A distant door in the building made a clang. Maybe at last, this wing of the jail would start to get a few proper criminals. Mark, his back against the bars, was a shell open to the empty exterior. In the depths of the jailhouse corridor—somewhere around the L-shaped corner—two guards could be heard talking, chuckling about something, headed the other way, voices dwindling. It was a female voice and a male voice, both with a bored, easy familiarity, government employees fated to work side by side for years. And get along. Until retirement or until job transfer. All that was in their voice tones, all that resignation in their life trajectories, all their second-bestness, their bluffing.
It was a comfort to hear them out there, just in case his zealot cellmate might, yes, conceivably become even more inappropriate somehow. Blythe, by this time, might be out in the front offices somewhere, with her envelope of hundred-dollar bills, trying to get the attention of whomever was in charge. But in places like this nobody was in charge, especially after midnight, every officeholder on the shift was just a passenger within the system, getting through the night, lodged deep in the belly of the beast. By daylight, too, nonresponsibility and nonresponsiveness are the bureaucrat’s code. The bureaucrat’s rule is, do as little as possible. Be blameworthy for nothing. Soon (or at least inevitably, before they could be released) one of those guards would come around with papers to be signed, papers no guard had ever really looked at, papers nobody had bothered to focus on, not ever, during all the years of working here, all legal boilerplate, pages specifying the prisoner’s personal effects that had been surrendered to storage baskets, pages indemnifying the city and county of Los Angeles, etc., pages defining the terms of arrest, the terms of release, the rights of the accused. Et cetera. Those four computers did look never-used. Jail is limbo.
Bodie’s sermon, he decided—of course—was aimed to condemn the abortion of Noddy. That was the point. That was its mysterious relevance, the reason for the gleam in his eye as he spoke. Describing a world populated by biological machine-monsters, he’d been mocking “materialism.” In his little system, Mark and Audrey Perdue had terminated their baby because they saw the boy’s death as practical, utilitarian, and convenient. What else could the sermon’s relevance be? Mark and Audrey had killed the fetus because it would have been competing with them for resources. The resources were: house, 3BR 2BA with walk-in closet, cars in carport, the freedom to work productively in society and have that dignity, leisure time to watch television, open weekends.
Which, in a sense, was true. Strange to admit. As a kind of oversimplification it was partly accurate, yes, but innocent, and innocence is ruthless.
“Any-hoo … yes, Mr. Perdue,” said Bodie. “Lotta and I do have reasons, for skipping the rest of the expensive Celebrity activities. Environmentally, the world’s getting smaller. We’re using up the planet and having no conscience. I guess, if Lotta’s been mentioning all that, I probably sound like a fanatic. I am a fanatic.”
A disabled person, he’d noticed, has the ability to exploit the small motions of the chair as a form of self-assertion, it’s like a bodily extension, backing off a few ticks or inching forward, or reangling the position by a couple of degrees, expressively, convivially. Bodie had a talent for sometimes casually flipping the chair back into a wheelie and sustaining that balance aslant in comfort, without a hint of a unicyclist’s wobble. This seemed definitely not one of the moments for doing a wheelie, here in a jail cell, facing the father of the girl he’d kissed. Rather he sat up straight, in the asana of one interviewing for a job, hands in lap.
“I understand you’ve started an organization back in Ohio, there, Bodie.” (He was not proud of himself, seeing himself repeatedly holding out new hoops for the boy to jump through.) “An organization where each individual’s front yard will be—you know—vegetable garden, hog, clothesline …”
Bodie’s only response was to wave the topic off, smiling. “It wouldn’t interest you, Mr. Perdue. It’s just a lot of ‘make-a-betterfuture’ stuff.”
Making a better future was evidently not for Mark and his generation.
“Lotta tells me you have a far-reaching notion of ‘crimes against humanity’: people should produce what they need, don’t exploit anybody else, don’t use up the natural resources, don’t even buy anything! Kind of do away with the whole economy! Well, I actually don’t see anything particularly wrong with that—I really don’t—I think it’s great—but when you say ‘crime against humanity,’ sometimes aren’t you just talking about moms who are just trying to drive their kids to school? So they need to burn a little gasoline?”
