“Tasset,” Kellerman repeats. “For the upper thigh. Suspended from the waistplate by straps.”
“Strap. Ah, strap!”
“D.: Cuisse.”
“I was good with the strap. Fast, but careful. Not too much, not too little. Calculating the angles, wind velocity, air-spring density, time of day. My windup a perfect hyperbolic paraboloid.”
“Covers the thigh proper,” Kellerman says. “Fastened by means of —”
“Strap,” the general says, with satisfaction. “Unpleasant duty. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary —”
“You loved it!” Kellerman says, shouting.
The Belgian regiments had been tampered with. In the melee, I was almost instantly disabled in both arms, losing first my sword, and then my reins, and followed by a few men, who were presently cut down, no quarter being asked, allowed, or given, I was carried along by my horse, till, receiving a blow from a sabre, I fell senseless on my face to the ground. Germany was unspeakably silly. Technically, I was a radar operator on the guidance system. It was a rotten job. Ten hours a day of solid boredom. I did get one trip to the wild Hebrides for the annual firing of the missile (it’s called a Corporal). Confidentially, it doesn’t work worth a damn. We have a saying: Its effective range is thirty-five feet — its length. If it falls on you, it can be lethal. “There are worms in words!” the general cries. “The worms in words are, like Mexican jumping beans, agitated by the warmth of the mouth.”
“Flaming gel,” Kellerman says. “You were fond of flaming gel.”
“Not overfond,” the general replies. “Not like some of them.”
“What’s that you have there, under you arm?” asks the book-storeman.
“The Black Knight,” Kellerman says. “I want one of those Histomaps of Evolution that you have in the window there, showing the swelling of the unsegmented worms — flatworms, ribbon worms, arrow worms, wheelworms, spring heads, and so forth.”
“Worms in words,” the general repeats, “agitated by the warmth of the mouth.”
“I’m not accepting any more blame, Papa,” Kellerman says finally. “Blame wouldn’t melt in my. . . .” He hands round the pâté. “I love playing with mugged-up cards,” Kellerman says, to the nearest mother. She is wearing a slim sand-tweed coat with two rows of gilt buttons and carrying a matchbook that says (black lettering, rose-blush ground) “VD Is On the Rise In New York City.” “The four of fans, the twelve of wands, the deuce of kidneys, the Jack of Brutes. And shaved decks and readers of various kinds, they make the game worthy of the name.” And it was true that his wife pulled one hair out of his sleeping head each night, but what if she decided upon two, or five, or even eleven?
Of those who remained and fought, none were so rudely handled as the Chians, who displayed prodigies of valor, and disdained to play the part of cowards. The order and harmony of the universe, what a beautiful idea! He was obsessed by a vision of beauty — the shimmering, golden Temple, more fascinating than a woman, more eternal than love. And because he was ugly, evil, impotent, he determined someday to possess it . . . by destruction. He had used the word incorrectly. He had mispronounced the word. He had misspelled the word. It was the wrong word.
“Eh, hello, Mado. A Beaujolais.”
“Eh, hello, Tris-Tris. A Beaujolais?”
Kellerman runs down the avenue, among the cars, in and out. There are sirens, there is a fire. The huge pieces of apparatus clog the streets. Hoses are run this way and that. Hundreds of firemen stand about, looking at each other, asking each other questions. Kellerman runs. There is a fire somewhere, but the firemen do not know where it is. They stand, gigantic in their black slickers, yellow-lined, their black hats covering the back of the neck, holding shovels. The street is full of firemen, gigantic, standing there. Kellerman runs up to a group of firemen, who look at him with frightened eyes. He begins asking them questions. “Should a person who is sterile marry? What is sterility? What is a false pregnancy? How do the male reproductive organs work? What is natural childbirth? Can a couple know in advance if they can have children? Can impotence be cured? What are the causes of barrenness? Is a human egg like a bird’s?”
