Somewhere it is being prepared. Somewhere deep in the heart of Germany the shell is being made. Some German girl is polishing it right now polishing it and cleaning it and fitting the charge into it. It glistens in the factory light and it has a number and the number is mine. I have a date with the shell. We shall meet soon.
Motor lorries rumbling through the street gathering guys up outside gathering up the late ones saying come on buddy time’s up down to the station and jump on the old box car. Because you’re going back. Back to the little old guy who figures out there the guy who figures all day long and all night long and never makes a mistake. The stars and stripes forever ta-da da-de-um and da-de-ah. Try it kid it’s good some guys say it’s got dope in it don’t believe a thing they tell you. Some guys say it dries you out. It’s called absinthe let it filter down in your glass it’s swell. Parley vous parley vous yes sir no sir lonesome honey where’s that American voice? god I’d like to find her. Where’s Jack where’s Bill Where’s John gone all gone. Gone west. Taps. Ten thousand dollars for the folks back home. Ten thousand simoleons Jesus. I know a house on Rue Blondel black and white all nations. Americans? Sure anything you want oh god that isn’t what I want what I want’s a long way off but I’ll take whatever you got. It’s a long way to Tipperary. Lights out.
Nearer nearer. Some top-heavy canvas-covered German truck is plunging toward France right now. In it are shells and among the shells the one with my number. It’s coming toward the west through the Rhine valley I always wanted to see it through the Black Forest 1 always wanted to see it through the deep deep night coming toward France the shell I shall meet. It’s coming nearer and nearer nothing can stop it not even the hand of god for I have a time set and it has a time set and we shall meet when the time comes.
America expects every man to do his duty France expects every man to do his duty England expects every man to do his duty every doughboy and tommy and poilu and what the hell did they call the Italians? anyhow they’re expected to do their duty too. Lafayette we come and so in Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses row on row check off the rows for the little old guy with the book the little old guy who figures all day long and all night long and never makes a mistake. Oui oui parley vous jig-jig? Sure jig-jig what the hell five francs ten francs who says two dollars two good old American dollars and a glass of corn whiskey? My god this cognac I always thought it was a swell drink I heard so much about it it’s terrible give me corn and what do you think of the prohibitionists? Four million of us gone four million votes I suppose we don’t count they’ll ruin us yet let’s go out and hunt corn good old American corn. Darling honey deary sweet tired lonesome wanta friend take a table take a chair take a bed only don’t take too long there’s lots of guys Paris is full of them so don’t take too long.
Hidden beneath some gentle rolling hill that is like a woman’s breast on the solid flesh of the land hidden under the hill in some unknown ammunition dump is my shell. It is ready. Hurry boy hurry doughboy don’t be late finish whatever you have to do you haven’t much time left.
Sing a rag-time jig-jig sing a rag-time mam’selle sing a hot time in the old town tonight. Sing a Joan of Arc and a flor da lee sing a mademoiselle from Armentieres. Sing a Lafayette parley vous fransays. Get up and jump jump mighty fast make the smoke whirl in the air smash the chairs smash the windows tear down the house goddam it move boy move girl put cognac in your joints and turn the lights out and beat the drums and get out of the trenches by Christmas and see Paris by night and turn a trick for five francs and oui-oui parley vous hunky-dory corn in my belly and a little old guy with a book who figures all day long and all night long and he figures faster and faster faster and quicker harder and stronger and faster faster faster.
It will come with a rush and a roar and a shudder. It will come howling and laughing and shrieking and moaning. It will come so fast you can’t help yourself you will stretch out your arms to embrace it. You will feel it before it comes and you will tense yourself for acceptance and the earth which is your eternal bed will tremble at the moment of your union.
Silence.
What’s this what’s this oh my god can a man ever get lower can a man ever be less?
Weariness and gasping convulsive exhaustion. All life dead all life wasted and becoming nothing less than nothing only the germ of nothing. A kind of sickness that comes from shame. A weakness like dying weakness and faintness and a prayer. God give me rest take me away hide me let me die oh god how weary how much already dead how much gone and going oh god hide me and give me peace.
xv
He kept on tapping.
He kept on now for another reason aside from the simple desire to speak which had started him out. He kept on tapping because he didn’t dare stop he didn’t dare think. He didn’t have the courage to ask himself even so simple a question as how long will it be before the nurse understands what I am doing? Because he knew it might be months it might be years it might be all the rest of his life. All the rest of his life to be tapping when the merest whisper—one word with the syllables barely formed by two lips—when that was all he needed to tell what he wanted.
There were times when he knew he was stark raving crazy only from the outside he realized he must seem as he always had seemed. Anyone looking down at him would have no way of suspecting that beneath the mask and the mucus there lay insanity as naked and cruel and desperate as insanity could ever be. He understood insanity he knew all about it now. He understood the overpowering impulse to kill without having a reason for killing the desire to beat against living skulls until they were pulp the passion to strangle the lust for murder that was more beautiful more satisfying more imperative than any lust he had known before. But he couldn’t do it he couldn’t kill he couldn’t do anything but tap.
