Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  In one segment they read excerpts from the thousands of letters the show had received from kids who wanted to run away from their own families and come live in the Harrigan House. The studio had been forced to come up with a form letter explaining that the Harrigans were fictional, that the kids should stay with their own parents and make the best of it.

  Sheldon Browne did not make an appearance; he had refused permission to use any clips from the show. So instead we got footage of The Harrigan House Live Onstage, and shots of the Harrigan House comic books and trading cards, dolls and board games.

  At the end all the celebrity guests got onstage and sang The Song together.

  At ten Linda got home and we had sandwiches. I went on to bed while she stayed up to watch the tape. I read for a while and then tried to sleep. Linda’s side of the bed was cold and empty, not that that was anything new. Most mornings I had to be up at eight to talk to editors in New York, while she slept in. More and more we seemed to live in separate worlds.

  Maybe I could try harder. I thought I would go in and see if she wanted to talk, or maybe even fool around a little. I put on a robe and got far as the doorway into the living room. Linda sat on the couch, tears rolling down her face. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her cry. Her lips moved as she sang along softly with the tape:

  And there they had their own little world

  Nancy and the kids, the professor and his spouse

  Laughter and love for each boy and every girl

  That’s life in the Harrigan house.

  She didn’t see me as turned and went back to bed.

  When Linda and I first dated there was an awkwardness that I chalked up to her being only twenty years old, compared to my worldly twenty-nine. I thought it would pass in time, but it never did.

  I went in the next morning, which was a Saturday, to talk to her. I found her curled up on the couch, watching a black-and-white movie from the forties and reading the morning paper.

  “So,” I said. “Did you like the special?”

  “It was great.”

  “I watched it while it was taping.” For just a second she looked at me with real curiosity and interest, the first time in longer than I could remember. The look went away when I said, “I have to admit I didn’t get it.”

  She turned back to the movie. “Well, you don’t like TV. You say so all the time. I wouldn’t really expect you to ‘get it.’”

  “So maybe you could help me, here. What is it you like so much about the Harrigans?” She shrugged, and I could see her slipping into hurt and anger. I kept after her anyway, knowing I should stop, a little angry at her myself for liking something that seemed so awful to me. “I mean, it didn’t seem to have much to do with the real world. It’s like some fascist fantasy, where there aren’t any black or poor people, women just stay home and have babies, there’s no crime, no injustice...”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” She was actually angry and letting it show, something even rarer than her tears. “Does everything always have to mean something? Some of us are tired of real life. I have customers in my face all day and when I get home I just want to relax. I don’t need to be challenged or stimulated, I want things to be nice. The Harrigan House was a nice show, okay? Is that so terrible?”

  “I was just asking.”

  “Just asking. With that superior tone in your voice. Just because you went on a few protest marches in the sixties, that’s supposed to make you some kind of holy person. Well, look at yourself. You used to talk about this Great American Novel you were going to write, about how you were just doing journalism while you got your novel together. Now you don’t even bother to talk about it anymore, let alone do anything. You don’t even vote, for God’s sake. Your talk and everybody else’s holier-than-thou talk about changing the world is just bullshit. Talk is all it is. The rest of us want to keep our houses and cars and TV sets, thank you very much. The Harrigan House is shown all over the world. Eastern Europe, Somalia, Brazil. That’s what everybody wants, everywhere. To be like the Harrigans.”

  “Linda, I—”

  “You think I like my shitty job? You think I like it that we’re too poor to have kids? You think I wouldn’t trade my life for Mom Harrigan’s in a second? Or for the life of any one of those kids?”

  “I’m sorry.” With a tinge of bitterness I added, “I guess I didn’t know you were that unhappy.”

  “Surprise! I am! Are you going to tell me your life is that great?”

  “It’s not so bad that I want to live in a sitcom.”

  “Fine. Don’t then.” She turned away again and the conversation was over.

  After Linda left for work I called my brother, who lives on the other side of town. He’s two years younger than me, but he’s got a steady job at Community National Bank, a big house, kids, and a bass fishing boat. “The Harrigan House?” he said. “I don’t think I ever watched it when it was first on. The kids watch the reruns.”