The Police Band
It was kind of the department to think up the Police Band. The original impulse, I believe, was creative and humanitarian. A better way of doing things. Unpleasant, bloody things required by the line of duty. Even if it didn’t work out.
The Commissioner (the old Commissioner, not the one they have now) brought us up the river from Detroit. Where our members had been, typically, working the Sho Bar two nights a week. Sometimes the Glass Crutch. Friday and Saturday. And the rest of the time wandering the streets disguised as postal employees. Bitten by dogs and burdened with third-class mail.
What are our duties? we asked at the interview. Your duties are to wail, the Commissioner said. That only. We admired our new dark-blue uniforms as we came up the river in canoes like Indians. We plan to use you in certain situations, certain tense situations, to alleviate tensions, the Commissioner said. I can visualize great success with this new method. And would you play “Entropy.” He was pale, with a bad liver.
We are subtle, the Commissioner said, never forget that. Subtlety is what has previously been lacking in our line. Some of the old ones, the Commissioner said, all they know is the club. He took a little pill from a little box and swallowed it with his Scotch.
When we got to town we looked at those Steve Canyon recruiting posters and wondered if we resembled them. Henry Wang, the bass man, looks like a Chinese Steve Canyon, right? The other cops were friendly in a suspicious way. They liked to hear us wail, however.
The Police Band is a very sensitive highly trained and ruggedly anti-Communist unit whose efficacy will be demonstrated in due time, the Commissioner said to the Mayor (the old Mayor). The Mayor took a little pill from a little box and said, We’ll see. He could tell we were musicians because we were holding our instruments, right? Emptying spit valves, giving the horn that little shake. Or coming in at letter E with some sly emotion stolen from another life.
The old Commissioner’s idea was essentially that if there was a disturbance on the city’s streets — some ethnic group cutting up some other ethnic group on a warm August evening — the Police Band would be sent in. The handsome dark-green band bus arriving with sirens singing, red lights whirling. Hard-pressed men on the beat in their white hats raising a grateful cheer. We stream out of the vehicle holding our instruments at high port. A skirmish line fronting the angry crowd. And play “Perdido.” The crowd washed with new and true emotion. Startled, they listen. Our emotion stronger than their emotion. A triumph of art over good sense.
That was the idea. The old Commissioner’s musical ideas were not very interesting, because after all he was a cop, right? But his police ideas were interesting.
We had drills. Poured out of that mother-loving bus onto vacant lots holding our instruments at high port like John Wayne. Felt we were heroes already. Playing “Perdido,” “Stumblin’,” “Gin Song,” “Feebles.” Laving the terrain with emotion stolen from old busted-up loves, broken marriages, the needle, economic deprivation. A few old ladies leaning out of high windows. Our emotion washing rusty Rheingold cans and parts of old doors.
This city is too much! We’d be walking down the street talking about our techniques and we’d see out of our eyes a woman standing in the gutter screaming to herself about what we could not imagine. A drunk trying to strangle a dog somebody’d left leashed to a parking meter. The drunk and the dog screaming at each other. This city is too much!
We had drills and drills. It is true that the best musicians come from Detroit but there is something here that you have to get in your playing and that is simply the scream. We got that. The Commissioner, a sixty-three-year-old hippie with no doubt many graft qualities and unpleasant qualities, nevertheless understood that. When we’d play “ugly,” he understood that. He understood the rising expectat
ions of the world’s peoples also. That our black members didn’t feel like toting junk mail around Detroit forever until the ends of their lives. For some strange reason.
He said one of our functions would be to be sent out to play in places where people were trembling with fear inside their houses, right? To inspirit them in difficult times. This was the plan. We set up in the street. Henry Wang grabs hold of his instrument. He has a four-bar lead-in all by himself. Then the whole group. The iron shutters raised a few inches. Shorty Alanio holding his horn at his characteristic angle (sideways). The reeds dropping lacy little fill-ins behind him. We’re cooking. The crowd roars.
