The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  He waved to a group of fellow Australians beckoning him to join them in one of the booths at the far side of the bar, no doubt to continue their week-long argument over that underarm delivery at the MCG. Personally, he was quite grateful to the brothers Chappell for demonstrating that it was possible for an Australian to sink even lower in his own estimation than Toby Jenks. He shook his head in response, indicating his intention to leave, feeling strangely out of it all, itching to talk to one of the others who now inhabited the same lonely universe as his own. He didn’t bother to hide a yawn. Time to go home. Not that there’ll be anybody there. God knows where she might be. Away with the pixies probably. He eased himself down from the bar stool. Time to cut and run, mate. Bail out. While there’s still time to spin it like you quit at the top. Done it all. Bored. Fresh fields and pastures new. Little place in Provence. Grow a few vines. Learn to cook. Or paint. Up at dawn. Walk six hours a day. Get back down to 180 pounds. Write the slim book of verse.

  45 | Happy hour

  Friday, March 6th, 1981

  Hélène sank back in the wicker chair, more tired than she could ever remember. Tired and remote. Just over two weeks had passed and nothing had been heard. Maybe nothing would be heard. Maybe the unbelievable thing they had done would just fade away eventually to be forgotten like a vivid dream. And, if one or more of them should happen to meet again some time, perhaps they would be too embarrassed even to mention it.

  By the gate, the gardien was emptying a bag of charcoal into the brazier. She looked at her watch. It would be getting near six o’clock in London, too, and Toby would already be well launched on ‘happy hour’, a term she had learned in New York and thought of often since. She settled back in the shade, realizing that the thought of Toby’s happy hour made her sad, knowing that there was something about him she could still love.

  With an effort, she fetched a glass of water and the portable radio out onto the veranda, turning the dial to push the red line along to the first of five or six possible wavelengths. The last of the sun had disappeared but the warmth lingered on, and for a moment she allowed herself to think of beginning a new life in Canada, indulging in a fantasy of getting Toby into shape with hours of the cross-country skiing she had so missed over the years. Hard to imagine, in the still-warm African evening, those vast and glistening slopes, the serrations of snow-laden pines, the taste of damp wool over her mouth.

  After poking the aerial this way and that, the BBC World Service found a way through and she balanced the set on the top rail of the balcony. Sinking down again into the wicker chair, she tried to concentrate on a discussion about the South African government’s Group Areas Amendment Bill. She would treat herself to a more modern shortwave when next she passed through an airport. Or maybe soon she wouldn’t be needing one. Her thoughts strayed this way and that, following the gentle promptings of association and memory, as if guided by nothing more than the faint breeze that stirred the sand in the compound. The child with TB wasn’t the worst of it. All week the children’s ward had been filling up with a measles outbreak. Probably half of those now lying in the extra cots would die.

  The signal had improved slightly and a government spokesperson was making great play of the decision to exclude sports from the Bill. Normally she would have been interested. But there was now only one real interest. She sipped her drink. There were no regrets. And if she occasionally felt fear or panic then she had only to think of the two or three mothers who would be quietly sobbing on the steps of the clinic when she went back on shift in the morning. In any case, it was only a selfish fear. Fear, and something else. A something else that had taken a long time to bring to the surface: a desperate desire for Fabrice to know what she had tried to do.

  From outside the gate came the sound of a motorbike hammering down the road, making her tense her muscles to think of the children on the ward. Tonight they would be in her dreams. Despite all the years, she had failed to cultivate that necessary degree of detachment that all health professionals need to acquire. And perhaps that, too, was part of the impossibility of going on.

  She was awakened by the jaunty signature tune of the BBC World Service News, redolent of Empire, as if Queen Victoria herself had come prancing on to the veranda holding up her skirts. The sun was losing some if its ardour as she listened to a report about the imposition of an exclusion zone around the Falklands. Eventually she sat back again and rested her head on the cushion. Was she really going to go back home after all these years? Abandon what she had done with her life? Had she never really been committed, deep down? Had she come to Africa because she was scared she wouldn’t be able to succeed in her own world? And had she stayed out of pride, or not knowing what else to do?

  … the goal of immunizing all the world’s children against the major killer diseases of childhood.

  She sat upright, unsure if the words had been in a dream.

  That goal, too, can and will be achieved by the end of the current decade. And it too will be a giant step for mankind.

  She covered her face with her hands and dropped to her knees by the balustrade before gripping the bars of the balcony rail and pushing her ear close to the tiny radio.

  To those countries across the globe struggling to break the bonds of disease, we pledge our support. In the face of the difficulties to be confronted, which will be many and great, we say – ask what America can do for you.

  A minute later she lay on her bed, sobbing uncontrollably into her pillow.

