaign for him in less than seventy-two hours and, the way they worked, closeted in his motel room until midnight each night, I assume they accomplished nothing less. I hugged a kickboard in the indoor pool, and on the last day of the colloquium all four of us played tennis at the university: Mother and Father against me and Barry. I was still dragging my left leg and Barry waddled around the court like a pregnant walrus. He was a great big guy with a beer keg belly. Mother and Father clobbered us, of course, on the strength of some pretty dubious drop shots, and they chortled a lot over their straight-sets victory. I’m not sure it wasn’t the happiest I ever saw them together.

  We were all famished and Barry treated us to Sunday brunch or, rather, tried to treat us to Sunday brunch, since we drove up and back the strip, trying to work our consciences free to eat at a restaurant called Sambo’s or a café that once fired a Chicano busboy. It is perhaps the most emblematic event of my childhood: Father mute behind the wheel, me nursing my left leg, a
nd beside us Mother and Barry playing Top This Arcane Indignation. It would be difficult to overestimate either the length of the main drag of Eugene, Oregon, or the number of times we traversed it. It was five miles long and we stopped once for gas.

  You could taste the first drip of honey on your hotcakes. Or surely Father could, gripping the wheel so tightly I knew he was going to halve it. Barry was what Gretchen would have called a “beefer,” and my guess was that politics took a distant second place in his stomach to a stack of French toast, but he wouldn’t give Mother that satisfaction.

  “We can’t eat here,” he said. “See that sign in the window for the NRA?”

  This was as nothing to Mother.

  “The architects who build Denny’s have notorious links to the mob in the Midwest.”

  “Annette, come on,” Barry said, “why even worry about the builders? It’s a chain.”

  By now which restaurant served the best brunch seemed the most trifling irrelevance. Mother and Barry were in an apoplexy of denial, and I doubt they would have ever come out of it if Father hadn’t lurched into the wrong lane and got shunted onto a road that led out to Barry’s treehouse in the country, where we nibbled nuts and berries along with the watching chipmunks. What did Barry do to get so fat? Did he think no one noticed? I guess the idea was that Mother was impressing him with how serious she was and Barry was impressing Mother with how serious he was and Father and I were impressing them with how we were just a couple of charter members of the hoi polloi who liked to eat food.