The Police Band was an idea of a very romantic kind. The Police Band was an idea that didn’t work. When they retired the old Commissioner (our Commissioner), who it turned out had a little drug problem of his own, they didn’t let us even drill anymore. We have never been used. His idea was a romantic idea, they said (right?), which was not adequate to the rage currently around in the world. Rage must be met with rage, they said. (Not in so many words.) We sit around the precinct houses, under the filthy lights, talking about our techniques. But I thought it might be good if you knew that the Department still has us. We have a good group. We still have emotion to be used. We’re still here.
The Sea of Hesitation
If Jackson had pressed McClellan in White Oak Swamp,” Francesca said. “If Longstreet had proceeded vigorously on the first day at Second Manassas. If we had had the forty thousand pairs of shoes we needed when we entered Maryland. If Bloss had not found the envelope containing the two cigars and the copy of Lee’s Secret Order No. 191 at Frederick. If the pneumonia had not taken Jackson. If Ewell had secured possession of Cemetery Heights on the first day of Gettysburg. If Pickett’s charge . . . If Early’s march into the Valley . . . If we had had sufficient food for our troops at Petersburg. If our attack on Fort Stedman had succeeded. If Pickett and Fitzhugh Lee had not indulged in a shad bake at Five Forks. If there had been stores and provisions as promised at Amelia Court House. If Ewell had not been captured at Saylor’s Creek together with sixteen artillery pieces and four hundred wagons. If Lee had understood Lincoln — his mind, his larger intentions. If there had been a degree of competence in our civilian administration equal to that exhibited by the military. Then, perhaps, matters would have been brought to a happier conclusion.”
“Yes,” I said.
Francesca is slightly obsessed. But one must let people talk about what they want to talk about. One must let people do what they want to do.
This morning in the mail I received an abusive letter from a woman in Prague.
Dear Greasy Thomas:
You cannot understand what a pig you are. You are a pig, you idiot. You think you understand things but there is nothing you understand, nothing, idiot pig-swine. You have not wisdom and you have no discretion and nothing can be done without wisdom and discretion. How did a pig-cretin like yourself ever wriggle into life? Why do you exist still, vulgar swine? If you don’t think I’m going to inform the government of your inappropriate continued existence, a stain on the country’s face . . . You can expect Federal Marshals in clouds very soon, cretin-hideous-swine, and I will laugh as they haul you away in their green vans, ugly toad. You know nothing about anything, garbage-face, and the idea that you would dare “think” for others (I know you are not capable of “feeling”) is so wildly outrageous that I would laugh out loud if I were not sick of your importunate posturing, egregious fraud-pig. You are not even an honest pig which is at least of some use in the world, you are rather an ocean of pig-dip poisoning everything you touch. I do not like you at all.
Love,
Jinka
I read the letter twice. She is certainly angry. But one must let people do what they want to do.
I work for the City. In the Human Effort Administration. My work consists of processing applications. People apply for all sorts of things. I approve all applications and buck them upwards, where they are usually disapproved. Upstairs they do not agree with me, that people should not be permitted to do what they want to do. Upstairs they have different ideas. But “different ideas” are welcomed, in my particular cosmos.
Before I worked for the City I was interested in changing behavior. I thought behavior could be changed. I had a B.A. in psychology, was working on an M.A. I was into sensory deprivation. I did sensory deprivation studies for a while at McGill and later at Princeton.
At McGill we inhabited the basement of Taub Hall, believed to be the first building in the world devoted exclusively to the study of hatred. But we were not studying hatred, we were doing black-box work and the hatred people kindly lent us their basement. I was in charge of the less intelligent subjects (the subjects were divided into less intelligent and more intelligent). I spent two years in the basement of Taub Hall and learned many interesting things.
The temperature of the head does not decrease in sleep. The temperature of the rest of the body does.
