by John Barth
That did for Andrew: He popped his head under the stern pulpit, over the transom, and followed suit. The only crew member in control of his breakfast, Peter gybed us around, summoned Katherine to come aft as soon as she was able, patted Chip’s back, and eased Story corpseward. One doesn’t just sail away. By when we luffed up just above it, Kath had got her stomach in hand as it were and returned to the cockpit to assist her ailing brother. In those days we had no radio: Peter instructed Chip to run our distress flag up to the mast spreader and help Katherine wave down the nearest motorboat or large sailboat while he kept the dead man in sight.
And that he did, with both the unaided and the aided eye. Unlike Andrew and for that matter Katherine, Peter Sagamore had seen drowned folks before, of various ages, sexes, and social classes and in various stages of disrepair, from both the general circumstance of his having grown up in an island community where boats far outnumbered cars and the particular circumstance of his having done rescue work with the Hoopers Island Volunteer Fire Company. He had helped drag river bottoms for and sometimes assisted in the vain effort to resuscitate drowned watermen, who seldom knew how to swim; drowned youngsters who swam out too far; drowned teenagers reckless with their beer and high-speed runabouts; drowned ladies and gentlemen fallen for one reason or another from passing yachts; pilots and their passengers dropped from the sky in malfunctioning private aircraft or military training jets; the odd merchant mariner inexplicably lost by night from a passing freighter; even an occasional casualty of plain old heavy-weather shipwreck. Now, in the twenty minutes or so until a large sedan cruiser called Mama’s Mink noticed our commotion and chugged over to check it out (where were all those helicopters when we needed them?), he was able to observe through our 7 x 50s that the former person floating chest-down in the water near us was a middle-aged-looking bald white male, not fat but bloated from the gases of decomposition, worked over by the marine life of the Chesapeake—blue crabs especially, we suppose, whose size and appetite peak at summer’s end. The fellow looked to have injured his head: Pete couldn’t quite see, but there was some sort of ugliness behind the left ear. He wore only blue jeans and . . . a lead-weighted scuba-diving belt? Nope: two lead-weighted scuba-diving belts, which must surely have kept him on the Bay bottom until the bloating brought him up. In water still in the low to mid sixties, that would take . . . about a week?
Mama’s Mink now saw what we were pointing at. Much high-spirited reaction from Mama and daughters, presumably, on the cruiser’s foredeck, but the white-uniformed professional captain agreed to call the USCG and (against the red-faced owners’ inclination, it seemed) to stand by at least until another radio-equipped and engine-powered vessel relieved him. It was clearly much easier for him than for us to maintain position; indeed, without wind in our sails and steerageway, we had no maneuverability at all and had to let Story drift well clear of Mama’s Mink. Normally unsqueamish Katherine was not well; it was Chip now who patted her back. Nevertheless we felt obliged to stand nearby until MM’s captain notified us by nailer that the Coast Guard was on its way. Others, too, evidently monitored the transmission: We saw a sportfisherman and a motorsailer under power change course usward. Then there was a helicopter overhead, not Coast Guard white and orange but unmarked olive drab, the wash of its rotors bad news for us sailboats. Seeing no good reasons to hang around and several to go (here came two or three more pleasure boats; the VHF channels must have been buzzing), we put the helm over, let the sails fill, and headed north for home.
Chip was still pale; Katherine nauseated. Peter for his part was furious, and something more. For reasons shortly to be set forth, the old question resurfaced, in his mind just then more than in hers: Why bring a child into this world? Our crew of course gets around to wondering Was that that Brillig fellow there? Mister John Arthur Paisley? Maybe so, maybe not: some luckless boater, anyhow. Were those weighted belts Kath thought she saw around his waist? Well, yes. Diving accident, maybe? Nope, says Chip: no wet suit. Nobody dives in blue jeans. Yes, well.
Well?
