In the car Glenn said, “So Phaëthon is not to drive his father’s chariot tonight.”
“Not swinging low for you tonight, man. You drive your chariot and I’ll drive mine and we’ll bury the sonofabitch from ‘the Ganges to the golden sands of Tagus—’”
“‘Deep to the underworld,’” he interrupted, “‘whose king and queen blink in terror of it.’”
“Hey!” I said. “I didn’t know you knew Ovid.”
I saw his grin in the streetlight as we pulled from the curb. “I borrowed your Miller translation.”
We slapped palms, down and up, and I drove down Seventh Avenue—Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Boulevard. The jump had gone out of it. As elsewhere this spring evening, there was an air of impending disaster. Changing the name had not been enough, would never be enough. It was, simply, too late.
Downtown we went in silence, through the everlastingly changing streets and buildings, all for offices, few for living, past frightened people scurrying along looking over their shoulders, clutching their bags tightly to their sides. (“Look at it,” Glenn said. “Look.”) This was now only one of the cities from which sedate flight had turned into a stampede; one of the cities inside whose walls the “barbarians” were marauding while the cops whined for publicly paid bulletproof vests and beat up on cadres of civilians who did their jobs better than they. Romes were falling everywhere.
“They’re mugging in Barcelona now,” Glenn said.
He’d told me before. I nodded. “It’s all over.”
I embraced him when I finally pulled up before his loft and let him out. I promised we’d visit as soon as we could. I checked the locks on the door and drove home. I could not drive them to the airport tomorrow. I was going to Denver for the reading.
Lemme hear from ya. Write, okay? Even if it’s just a card. Hey, man, stay in touch, willya? But finally, it’s always goodbye.
The Black Studies department, not the English department, had invited me to read. This was a normal exercise of academic racism. Nothing unusual. Most members of departments of English read assiduously the book review sections of the newspapers and magazines (lusting after invitations or even “nominations” to review for them), and, quite naturally, taking their leads there from whenever they even considered inviting writers to read their works or to lecture on writing or literature, found no suggestion that I deserved honoraria they’d accumulated by paying the part-time staffers peons’ wages, and did not invite me. I say, this was normal and mine was not a singular case.
Thus, I found myself in the Mile-High City, home of Floyd Little, Number 44, of Sonny Liston, former heavyweight champ, nearby SAC headquarters, missile silos and nerve-gas factories, striding with very little pain indeed across the campus with a quartet of aging, fretful members of the Black Studies department to the reading. We had eaten well, if such can be said of anyone in Denver, and I had drunk my fill and the altitude had given me an additional blast. They had watched me throughout dinner, this quartet, with careful eyes, wondering, I was sure, if I would collapse on the podium. They seemed now reassured as I matched them stride for stride.
I had noticed about the campus the usual posters:
The Noted Author
CATO DOUGLASS
Reading from His Works
Jordan Hall
Eight P.M.
Sponsored by the Department of Black Studies
I thought that it might play well in Denver, but was certainly a bomb in New York.
The hallways of the building were quiet. The auditorium in Jordan held, I had been told, five hundred people, but when we entered, my hosts gasped (or pretended to) and hurriedly conferred. They were really young men, younger than I, but the logrolling of academic politics must have aged them. While they talked in hisses and whispers (they were not clickers) I counted ten people, none white, spread about the auditorium in various stages of sleep. My hosts continued to confer with Negroid gravity. I understood. They didn’t think I did. (They were, I knew, continually pressed for justification for the very existence of their department—but were given no rational budget to support that existence.) Now, I knew as well as they that Whittington and Huysmans or even Selena Merritt would not have got up to piss for the kind of honorarium they were paying me. But I was from New York; I was a writer; there was some fraying reputation. They’d hoped, obviously. How much hullabaloo they’d managed to raise was obvious. How many times, I wondered, had they called the department of English? And their own department? Surely there were more than ten students enrolled. I felt sorry for my hosts, but no silver clarions had sounded my coming, so their students slept the untroubled sleep of conservative revolutionaries who sought cause and solution with the same impossible breath.