There I sat for weeks on end monitoring subjects who had half Ping-Pong balls taped over their eyes and a white-noise generator at 40db singing in their ears. I volunteered as a subject and, gratified at being assigned to the “more intelligent” group, spent many many hours in the black-box with half Ping-Pong balls taped over my eyes and the white-noise generator emitting its obliterating whine/ whisper. Although I had some intricate Type 4 hallucinations, nothing much else happened to me. Except . . . I began to wonder if behavior should be changed. That there was “behavior” at all seemed to me a small miracle.
I pondered going on to stress theory, wherein one investigates the ways in which the stressed individual reacts to stress, but decided suddenly to do something else instead. I decided to take a job with the Human Effort Administration and to try, insofar as possible, to let people do what they want to do.
I am aware that my work is, in many ways, meaningless.
A call from Honor, my ex-wife. I’ve promised her a bed for her new apartment.
“Did you get it?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve been busy. Doing things.”
“But what about the bed?”
“I told you I’d take care of it.”
“Yes but when?”
“Some people can get their own beds for their new apartments.”
“But that’s not the point. You promised.”
“That was in the first flush of good feeling and warmth. When you said you were coming back to town.”
“Now you don’t have any good feeling and warmth?”
“Full of it. Brimming. How’s Sam?”
“He’s getting tired of sleeping on the couch. It’s not big enough for both of us.”
“My heart cries out for him.”
She’s seeing Sam now, that’s a little strange. She didn’t seem to take to him, early on.
Sam. What’s he like? Like a villain. Hair like an oil spill, mustache like a twist of carbon paper, high white lineless forehead, black tights and doublet, dagger clasped in treacherous right hand, sneaks when he’s not slithering . . .
No. That’s incompletely true. Sam’s just like the rest of us: jeans, turtleneck, beard, smile with one chipped tooth, good with children, backward in his taxes, a degree in education, a B. Ed. And he came with the very best references too, Charlotte doted, Francine couldn’t get enough, Mary Jo chased him through Grand Central with the great whirling loop of her lariat, causing talk — But Honor couldn’t really see him, in the beginning. She’s reconsidered. I wish she hadn’t thrown the turntable on the floor, a $600 B & O, but all that’s behind us now.
I saw this morning that the building at the end of the street’s been sold. It stood empty for years, an architectural anomaly, three-storied, brick, but most of all, triangular. Two streets come together in a point there, and prospective buyers must have boggled at the angles. I judged that the owners decided to let morality go and sold to a ménage à trios. They�
�ll need a triple bed, customized to fit those odd corners. I can see them with protractor and Skilsaw, getting the thing just right. Then sweeping up the bedcrumbs.
She telephones again.
“It doesn’t have to be the best bed in the world. Any old bed will do. Sam’s bitching all night long.”
“For you, dear friend, I’ll take every pain. We’re checking now in Indonesia, a rare albino bed’s been sighted there . . .”
“Tom, this isn’t funny. I slept in the bathtub last night.”
“You’re too long for the bathtub.”
“Do you want Sam to do it?
Do I want Sam to do it?
“No. I’ll do it.”
“Then do it.”
We were content for quite a while, she taught me what she’d majored in, a lovely Romance tongue, we visited the country and when I’d ask in a pharmacy for a razor they’d give me rosewater. I’m teasing her, and she me. She wants Sam. That’s good.
Francesca was reading to me.
“This is the note Lee wrote,” she said. “Listen. ‘No one is more aware than myself of my inability for the duties of my position. I cannot even accomplish what I myself desire. How can I fulfill the expectations of others? In addition I sensibly feel the growing failure of my bodily strength. I have not yet recovered from the attack I experienced the past spring. I am becoming more and more incapable of exertion, and am thus prevented from making the personal examinations and giving the personal supervision to the operations in the field which I feel to be necessary. I am so dull making use of the eyes of others I am frequently misled. Everything, therefore, points to the advantages to be derived from a new commander. A younger and abler man than myself can readily be obtained. I know that he will have as gallant and brave an army as ever existed to second his efforts, and it would be the happiest day of my life to see at its head a worthy . . .’”
Francesca stopped reading.
“That was Robert E. Lee,” she said.
Flying to America Page 26