Flying to America

by Donald Barthelme

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The leader of all the armies of the Confederacy,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I wanted him to win. So much.”

  “I understand.”

  “But he did not.”

  “I have read about it.”

  Francesca has Confederate-gray eyes which reflect, mostly, a lifelong contemplation of the nobility of Lee’s great horse, Traveller. I left Francesca and walked in the park, where I am afraid to walk, after dark. One must let people do what they want to do, but what if they want to slap you upside the head with a Stillson wrench and take the credit cards out of your pockets? A problem.

  The poor are getting poorer. I saw a poor man and asked him if he had any money.

  “Money?” he said. “Money thinks I died a long time ago.”

  We have moved from the Age of Anxiety to the Age of Fear. This is of course progress, psychologically speaking. I intend no irony.

  Another letter from Jinka.

  Undear Thomas:

  The notion that only man is vile must have been invented to describe you, vile friend. I cannot contain the revulsion that whelms in me at the sight of your name, in the Prague telephone book, from your time in Prague. I have scratched it out of my copy, and scratched it out of all the copies I could get my hands on, in telephone booths everywhere. This symbolic removal of you from the telephone booths of our ancient city should not escape your notice, stinking meat. You have been erased and the anointment of the sick, formerly known as Extreme Unction, also as the Last Rites, is what I have in mind for you, soon. Whatever you are doing, stop it, drear pig. The insult to consciousness afforded by your project, whatever it is, cannot be suffered gladly, and I for one do not intend to so suffer. I have measures not yet in the books, and will take them. What I have in mind is not shallots and fresh rosemary, gutless wonder, and your continued association with that ridiculously thin Robert E. Lee girl has not raised you in my esteem, not a bit. One if by land and two if by sea, and it will be sudden, I promise you. Be afraid.

  Cordially,

  Jinka

  I put this letter with the others, clipped together with a paper clip. How good writing such letters must make her feel!

  Wittgenstein was I think wrong when he said that about that which we do not know, we should not speak. He closed by fiat a great amusement park, there. Nothing gives me more pleasure than speaking about that which I do not know. I am not sure whether my ideas about various matters are correct or incorrect, but speak about them I must.

  I decided to call my brother in San Francisco. He is a copy editor on the San Francisco Chronicle (although he was trained as a biologist — he is doing what he wants to do, more or less). Because we are both from the South our conversations tend to be conducted in jiveass dialect.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “What’s happening? You got any girl copy boys on that newspaper yet?”

  “Man,” Paul said, “we got not only girl copy boys we got topless girl copy boys. We gonna hire us a reporter next week. They promised us.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m depressed.”

  “Is it specific or nonspecific?”

  “Well,” Paul said, “I have to read the paper a lot. I’m ready to drop the bomb. On us.”

  One must let people do what they want to do. Fortunately my brother has little to say about when and where the bomb will be dropped.

  My other friend is Catherine. Catherine, like Francesca, is hung up on the past. She is persuaded that in an earlier existence she was Balzac’s mistress (one of Balzac’s mistresses).

  “I endured Honoré’s grandness,” she said, “because it was spurious. Spurious grandness I understand very well. What I could not understand was his hankering for greatness.”

  “But he was great,” I said.

  “I was impatient with all those artists, sitting around, hankering for greatness. Of course Honoré was great. But he didn’t know, at the time, for sure. Or he did and he didn’t. There were moments of doubt, depression.”

  “As is natural.”

  “The seeking after greatness,” said Catherine, “is a sickness, in my opinion. It is like greed, only greed has better results. Greed can at least bring you a fine house on a grand avenue, and strawberries for breakfast, in a rich cream, and servants to beat, when they do not behave. I prefer greed. Honoré was greedy, in a reasonable way, but what he was mostly interested in was greatness. I was stuck with greatness.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You,” Catherine said, “are neither great nor greedy.”

  “One must let people be —” I began.

  “Yes,” Catherine said, “that sounds good, on the surface, but thinking it through —” She finished her espresso, placed the little cup precisely on the little saucer. “Take me out,” she said. “Take me to a library.”

  We went to a library and spent a pleasant afternoon there.

  Francesca was stroking the brown back of a large spayed cat — the one that doesn’t like me.

  “Lee was not without his faults,” she said. “Not for a moment would I have you believe that he was faultless.”

  “What was his principal fault?”

  “Losing,” she said.

  I went to the Art Cinema and saw a Swedish film about a man living alone on an island. Somebody was killing a great many sheep on the island and the hero, a hermit, was suspected. There were a great many shots of sheep with their throats cut, red blood on the white snow, glimpses. The hermit fixed a car for a woman whose car had broken down. They went to bed together. There were flashbacks having to do with the woman’s former husband, a man in a wheelchair. It was determined that somebody else, not the hermit, had been killing the sheep. The film ended with a car crash in which the woman was killed. Whiteout.

  Should great film artists be allowed to do what they want to do?