Bodie didn’t answer but only smiled mildly—and expectantly, too—a guru, waiting for Mark to hear and detect his own errors, making of himself “a still pool” to mirror Mark’s image.
Mark added, “Maybe the gasoline comes from some underdeveloped little place, but nevertheless—”
Bodie began, “You know, I’d like to try just planting a seed,” his hands were making a shy cup, drifting out from his lap. “Let me just try planting this one little seed. Which might sprout at some later date. Something for you to think about. You know in the South …” Here he went again. Mark with relish drew back into his observatory pit. Bodie Lostig was so conceited he was positively luminous. “In the South in 1840-whatever, there were people who quietly just freed their slaves. Way before the Civil War. At that time, most people—good abolitionist people, too!—were saying it was still unrealistic to try freeing the slaves. Or, like one might say, not just idealistic but actually impractical. They weren’t racist at all. Their point was, society wasn’t ready yet. Or the slaves would feel displaced, and they’d be exploited in the job market, and would be operating at a huge, huge disadvantage. And end up in ghettos. All crime-ridden. Or the freed slaves will just be enslaved all over again, in the industrial factory system. Or, that that whole farm-labor system was still necessary for efficient business practice and would have to end gradually. Nobody felt ‘evil,’ they just felt like they had to compromise realistically with reality, and how things were presently working. But still, a few people did free their slaves and took the business loss. They ate that loss. And probably looked a little weird, or a little stupid. They just quietly did it. Slaves were huge investments, you know, for the average farmer. It’s like, nowadays, a farmer investing in a big tractor or combine-thing. Slaves cost a lot! Average little farmers, back then, they couldn’t afford to be idealistic, if they had one or two slaves. Like how, today, people drive cars and never think about it. People don’t worry about it. They just hop in the car and go. They don’t feel like they’re genocidal when they drive around.”
Bodie pushed his tuxedo sleeves back to the elbows, demonstrating there was no trickery, and he showed both his open hands. “The ideal society someday, Mr. Perdue, would be posteconomic. We would live like the American Indians used to. Or like the places we bomb—you know—the conservative little villages? With oxcarts and women-allin-black? We would ideally start living like them. We need to bomb them, presently these days, so we can have air-conditioning. And one day get them air-conditioning. That’s also why we’re killing the oceans and everything else: so we can get everybody air-conditioning, even the people we bomb. Nowadays people look back at slavery, or Nazi Germany, and they say, ‘How could those people be so awful, back then? How could those people be so evil?’ They say, ‘If I’d lived back in the South, I would have freed my slaves. And I would have helped a family of Jews. I would have been one of the good people.’” His hands rose and patted down the seed he’d planted. “Just something I thought you might like to think about.”
The smile: it was the gentle smile of the transcendent. He seemed always to be holding in reserve a more difficult opinion, mercifully, tactfully. It was impossible to define the exact superior niche he pretended to speak from. But he was a nightmare bulging forward, pontifical, a hand puppet despite the gap of air between his platform and the floor, a jack-in-the-box that from its lid
ded casket lunges and sways and swings. This was the fruit that was saved from the abortionist’s knife, exemplary in righteousness, self-equipped with ideals that will give it a reason for thriving.
“After total environmental collapse, people will look back at us. When people of the future look back at what we killed, it wasn’t Jews or African Americans, or one race or another. It was actually bigger than that, what we killed. We’re doing something actually bigger than genocide.” He gestured at Mark, because Mark was an instance. “Every day, bigger than genocide.”
The surrounding angry dimness was mostly from not having slept or eaten. Surely all the boy was doing, in his own mind, was delivering a speech like a student working for an A in public speaking.
“It’s everything we are,” he went on, patting his own upper body, from his pectorals to his abs. His dead legs didn’t get the thumping, because they were the part of him that had already been fed forward into oblivion. “Everything we are, and everything we do, is basically ruining everything.”
He was going to be interrupted, because the original two guards were coming around the L-corner. One of them spoke to his beltmounted radio, “Two males to release.”