Look here, reader: What finally appalls us, prospective-parentwise, is not that the world contains death and even disasters natural and manmade: holocaust, earthquake, plague, famine, fire, flood, war, the destruction of our natural environment. On the somewhat less than total scale, the world has ended many times: Where are Maryland’s Indians these days, Europe’s Jews, the citizens of Pompeii, Masada, Lidice, Gomorrah? When we look about us at beflowered Baltimore, thoroughbred Worthington Valley, the manicured waterfronts of Talbot County, we do not forget that we are chickens on the python’s back. If our particular reptile happens to have slumbered since the Civil War, in his sleep growing fescue and flowers on his scales, perhaps that’s because he’s still digesting the East Coast Indians, long since swallowed whole. He will rouse and strike again, by and by. What finally appalls us (P in particular) is not that even good governments have secret forces, more or less laws unto themselves, who harass, sabotage, torture, and kill—in short, “make policy”—no matter what the law, the Congress, the president, and sometimes even their own directors and department chiefs authorize or prohibit. That is your civilized world as it has no doubt virtually always been, only higher-tech these days and more expensive. Our beautiful wisterias and rhododendrons are fertilized with blood, our hybrid tea roses mulched with crime; we do not approve of, but have made uneasy peace with that circumstance. We don’t like the heat and therefore do stay out of the kitchen: grit our teeth; try both to protect Chip Sherritt (say) from these ugly realities and to strengthen him in them, as we shall our own offspring when the time comes. We accept all that, more or less. Though it is heart-heavying enough merely to fly in over our Chesapeake after heavy rain and see its failing tributaries brown and red and yellow with ruin, we can even still hope, swallowing hard, that our kids-in-the-works will have something left to enjoy down there, if . . .
But then our US Air flight (say) banks over the Potomac on its glide path into Baltimore-Washington International, and Peter sees not only those natural neighbors, Arlington National Cemetery and the Pentagon, and the grim H-shaped headquarters of the CIA over yonder in Langley, but (because he happens to know it’s there even though its existence is as of the time of this novel still officially unacknowledged) the astonishing National Security Agency complex down there at Fort Meade, and one or two other things. Whereupon raises its ugly head the biggest python of them all, so different in degree from those familiar sleeping ones as to amount to a difference in species and make us think ourselves insane to be deliberately pregnant. We mean
THE DOOMSDAY FACTOR.
Though our CIA had officially denied that Mr. J. A. Paisley was anything more than a retired intelligence analyst with no current role in the Agency, Peter Sagamore had private reason to know otherwise; to associate Mr. Paisley and Brillig with
THE DOOMSDAY FACTOR,
which, whether or not the chap Story just bumped into was J.A.P., keeps floating to the surface of our life like deadly fact to the surface of our fiction or rotting corpses to the surface of our Bay.
THE DOOMSDAY FACTOR,
OR,
AT LAST: A FINAL REASON FOR PETER SAGAMORE’S LATE INCREASING
SILENCE
Our Bay.
When the Chilean generals arrest and kill three or was it ten thousand noncombatant civilians, the Argentine generals six or was it thirty thousand, the Khmer Rouge two or was it three million, the Nazis about ten million, the Soviet Stalinists twenty million; when unacknowledged official murder grows so enormous that one has to add “give or take a few million” to some particular estimate, why bother our heads about one middle-aged American dead body more or less? One American infant-in-the-works more or less? Oh, because not only is no man an island, but that was our kid inside that Kathy there; our Story here. This land is our land et cetera, and thus that CIA is our CIA, and what we bumped into that blue October Sunday morning was our dead body, though it was
identified in next week’s papers as J. A. Paisley’s. That mark Peter Sagamore thought he’d seen behind its left ear was a nine-millimeter bullet hole; those weights, sure enough, were 38 or 39 or 40 pounds of scuba weights, depending on which account we read in which newspaper. Those blue jeans and jockey undershorts would turn out to be a bit of a problem for investigative reporters following up the story: Size 30 waist, they were, and the corpse itself weighed in at 144 pounds once the belts were off, whereas Paisley alive weighed 170 and wore size 34 to 36. Well, corpses lose weight, the Maryland State medical examiner would explain, especially perforated corpses: Intracranial and other body fluids run out. Even waterlogged corpses? And their clothes lose weight too, do they? Even the printed size-markings lose half a foot of waistline? Her own girth growing, Kath would say wistfully Some dandy diet, death.