  Perhaps it was the loneliness of living in a hotel, but there was no doubt that Stephen had developed a kind of compulsion for walking the streets of New York. And so it was that on the bitterly cold afternoon of Friday, March 6th, he found himself sitting at a metal table outside a Dunkin’ Donuts outlet just off Times Square. He had been there for the best part of an hour, sipping coffee and reading through the notes he had made, looking up from time to time to wonder anew at the late twentieth-century madness that was arrayed before him like some surreal stage set. Here was false consciousness made flesh. Capitalism’s reductio ad absurdum. Here was the maelstrom of excess, cheek by jowl with poverty and degradation. Here was the sensational unashamedness of commercialism gone mad. Here was an overwhelmingly senseless crusade against the senses under the banners of greed, envy and lust. And here was every flashy temptation, every soulless joy, every base appetite titillated and promoted in ever-changing patterns of artificial light while in the streets below the huddled, broken lives shuffled along, heads bowed, seizing on a food wrapper left in a trash can or a half-smoked cigarette in the gutter. And here, too, stretching down 42nd Street, was the scarcely less obvious prostitution of the dead-eyed girls of indeterminate age posing in the entrances of strip joints offering ‘continuous shows’, ‘no waiting,’ ‘ten different girls’ and ‘as much as you can see for $1.00’. And, in the centre of it all, running under that famous, ever-changing Coca-Cola commercial, a ribbon of electronic figures recorded the latest changes in the Dow and the Nikkei, interrupted occasionally by snippets of news about the death of a movie star or the progress of the neocolonial war in the South Atlantic.

  He returned to his notes, scribbling another line on the concept of alienation, dashing off the words he would look up later – ‘human beings cannot be free if they are subject to forces that determine their thoughts, their ideas, their very nature of human beings’. A shadow fell across the table and he lifted his head to see a figure standing before him, oppressively close, the smell of sour clothes pushing up against his face as a cup of coins was thrust towards him. He dug in his jeans pocket and found two quarters, glancing up only briefly at the man, the scarred mind visible in the eyes. The man moved on and in the space where he had been the giant advertising screen was mindlessly changing the pattern of lights … Coca-Cola – It’s the Best and, running underneath it in two-foot-high pixellated letters, the words ‘US to immunize world’s children …’

  Toby Jenks was still at the office, though the
rest of the department had gone home hours ago. So far, he had restricted himself to two Scotch-and-sodas and was managing to maintain himself in that state of mellow, sunlit well-being that fell well short of the darker shadowlands of inebriation. Opposite him the bank of television screens were tuned to different channels, all with the sound turned down. The letter of resignation sitting before him on the desk had taken just a few minutes to write. And the decision itself hardly any longer to make. Why his path should suddenly have become clear was, he thought, just one of life’s little mysteries. Probably it had been foolish to think that there had to be a plan in place. Just do it.

  He glanced up at the bank of screens, all of them now showing the same pictures of the Task Force as it made its menacing progress through the South Atlantic. The thing to do now, just before he headed off to Soho, was to write to Hélène. Nothing fancy. No stupid witticisms. Just tell her you’ve resigned. ‘No intention of pressing for an answer … just thought I’d let you know … fresh start … offer still open … always assuming still at liberty.’

  He was beginning the letter when a simultaneous change on all of the screens caught his eye and he glanced up to see a mugshot of the President of the United States addressing a microphone. He returned to his letter but, after a second or two, picked up the remote from the desk and brought up the sound.

  Twenty years ago, President John F Kennedy committed the United States to the goal of putting a man on the moon within a decade.

  He held down the volume rocker on the remote.

  Today, the United States commits itself to another great goal, a goal for our times, a goal here on earth …

  When his secretary came in to see what the commotion was about, she found her boss standing on the desk yelling, ‘You little ripper!’

  Stephen remained for several minutes on the southwest corner of 42nd Street, fixed there by the ribbon of news carrying its telegraphese over the heads of the tourists and the street vendors, the prostitutes and the drug dealers, the down-and-outs and the millionaires, the traffic lights changing ineffectually over the gridlocked chaos of Times Square. Fazed by the riot of frenzied advertising competing for his attention on all sides, he waited for the message to come around again, thinking for a moment he might have projected his inner imaginings onto this most external of worlds. But no, there it was again, chasing along after Walter Cronkite signs-off from CBS News … US to immunize world’s children … President pledges …

  He closed his eyes against the mayhem, wondering which world was real.

  At first he looked frantically for a cab, then abandoned the idea in favour of running all the way downtown, only to stop and wave at any cab whether showing a light or not. Even to himself it was the strangest of reactions, this surging through his veins, this quality of lightness, as if some great and permanent weight had been lifted from his spine, his breathing becoming easier and deeper even as he became out of breath, as if he were standing on a rarefied mountain top rather than in one of the most polluted places on earth, as if the frustrations of the years, the poisonous clouds of angst and resentment, were blowing away in a cleansing breeze. ‘Live with significance’ – he had never been without its sharp spur and chafing bridle – and there it had been in red electronic letters scrolling across the world.

  On the corner of Macy’s a chequered cab slid into the kerb and fifteen minutes later he was pressing the intercom in the lobby of Seema’s building. He forced himself to take the stairs at a steadier pace so as not to be out of breath. On the top landing, the door was already open.