The other was digging in his belt to bring up the single big key that opened every door. He and the wheelchair kid would be free, Blythe would be waiting outside, and the little jail-cell encounter was over. Just in time. He’d started to feel surges.
But he had evidence now. The boy had shown himself to be, if not exactly crazy, at least insolent. At least inappropriate. With a little time away, Mark would be able to get him in perspective. He was only a seventeen-year-old. And he was physically disabled. Which, along with his dysfunctional home life, had made him permanently angry at the world—and he had discovered one refrain, which it pleased him to keep harping on: his own righteousness: it was like a bagpipe he’d discovered and kept reinflating to make it drone in people’s faces. Also, nobody liked him. None of the other kids. They all made fun of him. Lotta was too smart for this. Mark tried to command the boy, by force of telepathy, to stop lecturing now, because the two guards would find him apparently receiving spiritual advice from a seventeen-year-old.
The one guard said, “Time to go, gentlemen,” inserting his key.
As now there wasn’t much time, Bodie shrank his message to a pill: “A person’s happiness isn’t going to come from anything you get for yourself, like ‘prosperity’ or success or whatever.”—Or like freedom from a brain-damaged baby. He made the shrug-smirk.
The guard swung open the gate to free them, saying, for the other guard’s amusement, with a weary scoop of the eyes, “Yeah, right this way, Mahatma.”
ALONG THE CEMENT corridor, behind the guard pushing the wheelchair, Mark followed his uniformed, jingling, radio-crackling captors—on out to freedom—but he wasn’t seeing anything because he’d begun to feel dizzy in that cell. Listening to the moral lesson and looking at the jack-in-the-box, he’d started getting the swarming sensation in the throat, the emergency hopelessness. An average human being is complicated and has no real defenses ordinarily. Against the attack of the simplistic. Bodie, while making his eye twinkle, had spoken of casual, everyday genocide, which was a code word. The lesson was, the Perdue family should have given over ten years of their lives to the infant in its twilight. That’s what glinted in Bodie’s eye. He couldn’t say it, not in an explicit way. The baby ought to be suffering at home in a crib in the spare bedroom where ordinarily the bikes are stored and the never-used glossy Weber barbecue with the price tags still hanging on it. Under the terms of society’s conversation, nobody is allowed to speak honestly, or even allowed to think honestly—society simply places people in roles in a formal melodrama, so the melodrama replaces thinking. Lotta and her new boyfriend were pretending something mattered, where, really, they didn’t care. The boy didn’t care. Nobody cared. The melodrama consists in people’s pretending passionately to care. And it causes in others a hopelessness, and a weakness, and the sense of a smothering wall. Mark ought to take care of his health and get back to the hotel room and lie down and maybe get a snack in his stomach.
Then there was Blythe. When the heavy door was buzzed open, he caught sight of her, the chipmunk profile, separated by one last barrier of glass. She was standing at a counter, feeding paper money into the steel bowl under an armored window. She was his ally in the world, the mature world, the ripe, full, dappled world.
He didn’t see his daughter, however, not anywhere. She wasn’t visible through the big window in the room called Large Meeting.
Before he could ask where she was, Bodie asked first, looking up to the guards, from his parked seat, in his self-assured tone referring to her as “Carlotta.”
Neither of the two jailers answered. They ignored him. So the Celebrity turned his attention away idly, idly to examine a few miscellaneous “Know Your Rights” notices on the wall. He was a boy who was angry about his own weakness and powerlessness. It would be a permanent, chronic kind of anger, a fundamental anger. And so as revenge he had found a way of belittling the world. Mark kept an analytic eye on him because such people are poisonous, because they do pretend to believe it. They pretend for their own spectatorship: they’re watching themselves “believe” something; they think the pretense might bring about the real thing, true belief. They know in their deepest heart none of it’s true. And call that faith. What they really like, though, is holding it up against others, like a candle.