Inside his skull there was a normal man with arms and legs and everything that goes with them. It was he Joe Bonham trapped in the darkness of his own skull rushing frantically from ear-hole to ear-hole wherever in the skull there might be an opening. Like a wild animal he was trying to hammer his way out to escape into the world beyond. He was trapped in his own brain tangled in the tissues and brain-matter kicking and gouging and screaming to get out. And the only person in the world who could help him had no idea of what he was doing.
He got to thinking this nurse is keeping me a prisoner. She is keeping me more securely a prisoner than any jailer than any chain than any stone wall they could ever build around me. He got to thinking of all the prisoners he had ever read about or heard about all the little guys from the beginning of the doing of things who had been caught and imprisoned and who had died without ever becoming free again. He thought of the slaves little guys like himself who had been captured in war who had spent the rest of their lives chained like animals to oars rowing some big guy’s ship through the Mediterranean sea. He thought of them down there in the deeps of the ship never knowing where they were going never smelling the outer air never feeling anything except the oar in their hands and the shackles on their legs and the whip that lashed their backs when they grew tired. He thought of them all the shepherds and farmers and clerks and little shopkeepers who had suddenly been taken away from their way of living who had been cast into the ships and had stayed there away from their homes and their families and their native parts until finally they collapsed at their oars and died and were thrown out into the sea for the first time to touch fresh air and clean water. He thought of them and he thought they were luckier than I am they could move they could see each other they were more nearly living than I and they were not imprisoned as securely.
He thought of the slaves deep under the street levels of Carthage before the Romans came and destroyed the city. He remembered from some time way back in the past how he had read of the Carthaginian slaves and what they did and how they were treated. How the great Carthaginian lords wanting someone to guard their treasure stores would find a healthy young man and put out his eyes with sharp sticks so h
e wouldn’t be able to see where they took him and thus learn the location of their treasures. Then they would take him poor blinded young guy down into the passages under the level of the streets to the door of the treasure house. There they chained one arm and one leg to the door and one arm and one leg to the wall so that for anyone to enter the seal would have to be broken and the seal was the living breathing body of a man. He thought of the Carthaginian slaves down in the darkness blinded and chained and he thought they were lucky guys. They died soon there was no one there to take care of them to make sure the breath of life stayed in their bodies as long as possible. They were in agony but they died soon and even in their agony they could stand on two legs they could pull against their chains. They could hear and when someone spoke some great noble coming down into the treasure house they could hear the blessed sound of a human voice.
He thought of the slaves who built the pyramids thousands of them tens of thousands of them spending their whole lives to put up a dead monument to a dead king. He thought of the slaves who fought each other in the Coliseum in Rome for the entertainment of big guys who sat in the boxes and held their thumbs up or down to give the slaves life or death. He thought of the slaves when they disobeyed—ears lopped off hands hacked away screaming tongues flexed with cries for mercy even as they were pulled out by the roots so that no secrets would be betrayed. Little guys all over the world shot drowned stabbed crucified boiled in oil whipped to death burned at the stake—all these things were the fate of slaves the fate of the little guy the fate of men like himself. Only the slaves could always die but he couldn’t and he was mutilated far beyond any slave who ever lived. Yet he was one of them he was part of them he too was a slave. He too had been taken away from his home. He too had been put into the service of another without his consent. He too had been sent to a foreign country far from his native parts. He too had been forced to fight against other slaves of his own kind in a strange place. He too had been mutilated and branded forever. He too was at last a prisoner in the narrowest cell of them all the cell of his own horrible body awaiting only the relief of death.
God help us he thought god help us all the slaves. For hundreds and thousands of years we have been tapping we slaves tapping away from the depths of our prisons. All of us all of the little guys all the slaves from the beginning of time tapping tapping tapping——
A man had come into the room a man with heavy footsteps. The man came over to the bed and threw the covers back and began to prod his body. It was the doctor. He could imagine the nurse going for the doctor and saying that thing up there in the room that thing is always tapping its head. I get nervous I think it needs something. Come and look at it come and try to stop its tapping. So the doctor had come and now he was prodding him. When the prodding was over the doctor took the tube from his throat and he had a little fit of strangling like he always had when they took the tube out to clean it. The doctor put the tube back in its hole and stood quietly doing nothing.
All during this he kept up his tapping and now that the doctor was quiet he tapped much harder. It was just possible that the doctor might understand what he was trying to do. He felt the vibration of the doctor’s footsteps moving over toward the dresser then coming back again. He felt a cold wet thing against the stump of his left arm. Then he felt a sharp little sting a sharp little pain like a needle and he knew the doctor was injecting something into his arm.