My hosts decided to put the best face on the matter and guided me down into the well of the auditorium and introduced me. Then they sat down next to each other as though squeezed in by an overflow audience.
The applause was like the sound mice make when they have momentarily stepped off cotton onto linoleum.
I rose, voiced my thanks, mentioning each of my hosts by name and title, as is politic to do in these situations. I opened the folder containing Unmarked Graves.
“C’mon down front,” I said, beckoning to the limp bodies tucked into vast, empty sections of the hall. “Come on. I won’t bite you. Not too hard. Come on.”
They moved reluctantly down toward the front rows and sat down. “Plenty of room,” I said.
I shut out the emptiness before me and, sensing their embarrassment and pity for me, began to read. I imagined that the place was jammed; that people were pressed into each other; that everyone was hanging on to my every (yes, a side dish at dinner had been navy beans cooked with ham, a winner for the production of carbon dioxide) ppppppt! My hosts, the closest people to me, held their breaths.
I read, glanced at my watch and read on. My voice came bounding back from that great emptiness, but I continued to read. The Chair glanced at his watch. It was like trying to do it to a mastodon. I heard a noise way back in the hall and saw an elderly white man in overalls shuffle to a seat. I thought, Eleven. For an hour and a half I read into emptiness and finally it broke me. I had intended to read more, but I quit. To hell with it.
The Chair leaped up. There had been no applause, or if there had been, I had not heard it. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “there are any questions for Mr. Douglass?”
A thin young woman rose. “I have a question.”
I felt that she had come only to ask it.
“What are the responsibilities of the black writer?”
“To whom?”
“Well!” she said. “To black people!”
I closed my folder and glanced to the back, where the old white man was sitting. Was there a smile on his face? I wondered why each generation seemed to seize precisely on the questions asked by the previous one. I had been asked the question a hundred times over the years, but tonight was the first time I really heard it.
“They are,” I said, “in exact proportion to the responsibilities the black community has to its writers, regardless of all obstacles, real or imagined. If the people feel they have none, then they cannot expect the writer to have them.”
From the back came a measured clapping of a single pair of hands. The old white man in the blue overalls was standing. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. We turned to look up at him. I had the peculiar feeling that something in an old dream had been reversed.
“Are you through?” he asked. “Can I turn out the lights now?”
There seemed to be a mocking in his voice.
“Yes, yes,” the Chair said. “We’re quite finished. Turn them out.”
As we left the auditorium a bank of lights went soundlessly out, and then another and another. One final bank over the well and podium remained, and then came an abrupt and total blackness.
“Guess, guess,” Allis said after we’d kissed, “who called while you were gone?”
“E
asy. Gullian.”
“Oh, she did call. Wants lunch. Call her back. But that’s not who I meant.”
“Who, honey? c’mon.”
“Aha. A bad reading. Paul. It was Paul Cummings.”
I groaned. Not after last night’s kick in the ass.
“I told him it was good to hear from him after such a long time.”
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“No.”
“Leave a number?”
“No. Said he’d call back. Sounded like hell.”
“Uh?”
“Sad, tired. So the reading wasn’t a success. No young writers hanging on to every word, no women tempting you?”
“You got it, kid. Just like that. A bomberoo. Why do you suppose he called?”
“How should I know? Tired of the crowd he’s drinking with, the people who buy all his books for movies and then never make a movie—don’t know. Maybe he just wanted to, you know.”
“Didn’t he say anything, like why he was calling?”
“I told you. No. He’ll call back. Maybe you’d better call Maureen, though.”
I told myself that I ought to be pleased that he was calling me, but that didn’t make me feel better. I wondered if he’d ever done Denver and what his reception had been like.
I got Nan Tyce, who sometimes hung out in Maureen’s office.
“Glad I got you,” I said. “I want to come and look at your machine.”
“You’re not supposed to,” she said. “But. If you make it soon, like next Thursday night after seven—”
“Really? What’s the rush?”
“I think I’m going to leave TCFP soon.”
“Why?”