At this point the boy had nothing more to say to Mark and seemed satisfied to disregard him. He had delivered his blow. It was a glancing, indirect blow, delivered diagonally through Mark’s daughter, but it would go on spreading: the infant’s stunted life ought to have been lived out to completion, in the crib with the IV bottle, the becalmed mobile motionless over him, unseen, where he would have heard only the few ambient sounds, like television or the vacuum cleaner or the dishwasher, or a distant lawn mower, which would represent the outer world, the mysterious sunny spaces beyond a window sill. Lotta had said it, Bodie does believe Nod’s life would have had the same absolute value, the same as people who got the complete eighty years, like people who taught physics or defended corporations from lawsuits or built low-income housing or whatever: ten years of paralysis and incomprehension had the same “value,” supposedly. Hearing a distant lawn mower once a week was supposed to have comparable worth. The orbit of the neighbor’s lawn mower would have been, from within the boy’s crib, an event as important as the northern lights. The touch of his sister’s hand wiping the cold spit from his chest would have been, to him, all possible communion. The sound of the vacuum cleaner would have been Beethoven and Mozart. The clank of dishes in the sink, after dinner, would have been the Grand Canyon and the Milky Way. The jay’s harsh song outside his window would have been as important as all poetry, everything in Wittgenstein and Shakespeare and Newton’s Principia. All he and Audrey had to show, now, was leisure time and disposable income. That’s what Bodie’s kind of philosophy proposed; but the truth is, a physicist and a lawyer are worth more than a paralyzed, retarded, blind baby, that’s an objective social fact you have to take responsibility for, because if you don’t, then you do live in a world where the evening sound of dishes is as great as the Milky Way, or just the sensation of cotton fabric is as profound as the Seven Wonders of the World.
“WHERE IS THE wine list?” Blythe said, unzipping her jacket, opening the heavy padded spiral-bound book of snacks, cocktails, in-room movies, dessert offerings, masseuses, banquet rooms, spas and salons, boutiques and concierge services. “Have any preferences?”
During the drive back she’d used her cell phone to call ahead and order a room service cart to Mark’s room, a midnight meal devised—part medicinal, part triumphal—for the returning hero: cold salmon with a French name, a fruit-and-cheese plate, a bread basket. She had put off ordering wine because she wanted to see the list. Mark did feel deserving. He felt altogether better, too. He’d withst
ood the ordeal of the disabled boy who was such a superior human being, he hadn’t lost control and said anything to bring him down, so he’d survived with his dignity intact. Like one of those martyrs, he’d been penned with a beast and, surviving, he’d only been made stronger by it. After the drive back to the hotel—(Bodie riding royally in front, father and daughter crammed into the back seat together, the collapsed wheelchair behind them in the hatchback, crushing Blythe’s NORTON SIMON MUSEUM gift shop bag, the painful kneeling before Bodie so that his passenger seat could be adjusted to make legroom)—then after all the accounts of how boring! a jailhouse is—and how amazingly impolite! jailers can be—after the kids’ tireless excited boasting about the wonders of beachgoing wheelchairs—and after the two young Celebrities had been installed in their separate Celebrity Suites to sleep—it was still only two in the morning. And in the room the meal was already there, on a wheeled gurney under a linen shroud, and Mark was able to close his (hefty, armored, veneered) hotel room door on everything, with a brass clack in the latch, and he went straight for the bed and sat himself up against the pillows, with his jacket still on, and his shoes still on. Let Blythe use the armchair across the room. Let her bring him tidbits on plates. He carried on talking, unburdening himself of his many insights into the boy and his weird oratory. He didn’t feel tired anymore. He’d never felt better. Annoyance had cheered him up, at least temporarily. And the boy’s style of pronouncements, their free-floating grandeur, was so interesting. Also, he was excited because there was something fascinating now: he wanted to get back home and talk with Audrey: about this 2 + 2 = 4 thing. Audrey was always his first listener.
And it was a problem. It was a problem that a boy from Cleveland—in his ignorance, not giving it a second thought—had lifted and dropped without realizing what he was saying. The so-called creation instant, the instant when mass and energy were first fossilized in the expansion—all that mass beading up from nothing—that moment was acknowledged all through the profession to be, still, a fiction; but before that instant, all of mathematics had already, always, waited. Mathematics seems not exactly a fiction, not in quite the same way as particles and energy are. Mathematics might have already been there in some sense.
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