  “But you’ve heard of it.”

  “Hasn’t everybody?”

  “Put one of the kids on, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  The phone clunked, and a second later a voice said, “Hi, Uncle Larry.”

  “Hi, Danny. Do you ever watch The Harrigan House?”

  “We used to. It’s not on any more.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I don’t know. It was kind of dumb.”

  “But you watched it.”

  “Yeah.”

  We talked about baseball for a minute or two and then I got Phil back on the line. “Is this for a story or something?” he asked.

  “Maybe. Just bear with me for a second, okay? Do you remember ever actually seeing this show, or is it just that you heard the kids talk about it?”

  He thought it over. “I guess I never did actually watch it. It’s just part of the culture, you know? Like how you can not watch TV or read the paper, but still know everything that’s going on? It’s like it’s part of the air we breathe and the food we eat or something.”

  The stock car racing piece was a loss, at least for the moment. I went downtown to the main library to put an end, once and for all, to the knot of dread at the bottom of my stomach.

  The first place I checked was the TV Guide for the week ending September 27, 1968. The Friday night listings had ads from all three networks featuring their new shows. The Harrigan House was not among them. Eight o’clock Eastern was seven o’clock in Texas, and nothing started at that hour. The second half of High Chaparral was on NBC, the second half of Wild Wild West was on CBS, and the second half of Operation Entertainment was on ABC. I tried the rest of the night’s schedule, then the rest of the week. I tried the next week’s issue, and the week’s after that. Then I moved on to the fall of 1969 and 1970.

  No Harrigan House.

  I got the New York Times and the Austin American-Statesman on microfilm and checked them as well. I looked up Harrigan House in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. There were no entries until the mid-eighties, and then the articles were either of the where-are-they-now or the sitcom-that-defined-a-generation variety.

  I double-checked the alleged date of the show’s premiere in People, and xeroxed the incriminating page from TV Guide.

  Back at home I called LA Directory assistance. Sheldon Browne’s number was unlisted, of course. I dug out my research on an article I’d done the year before on telephone hackers—phone phreaks, they call themselves—and dialed the number of a kid in LA. He got me Browne’s home number while I waited, and threw in his fax for good measure.

  A personal secretary answered at Browne’s house. I was sure she would hang up on me if I mentioned the Harrigans so I said, “My name is Larry Ryan. It’s about an investment of his. It’s rather urgent, I’m afraid.”

  “Please hold.” There was faint classical music on the line for less than a minute. “Mr. Browne does not recognize your name. What company are you with, sir?”

&nb
sp; “Uh, Merrill Lynch.”

  “Mr. Browne has no investments with Merrill Lynch.” The line went dead.

  In for a penny, I thought. I punched his fax number into my machine, scrawled my name and number at the bottom of the TV Guide page, and fed it through.

  The phone rang approximately a minute and a half later.

  “So,” the voice said. “You’ve discovered the secret of The Harrigan House.”

  “Is this Sheldon Browne?”

  “I suppose it is.” His voice sounded tired. “A journalist, are you?”

  “Well...yes.”

  “I don’t care. If you’re recording this, fine, you have my consent. None of it will do you any good.”

  In fact I hadn’t thought to record it, but I turned the machine on as soon as he mentioned it. “I’m onto something,” I said, “but I don’t know what it is. All I have right now are questions.”

  “The answer to one of them, Mr. Ryan—that is your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “The answer is, Harrigan House never existed. I never created it. There are no tape archives that I’m refusing to license to video or put in syndication to the cable stations. It’s never, to my knowledge, actually appeared on a television screen anywhere.”

  “But...that’ s impossible.”

  “I said that for years, to anyone who would listen. No one wanted to believe me.”

  “But the books, the trading cards, the TV special last night...”

  “You’re a journalist, Mr. Ryan, an educated man. I’m sure you’re familiar with Voltaire? ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him?’”

  I didn’t believe him at first. On Monday I made a few calls to editors I’d worked with for years. “Try the Weekly World News,” they said. “We don’t do that kind of story, Larry, what the hell’s wrong with you?”

  At the end I even got desperate enough to think about the Weekly World News. But what was the point of burying the truth amid all those Elvis sightings, UFO encounters, and miracle cures?