Those are but two of several mysteries and discrepancies that the reporters would turn up in the months to come. The CIA, true to its nature, routinely lied as long as it could, even to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to whom it is supposed to tell the truth. That is its second principal business, lying, and its problem. Having at first denied that Paisley had ever been a CIA man and then reluctantly acknowledged that he’d been a very high-ranking one indeed, the Agency continued to deny that he was still on the payroll at the time of his disappearance, until reporters reported that an attaché case full of CIA documents had been found aboard Brillig by CIA investigators who inspected the boat along with the Coast Guard, the Maryland State Police, and Mrs. Maryann Paisley—to whom we here apologize for dredging up this sore material, but goddamn it we were minding our own business out there when etc. The Agency denied that report, along with the report that the documents were marked secret, but now acknowledged that Mr. Paisley at the time of his death was in fact a $200-a-day consultant for the Military Economic Advisory Panel, established to assess for the CIA the Agency’s own assessments of Soviet military expenditures and related matters. By the Wednesday after our Sunday bump, angry senators had obliged the Agency to admit that there were indeed Agency documents aboard Brillig, which were not classified top-secret only because they were draft reports by Paisley himself which had not yet been delivered to the Agency for classification. But they still denied taking an active role in the investigation of Paisley’s death, and that his death had anything to do with his familiarity with our new spy-satellite system, the Keyhole 11 “Big Bird,” which he had helped conceive to monitor Soviet compliance with the SALT I arms-control agreements, and which the KGB had managed to obtain secret information about from a young CIA double agent arrested earlier in the year.
By that same Wednesday, October 4, Mr. Paisley’s fellow yachtsman, Michael Yohn, of the Agency for International Development, the last person known to have seen the chap alive, was reported to have left the country hurriedly for an extended visit, it was not known to where. Colonel Wilson, too, of the Lusby mooring, left soon after for Perth, Australia, for an indefinite time. It was reported that Mr. Paisley was despondent over the marital separation; also that he was in financial straits. But it was also reported that he was not in financial straits, and that so far from being despondent, he had a new lover, former friend of his wife’s, whom he sometimes took sailing and to whom he’d loaned his car just prior to telephoning Maryann Paisley, on the Saturday before his last sail, for a cheerful chat. He remarked that he planned to go sailing tomorrow and invited Maryann to meet him for dinner should the weather keep him ashore.
“People whose business, position, or character involves secrets they will lie and lie and lie to protect,” a certain friend of ours in Bethesda used to say, “are not especially to be believed on any particular point, even when they swear that this is the truth, whereas what they’d said before was a lie. It is well to have as little as possible to do with such people.” Any nation’s “intelligence community” is rich in such secrets: the hidden truths which its expensive business is to discover but only selectively to reveal. Its members therefore routinely lie as necessary to the public, to their colleagues and families (who, to be sure, learn not to ask questions), even—less routinely—to their superiors, as well as to their rivals and their enemies and ultimately to themselves. Peter Sagamore, at the time of this earlier cruise, had been lying in similar fashion for some while, mostly passively, like Agency officers, by withholding what he knew; in some instances, more seriously, by withholding that he knew. We hate this part of our story. On with it.
More exactly, by withholding from Katherine Sherritt what or that he had been told: He knew nothing, inasmuch as he had been told what he had been told over the several years past by the Agency officer whom he’d tried to telephone when we first read of Brillig’s discovery below Point Nopoint, and again after Story collided with that yacht’s unfortunate skipper. On the Friday, October 6, he got through to him: our Bethesda friend quoted above.
Townshend here.
Peter Sagamore, Doug.
Peter. I expected you might call.
I’ve been calling.
I’ve been away, said Douglas Townshend. What have you and Katherine been up to.
Sailing and making babies. Peter breathed. We were out on the Bay last Sunday, Doug, just below Solomons Island.
Really.
Bit of a stir out there.
You saw it, did you.
Lunch tomorrow? I’ll pick you up.