  Catherine is working on her translation of the complete works of Balzac. Honoré, she insists, has never been properly translated. She will devote her life to the task, she says. Actually I have looked at some pages of her Louis Lambert and they seem to me significantly worse than the version I read in college. I think of Balzac in the great statue by Rodin, holding his erect (possibly overstated) cock in both hands under his cloak of bronze. An inspiration.

  When I was in the black box, during my SD days, there was nothing I wanted to do. I didn’t even want to get out. Or perhaps there was one thing I wanted to do: Sit in the box with the half Ping-Pong balls taped over my eyes and the white-noise generator standing in for the sirens of Ulysses (himself an early SD subject) and permit the Senator Investigator (Dr. Colcross, the one with the bad leg) to do what he wanted to do.

  Is this will-lessness, finally? Abulia, as we call it in the trade? I don’t think so.

  I pursue Possibility. That’s something.

  There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, “Proceed with your evil plan, sumbitch.” The initial smash on glance. Then, the drawing near. This takes a long time, it seems like months, although only minutes pass, in fact. Languor is the word that describes this part of the process. Your persona floats toward her persona, over the Sea of Hesitation. Many weeks pass before they meet, but the weeks are days, or seconds. Still, everything is decided. You have slept together in the glance.

  She takes your arm and you leave the newsstand, walking very close together, so that your side brushes her side lightly. Desire is here a very strong factor, because you are weak with it, and the woman is too, if she has any sense at all (but of course she is a sensible woman, and brilliant and witty and hungry as well). So, on the sidewalk outside the newsstand, you stand for a moment thinking about where to go, at eleven o’clock in the morning, and he
re it is, in the sunlight, that you take the first good look at her, and she at you, to see if either one has any hideous blemish that has been overlooked, in the first rush of good feeling. There are none. None. No blemishes (except those spiritual blemishes that will be discovered later, after extended acquaintance, and which none of us are without, but which are now latent? dormant? in any case, not visible on the surface, at this time). Everything is fine. And so, with renewed confidence, you being to walk, and to seek a place where you might sit down, and have a drink, and talk a bit, and fall into each other’s eyes, temporarily, and find some pretzels, and have what is called a conversation, and tell each other what you think is true about the world, and speak of the strange places where each of you has been (Surinam, in her case, where she bought the belt she is wearing, Lima in your case, where you contracted telegraph fever), and make arrangements for your next meeting (both of you drinking Scotch and water, at eleven in the morning, and you warm to her because of her willingness to leave her natural mid-morning track, for you), and make, as I say, arrangements for your next meeting, which must be this very night! or you both will die —

  There is no particular point to any of this behavior. Or: This behavior is only behavior which has point. Or: There is some point to this behavior but this behavior is not the only behavior which has point. Which is true? Truth is greatly overrated, volition where it exists must be protected, wanting itself can be obliterated, some people have forgotten how to want.

  The Mothball Fleet

  It was early morning, just after dawn, in fact. The mothball fleet was sailing down the Hudson. Grayish-brown shrouds making odd shapes at various points on the superstructures. I counted forty destroyers, four light cruisers, two heavy cruisers, and a carrier. A fog lay upon the river.

  I went aboard as the fleet reached the Narrows. I noticed a pair of jeans floating on the surface of the water, stiff with paint. I abandoned my small outboard and jumped for the ladder of the dead destroyer.

  There was no one on deck. All of the gun mounts and some pieces of special equipment were coated with a sort of plastic webbing, which had a slightly repellent feeling when touched. I watched my empty Pacemaker bobbing in the heavy wake of the fleet. I called out. “Hello! Hello!”

  Behind us, the vessels were disposed in fleet formation — the carrier in the center, the two heavy cruisers before and behind her, the destroyer screen correctly placed in relation to the cruisers, or as much so as the width of the channel would allow. We were making, I judged, ten to twelve knots.

  There was no other traffic on the water; this I thought strange.

  It was now about six-thirty; the fog was breaking up, a little. I decided to climb to the bridge. I entered the wheelhouse; there was no one at the wheel. I took the wheel in my hands, tried to turn it a point or two, experimentally; it was locked in place.

  A man entered from the chartroom behind me. He immediately walked over to me and removed my hands from the wheel.

  He wore a uniform, but it seemed more a steward’s or barman’s dress than a naval officer’s. His face was not unimpressive: dark hair carefully brushed, a strong nose, good mouth and chin. I judged him to be in his late fifties. He re-entered the chartroom. I followed him.

  “May I ask where this . . .”

  “Mothball fleet,” he supplied.

  “ — is bound?”

  He did not answer my question. He was looking at a chart.

  “If it’s a matter of sealed orders or something . . .”

  “No no,” he said, without looking up. “Nothing like that.” Then he said, “A bit careless with your little boat, aren’t you?”

  This made me angry. “Not normally. On the contrary. But something —”

  “Of course,” he said. “You were anticipated. Why d’you think that ladder wasn’t secured?”

  I thought about this for a moment. I decided to shift the ground of the conversation slightly.

  “Are there crews aboard the other ships?”

  “No,” he said. I felt however that he had appreciated my shrewdness in guessing that there were no crews aboard the other ships.