  ‘Turn on the TV.’

  The loft had become too small to contain all that was happening in Seema’s brain. Stephen, in any case, was slumped on the couch completely lost in his own thoughts. She made an excuse, not knowing if he had heard, and slipped out of the door, intending to buy wine and something to eat.

  She turned right on West 4th. Where was Michael now? She had tried a dozen times to reach him, but he was not answering. And there was no way to contact Hélène, except by leaving a message. She turned onto the Avenue of the Americas, glad of the crowds and the lights and the bars and the fact that no one was taking any notice of the tears that were stinging her face in the freezing air. She stopped by a mini-mart and took a basket from the rack, not able to think beyond wine and cheese and crackers. With the bag in her arms, she hurried on to nowhere, unwilling to stop walking, as if to stop would be to change to a different reality. In the window of the TV store C-Span was reshowing the scene that they had watched half an hour earlier, a fixed-camera view of the White House press room, the President silently miming the words she was certain that Toby had composed.

  It was the time of day when the surface of the lake appears brighter than the sky and the first pink touches the distant majesty of Mont Blanc. Michael had left the office earlier than usual on a fine spring evening and headed home along the lakeshore road. Arriving on the Quai des Alpes, he managed to find a space on the waterfront and strolled through the streets of the old town, picking up a few things for his evening meal. It was unseasonably warm, and he sat for twenty minutes by the lake enjoying a cold beer and the soft breeze. He could not look at the lake now without also seeing the typewriter sitting in the silt two hundred metres down.

  Back in the apartment, he ate spaghetti with fresh tomatoes and basil, the International Herald Tribune propped against the bottle of olive oil beside his plate. At eight o’clock he washed up and went to sit by the window, switching on the reading light over his chair and intending to spend the time before bed reading a colleague’s report on the field trials of a new protocol on Integrated Management of Childhood Illness.

  After a few pages he put down the report and reached up to switch off the lamp. Darkness had fallen, dividing the view from his window into the nearby lights of the town and the far distant lights of Yvoire and the French shore. Would she also be eating alone tonight, reading in the cane-backed chair, perhaps with the wood-stove lit and the candles burning? Or was she out to dinner with friends or colleagues? Or might she have a date? He thought of calling, but dismissed the idea. He had already called twice since getting back. On the second occasion the conversation had been stilted, strained. She had obviously thought he was calling with news and had waited for some cautious, coded word that might give her a clue as to what might be happening. Once it had become clear there had been no special reason for the call, she had tried to help him out, keeping the conversation going with what little news she had of work, of a lunch with Tom Keeley, and of a city showing signs of beginning to emerge from winter.

  At work all day, he had been conscious of looking for an excuse to schedule another trip, and of hoping for a fax or a call from Atlanta. In June he would be required at the inter-agency UCI consultation. Until then he would have to bide his time.

  When the telephone rang he wondered for a wild moment if it might be New York, or Washington, but heard instead the heavily accented tones of the Director-General asking him, without preliminaries, if he had heard the news.

  He listened for two minutes, then said goodnight and turned on the lamp. For a few moments more he sat calmly at his desk, unable to digest what he had heard, yet thinking that his boss might have sounded a little bit more excited. Eventually he picked up a pen to draft the response that the DG had asked for. But he could not begin. Could not conceive of a response. Could not dare to believe.

  After a minute he reached for the portable radio on his desk. Willis Conover’s jazz programme was in full swing as he tuned in to Voice of America to await the next bulletin.

  A few minutes later he walked out on to the balcony. He had been given the bottle of Champagne years before, but it had remained at the back of his fridge. It had always seemed a waste to open it alone. Fighting back unaccustomed tears, he watched the cork fly out into the night. Then raised his glass in the general direction of America.

  Stephen stirred on the couch. The bottle of wine stood empty on the coffee t
able. He opened his eyes, his world reassembling itself, and found himself alone in the apartment. He thought he remembered Seema saying something about going out to buy food.

  He sat up, feeling sick and empty, his head swirling unpleasantly. He needed coffee, but sank back into the couch, the taste in his mind as stale as the wine on his parched palate. Motionless, he stared at the white slope above, watching the spidery nebula of the junk in his eyes swimming around the ceiling. The television had been turned off. Euphoria had gone. In its place, some portion of bitterness had returned. Michael was the one who had done it all, run the whole show. And in any case nothing fundamental had changed, though no doubt the others would be running around congratulating themselves.

  From out of nowhere he experienced again that instant, frightening fusing of the brain’s wiring, a momentary suspension of all conscious capacities. When the moment had passed, his world returned to him, though under what seemed like a deep shadow. He reached out an arm to see if there might be anything left in the bottle. Above, a sudden rain had begun to tap at the skylight. Breathing more quickly, he turned to face the spiral staircase in the corner. He was alone with the virus not two metres away in the little fridge he had carried up the stairs only two weeks ago.