Doug Townshend paused. Let me drive up there Sunday evening after dinner. I’ve seen neither Katherine nor Baltimore in too long.
Make it for dinner, Doug. We’ll go for a drive after.
Well. Dinner it is.
“Our telephones must be assumed to be tapped, our lodgings wired. Do not ever talk business with us on the telephone, or in our quarters or our automobiles. Always let me decide where and when to speak of business matters. Remember that I myself may be misinformed or disinformed, or I may be lying to you for one reason or another. Our kind may tell you six true things, as subsequently verified, in order to set you up for believing a seventh thing, which may be false. I speak of course of ordinary business circumstances, not of our special situation, in which I have no motive for anything less than total candor.”
None that I know of, had said Peter when Doug Townshend first spoke words like those to him in 1974; and Douglas had replied, Townshend-fashion, inflecting his questions as declarative statements, Just so; then what will you believe. Countered Peter I didn’t sign on to believe, only to listen.
That had been the correct response. Douglas Townshend in 1974 was a pink and portly sixty-year-old who looked like an aristocratic Eisenhower and was just becoming our CIA friend. In those days, his royalty income having dropped with his production, Peter sometimes conducted writing classes in the university’s evening college for extra cash. In addition to the pleasant but usually unhelpable permanent amateurs—middle-aged housewives and schoolteachers, retired civil service clerks and lieutenant colonels, all hoping to hit the jackpot with novels about spies or flying saucers or their own lives—such classes attracted an occasional ringer, of interest whatever the degree of his or her talent. One such was an ex-warden of the Maryland State Penitentiary, whose novel was a plea for leniency for most first offenders, even murderers other than assassins and hired gunmen, but Islamic punishment for all second commissions of the same offense: cutting off the hands of two-time thieves, surgically emasculating two-time rapists, brutally beating two-time assaulters, et cetera; the novel lacked form, language, character, invention, and plot, but not a certain vision and rough justice in the theme. Another was a retired rear admiral whose previous bibliography consisted of the Navy’s sight-reduction tables for navigation stars; a former combat officer, he contrived under Peter’s tutelage not only to write his war novel but actually to publish it, once P had persuaded him to scrap the common sailor’s point of view, of which the admiral knew nothing, and concentrate on maneuvering those big boats and bureaucracies from the bridge-
deck level, about which he knew much. A third was Douglas Townshend.
Witty, soft-spoken but firm-principled, urbane and thoroughbred like a gentler, unathletic Henry Sherritt, in his beautiful three-piece pinstripes and dark silk neckties Douglas looked to Peter Sagamore like a misplaced Princeton trustee. His fiction, like its author more polished than anything else in the room, nevertheless did not quite have it: light comedies of manners among the old Maryland family aristocracy, under threat from arrivistes like the Vanderbilts; blustering eccentric gentlemen, daft or scrappy elder ladies, well-mannered but troublemaking youngsters; no sex; no violence beyond the odd wrecked roadster or spoiled lawn party—it was P. G. Wodehouse country-place humor displaced to Greenspring Valley and attenuated in transit. The author himself was diffident; one got the idea early on that his literary interest was in proving to himself that he could not after all write fiction, rather than that he could. He admired exquisitely the certain quasi-fanaticism or roughness of spirit he saw in great writers, not only in the Lawrences and Hemingways (and the Peter Sagamores, he insisted) but in the Henry Jameses and Marcel Prousts as well. It was absent from himself.
After a few months, Doug Townshend quietly dropped the course, but not its instructor. A Maryland aristocrat of sorts himself, whose grandfather had been a Princeton trustee, Douglas Townshend had studied literature before following the family path through law school into government service. In all but quite contemporary letters, the breadth of his reading was superior to Peter’s. Doug knew very well and much admired P’s own early fiction, up to the turning point represented by “Part of a Shorter Work”; and while he could not warm up to the subsequent increasing minimalism, he could appreciate and discuss it more sympathetically than many professional critics. Moreover, he knew the Sherritt family well at second hand and slightly at first, from sundry horse-shows back in Katherine’s riding days and similar casual path-crossings.