Before he began to feel its effects he knew it was some kind of dope. They were trying to shut him up. They had been trying all along they knew perfectly well what he was doing nobody with any brains could fail to know. And he knew what they were doing too. They were plotting against him out there in the darkness. They had tried every way on earth to make him be still but he had out-fought them he had kept right on tapping. So now they were doping him. They were forcing him to be silent. They didn’t want to hear him. They weren’t interested in anything but getting him off their minds. He shook his head frantically to try to tell them that he didn’t want to be doped. Then the needle was withdrawn and he knew it didn’t matter whether he wanted it or not.
He determined to keep on with his tapping in spite of them to try to strengthen his will to such a point that even as the drug overcame him even as he fell completely asleep from its effects the strength of his will would carry over into his sleep and he would continue the tapping just as you turn on a machine and it continues to operate after you have gone away.
But a fog settled down over his mind a numbness took possession of his flesh so that it seemed that each time he lifted his head from the pillow he was lifting some enormous weight. The weight grew heavier the tapping grew slower his flesh became like the flesh of a dead person his mind seemed to shrink and shrivel as the drowsiness swept over it. In his last moment of thinking he was saying to himself they’ve won again but they can’t win forever they can’t forever oh no not forever…
xvi
Things began slowly to change to go in wide hazy circles to dissolve into one another. It seemed that he was relaxing in every muscle of his body relaxing in his brain. The bed felt softer than it had ever been before. The pillow at the back of his head was like a pillow of cloud. The covers across his stomach and chest were covers of silk of cobweb of soft warm air. There was nothing below him nor above him nor to his right nor to his left. His skin went limp and lazy against his flesh and even his blood seemed at rest not pumping through his heart any more but lying warm and liquid and still in his veins.
And yet in the midst of this enormous quiet there was movement. This perfectly still thing which was him his body and his mind was moving slowly through a windless world. Only it wasn’t the world. It was simply space a kind of glowing space through which he was moving whether slowly or rapidly he couldn’t tell because there was no air to stir at his passing. It was the kind of motion a star must make a star without atmosphere or life as it completes its steady circle through nothingness.
And there were colors everywhere. Not rough nor violent colors but the kind of shadings the sky takes on at sunrise the pinks and blues and lavenders of the inside of a seashell suddenly grown bigger than the sky and everything in it. The colors floated toward him floated into him dissolved through the particles of his body and then passed on to make way for more colors more and more and more so wonderful so beautiful so big. There were cool colors sweet smelling colors colors that made faint high music as they passed through him. He could hear the music everywhere and yet it wasn’t loud. It was a kind of music that seemed to be so thin it was scarcely sound at all. It was simply a part of space a sound that was the same thing as space and color a sound that was nothing at all and at the same time more real than flesh and blood and steel. The music was so sweet so tinkling high that it seemed a part of him just as much a part as the little fibres of his body. The music was like a white ghost in the daytime. He and space and the colors and the music were the same thing. His body had drifted into them like smoke into the sky and now he like them was a portion of time.
Then the music stopped and there was silence. It wasn’t the simple silence that sometimes comes when you are in the world the silence which is merely the absence of noise. It wasn’t even the silence that comes to deaf people. It was something like the silence you hear when you put a seashell to your ear the silence of time itself that is so great it makes a noise. It was a silence like thunder in the distance. It was silence so dense that it ceased to be silence. It changed from a thing to a thought and in the end it was only fear.
He hung there in the silence waiting for the thing to happen. He didn’t know what the thing would be but he knew it would happen. It was as if he had already seen the puff of smoke from a dynamite charge and now was waiting for the sound. Then the silence was shattered by his fall. His breath was forced back into his lungs from the pressure of the air through which he fell. He was falling a million times faster than a shooting star falling faster than light travels falling through ten thousand years
and ten thousand worlds with things becoming louder and faster and more terrible. Great round globes bigger than the sun bigger than the whole milky way came at him so fast they might have been cards shuffled through a pack. They came at him and hit him full in the face and burst like soap bubbles to make way for the next and the next. His brain was working so fast that he had time to flinch for each one and after it had burst to prepare himself for the shock of the next.
He began to whirl faster than the propeller of an airplane and the whirling made noises in his head. He heard voices all the voices in the world voices that had arms and legs voices that reached out to grab him and voices that kicked as he sped by. Things went so fast before his eyes that he could see nothing but light. When he saw the light he knew that nothing was real because real things make shadows and shut out light.
And then all sound seemed centered in one voice that filled the whole world. He listened to the voice because it had stopped his fall. It had become everything—the world and the universe and the nothingness around them. It was a woman’s voice crying and he had heard it before.
Where’s my boy where’s my boy? He’s under age can’t you see? He just came up from Tucson about a week ago. They had him in jail for a tramp and I came all the way here to get him back. They let him out of jail if he’d join the army. He’s only sixteen except he’s big and strong for his age he always was. He’s too young I tell you he’s just a baby. Where is he my little boy? He just came up from Tucson you see and I came to take him home.
Johnny Got His Gun Page 15