  “Radio?” I asked. “Remote control or something?”

  “Something like that,” he said.

  The forty destroyers, four light cruisers, two heavy cruisers, and the carrier were moving in perfect formation toward the open sea. The sight was a magnificent one. I had been in the Navy — two years as a supply officer in New London, principally.

  “Is this a test of some kind?” I asked. “New equipment or —”

  “You’re afraid that we’ll be used for target practice? Hardly.” He seemed momentarily amused.

  “No. But ship movements on this scale —”

  “It was difficult,” he said. He then walked out of the chartroom and seated himself in one of the swivel chairs on posts in front of the bridge windows. I followed him.

  “May I ask your rank?”

  “Why not ask my name?”

  “All right.”

  “I am the Admiral.”

  I looked again at his uniform which suggested no such thing.

  “Objectively,” he said, smiling slightly.

  “My name is —” I began.

  “I am not interested in your name,” he said. “I am only interested in your behavior. As you can see, I have at my disposal forty-seven brigs, of which the carrier’s is the most comfortable. Not that I believe you will behave other than correctly. At the moment, I want you to do this: Go down to the galley and make a pot of coffee. Make sandwiches. You may make one for yourself. Then bring them here.” He settled back in his seat and regarded the calm, even sea.

  “All right,” I said. “Yes.”

  “You will say: ‘Yes, sir,’” he corrected me.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I wandered about the destroyer until I found the galley. I made the coffee and sandwiches and returned with them to the bridge.

  The “Admiral” drank his coffee silently. Seabirds made passes at the mast where the radar equipment, I saw, was covered with the same plastic material that enclosed the gun installations.

  “What is that stuff used for the mothballing?” I asked.

  “It’s a polyvinylchloride solution which also contains vinyl acetate,” he said. “It’s sprayed on and then hardens. If you were to cut it open you’d find inside, around the equipment, four or five small cloth bags containing silicate of soda in crystals, to absorb moisture. A very neat system. It does just what it’s supposed to do, keeps the equipment good as new.”

  He had finished his sandwich. A bit of mustard had soiled the sleeve of his white coat, which had gold epaulets. I thought again that he most resembled not an admiral but a man from whom one would order drinks.

  “What is your mission?” I asked, determined not to be outfaced by a man with mustard on his coat.

  “To be at sea,” he said.

  “Only that?”

  “Think a bit,” he said. “Think first of shipyards. Think of hundreds of thousands of men in shipyards, on both coasts, building these ships. Think of the welders, the pipefitters, the electricians, naval architects, people in the Bureau of the Budget. Think of the launchings, each with its bottle of champagne on a cord of plaited ribbons hurled at the bow by the wife of some high official. Think of the first sailors coming aboard, the sea trials, the captains for whom a particular ship was a first command. Each ship has a history, no ship is without its history. Think of the six-inch guns shaking a particular ship as they were fired, the jets leaving the deck of the carrier at tightly spaced intervals, the maneuvering of the cruisers during this or that engagement, the damage taken. Think of each ship’s log faithfully kept over the years, think of the Official Naval History which now runs, I am told, to three hundred some-odd very large volumes.

  “And then,” he said, “think of each ship moving up the Hudson, or worse, being towed, to a depot in New Jersey where it is covered with this disgusting plastic substanc
e. Think of the years each ship has spent moored next to other ships of its class, painted, yes, at scheduled times, by a crew of painters whose task it is to paint these ships eternally, finished with one and on to the next and back to the first again five years later. Watchmen watching the ships, year in and year out, no doubt knocking off a little copper pipe here and there —”

  “The ships were being stockpiled against a possible new national emergency,” I said. “What on earth is wrong with that?”

  “I was a messman on the Saratoga,” he said, “when I was sixteen. I lied about my age.”

  “But what are your intentions?”

  “I am taking these ships away from them,” he said.

  “You are stealing forty-seven ships from the government of the United States?”

  “There are also submarines,” he said. “Six submarines of the Marlin class.”

  “But why?”

  “Remember that I was, once, in accord with them. Passionately, if I may say so, in accord with them. I did whatever they wished, without thinking, hated their enemies, participated in their crusades, risked my life. Even though I only carried trays and wiped up tables. I heard the singing of the wounded and witnessed the burial of the dead. I believed. Then, over time, I discovered that they were lying. Consistently. With exemplary skill, in a hundred languages. I decided to take the ships. Perhaps they’ll notice.” He paused. “Now. Do you wish to accompany me, assist me?”

  “More than anything.”

  “Good.” He moved the lever of the bridge telegraph to Full Ahead.

  Subpoena

  And now in the mail a small white Subpoena from the Bureau of Compliance, Citizen Bergman there, he wants me to comply. We command you that, all business and excuses being laid aside, you and each of you appear and attend . . . The “We command you” in boldface, and a shiny red seal in the lower left corner. To get my attention.

  I thought I had complied. I comply every year, sometimes oftener than necessary. Look at the record. Spotless list of compliances dating back to ’48, when I was a pup. What can he mean, this Bergman, finding a freckle on my clean sheet?