“I might tell you later, but don’t tell anyone you’re coming, okay? They don’t want authors looking at their printouts. Here’s Maureen now. See you then.”
Gullian came on, her voice lilting and cheerful. “Sorry, Cate. Was in a publishing committee meeting.”
“Yeah. What’s up? You got the manuscript?”
“Got it. It’s really, really marvelous. Just thought we could have lunch and chat about it.”
“Sure. When?”
“Tomorrow all right?”
“Yeah, where?” Suspicion was already coiling, and I hung up feeling a slow twisting in my stomach. Lunch? And we weren’t going to talk about anything except how marvelous Graves was? What did all that super-cheer in her voice conceal? What was that publishing committee meeting about? Me? Had they decided something? (But she’d called yesterday.) So? Maybe it took them two days to decide. Also, there was missing Jock’s bullshit little note, that ego-stroking missive about the greatness of your book, the magnificence of your talent and the modest pride TCFP felt publishing you. It usually arrived special delivery. This time: zip.
“If it’s only lunch, why are you looking like that?” Allis asked.
I didn’t answer.
She said, “Oh. Oh.”
I willed still the writhing. “I don’t look like my usual, graying, debonair, self-confident self?” I circled behind her and gently grabbed, one in each hand.
Allis clasped her hands over mine and stilled my sexless graspings. She knew the movements for what they were—distractions—for me, not for her. I didn’t seem to know what to do with myself.
“You mean your debonair egomaniacal self. No, you don’t look at all your usual self, dear.”
I released her.
“Maybe too many Denvers, too many Maureens, too many Jock Champions,” I said. “And I’m tired. But listen, I’m not letting anyone tear up my notebook, kiddo.”
She remembered and smiled. “I hate them all,” she said simply. “I just hate them.”
“Listen,” I said, “let’s call him. Let’s call Paul.”
“He’s not listed,” Allis said. “I looked him up, just in case. Had to get the operator. He’s unlisted.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Just a thought you thought I might have, huh? Guess I’d better unpack. The Mack’s okay?”
“Sure. But tell me, honey, just how bad a reading was it?”
“Ten people showed up; eleven if you include the watchman. Altogether there were sixteen people, including me and the people from the department.”
“Damn them. Leave any cards at the museum?”
“No. Figured it would be hopeless. If you can’t get people in New York to wonder, you know what’d happen in Denver.”
I thought about Paul for the rest of the afternoon and I looked at Mack, who was puttering over what he would carry to camp, and thought of Paul’s kids; I looked at Allis, who was sewing labels on Mack’s clothes, and thought of Betsy. I thought down all the years.
What could he have wanted; why hadn’t he called back? And why, just why should I be wondering, even considering his call, after all this time? If, as they say, the matter was important, he’d call back; if it wasn’t, he wouldn’t. No big deal.
“It’s going to be hot tomorrow,” Allis said later, in bed. “Pity you have to get all suited up for that lunch. Eat fish, okay? And try to eat a lot. Cost them a bundle.”
“I’ll try, baby.”
“Stuff yourself, if you have to.”
“You don’t want to cook dinner tomorrow, do you?”
She looked at me with hugely innocent eyes. “Good night.”
I slept the sleep of the thoroughly spooked. Everything was either after me or stood between me and whatever it was I wanted. I had been born and was living in a great labyrinth; there was no series of passages that would lead me out. I would die in it, either from exhaustion from seeking exit, or attacking the walls that defined my boundaries. I lay amidst those layers of sleep and thought of my gun and told myself that I must not forget to look at it, oil it, go through the drill of slamming in the clip, cocking, aiming and firing. It had a bigger voice.
The labyrinth becomes jungle whose heavy, cloying stillness is pocked by gunfire. It is hot; it is smoky. There is war. Phantoms dash from sand ridge to sand ridge. The place reminds me of Tarawa, maybe Iwo. It feels familiar and right to be there. Snipers fire at me now from the upper floors of TCFP. Maude Tozer fires rockets. Sandra Queensbury scrambles through sand tossing me ammunition. Men cry out. Women cry out. Amos chews tobacco, prefers the Springfield ’03 to the M-1 or M-16 to cover me. But where am I going? Someone screams, MEDIC! It’s me. Crawling on elbows and knees, cradling her kit in her arms, Allis arrives. She binds my legs in gauze so that I cannot move and reopen the wound I did not realize I had. My father casts off death and swims strongly from the bottom of the sea near Murmansk and arrives where I am in three seconds flat; swimming faster than Shine, and changing into Paul Cummings, he comes up on the beach breathing hard. He pisses on me as I crouch in my foxhole and then trots off to catch a football thrown by Jeremy Poode, who avoids a tackle by Jock Champion and Bob Kass, and laterals to Selena Merritt. Walt Whitman shoots me in the head with a Japanese rifle from the Brooklyn Bridge, and Alejo (how can I know for sure—the face is only from photographs) runs up, leg-flips him and says, YOU MISSED MY FATHER. I glance behind me (exposing myself to a shower of hand grenades tossed by Maxine Culp) and see Glenn just about to enter the labyrinth. I call out a warning, but no sound comes. He keeps walking, but he is more wary than I was. A Samurai takes a swing at me with a roast Peking duck.* He misses. I shoot the duck in the ass with my .32 as it whizzes by, spilling cards upon the beach. On them is the legend: Ecce signum, etc., etc. The shot-up duck whacks Maureen Gullian in the snatch, out of which come bleeding books. Mack runs up, grabs one and turns on a dial. He squats down to watch Moby Dick starring Lionel Barrymore as Ahab. I shoot the great white whale with a mighty black toggle harpoon, which Lewis Temple quickly invents for me, which harpoon looks like a Maasi spear and keeps going and going and sticks Dick until he sounds clear through three overlapping tectonic plates. A headless black marine trots up and we slap palms and he tells me that up ahead there is a machine-gun squad of southern Japanese who demand to
know the extent of my responsibility to them. One of Maude Tozer’s rockets takes out the marine. He looks like half a million red spiders on the beach. My mother turns away in disgust and raises her window shade over the sink to allow in a stream of pure, golden sunlight. She says, O GOD OUR GOD HOW EXCELLENT IS THY NAME IN ALL THE EARTH, and God bops down that sunlight carrying his cue stick in a golden cue-stick case, booming out, EIGHT BALL OR POINTS? The kunai grass in front of me parts in a sinister movement. I shit in fear. But it is only King Tut peering from around the La Venta Olmec head. Through the noise of gunfire he shouts, MICHAEL JACKSON REALLY LOOKS LIKE ME? Allis sits in the women’s section of the synagogue in Toledo, throwing Spanish matzoh at her father, the cantor, who is singing “Swanee,” while Dolores (how can I know for sure?) does a flamenco boogaloo across the floor. Every time Mr. Storto sets out an antipasto to sell from his organ grinder, big rats sneak up and eat it. I have moved no closer to any kind of exit. I begin firing the .32 in anger and frustration. It holds an unaccountably large number of bullets. The walls begin to shatter and crumble. I am elated, spurred on. Why have I hesitated? I fire again, a burst. More walls crumble and send up putrid clouds of white dust. Another wall. Bang bang bangity bang! Still another wall. Paul watches all this as he sits typing on his word processor. Then he saunters up a blue hill. At its crest he stops suddenly, cries out and runs back down. I burrow deeper in my foxhole. It stinks. I have shat, pissed and vomited in it. Night. Little old white men in blue cloaks float up and down the passageways of the labyrinth, conversing in a language I’ve never heard. RACK! God calls out, but I’m on the move again, to the left, left and left again; then back, straight ahead; now to the right, the right. Faster! Allis materializes, big as Randy Grossman, and pounds me to the ground.
“Honey!”
Strange voice for Randy Grossman.
“Cate!”
She was crying and screaming into the bed.
“Whuh!” I became motionless. Fragments were dissolving. “Su caga la leche su madre!” sprinted up from the street.
“Maricón!”
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