  Late at night t tried to make the pieces fit together. How long had this been going on? Did it go all the way back to the sixties? If the Harrigan audience wasn’t old enough to vote, how could they have swung Nixon’s election? The easy answer was that they had exerted some kind of influence on their parents, conscious or otherwise.

  The other answer is much more frightening. What if the same elemental forces that had brought an entire TV show into existence had also created Nixon—five o’clock shadow, political history, Pat, Tricia, Julie, Checkers, and all? My mind shrank from the thought as violently as those of the Harrigan generation had fled from the tumult of the sixties.

  It was just yesterday morning that I came into the living room and found the morning paper in my chair at the breakfast table. Linda was in her place, head buried in the Lifestyle section.

  “Do you mind?” I said, picking up the stack of papers. I hadn’t thought of Prof Harrigan until the words were already out of my mouth. Obviously I had let myself get deeper into the Harrigan world than I realized.

  Linda peered around at me, a big grin on her face. “‘Do you mind?’” she said back to me.

  I smiled. “Oh well,” I said. “That’s life—”

  And suddenly I saw where I was headed. Linda’s warmth and acceptance reached out to me like a roaring fire in a blizzard. It was the chance of a lifetime. I could be part of something larger than myself, an unconscious conspiracy of light and happiness that could shelter me from a world of fear and anger and despair.

  All I had to do was finish the sentence.

  The Death of Che Guevara

  Interview with Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, January 7, 1988, for the Argentine newspaper Clarín. Translated from the original Spanish.

  How did you come to take the name Tania?

  When they recruited me for the mission in Bolivia, I asked if I could pick my own nom de guerre. I chose Tania in honor of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya Anatolyevna, who used the name when she was a partisan in the Great Patriotic War. She was tortured and executed by the Nazis in 1941 in the German-occupied Soviet Union.

  In those days, the early sixties, we were all in love with the Soviet Union and Mao, and maybe also a little in love with death. I think that was especially true of Che.

  What made you become a revolutionary?

  I came by it naturally. My parents are both Communists, and had to escape Hitler’s Germany because of that, and because my mother is Jewish. Here in Buenos Aires they were both members of the Communist Party and actively supported the guerrillas. In 1952, when I was 14, we moved back to the German Democratic Republic, and I joined the socialist youth organization—the Free German Youth—and later I was allowed to join the Party.

  I grew up accepting Marxist historical analysis as the natural order of things. As I learned how the poor are treated in imperialist countries, and saw more and more of that as I traveled, it reinforced all those ideas and hardened my determination to change things.

  You have to understand how exciting the Cuban Revolution was to all of us when it won its first victories in 1957 and ‘58. There they were, only 90 miles from the US, defying the most powerful oppressor on Earth and getting away with it.

  Then, in 1960, I met Che in Berlin. He had found his purpose in life and he was radiant. After that I wanted nothing more than to go to Cuba. I used to sign all my letters with the slogans of the Revolution: Patria o muerte [homeland or death], and Venceremos [we shall overcome].

  In May of 1961 my dream came true and I got to visit Cuba. That was all it took for me—Cuba became my home.

  What kind of a man was Ernesto “Che” Guevara?

  Magnetic. Everyone says this about him, and everyone is right. On the one hand, he was incredibly strong because of his will and his absolute devotion to the Revolution. On the other hand he was physically weak because of his asthma. The strength and weakness were forever at war inside him. You could see the pain of it in his eyes, and it made him sensitive to the pain of others, especially the helpless.

  To the powerful, he was not so kind.

  He did everything with intensity. He was like a crazy man in combat, but when he listened to you he was quiet and looked in your face and he was entirely yours. This was very attractive, to men and women alike. Those who were close to him were passionate about him.

  What about the stories that the two of you were romantically involved?

  I’ve seen the stories. Ridiculous, and full of errors. The writers clearly did not know what they were talking about.

  You and Che both nearly died in Bolivia.

  Bolivia was a mistake.

  Che believed absolutely in exporting the Cuban Revolution throughout America. As soon as they consolidated their power in Cuba, Che began talking to Fonseca in Nicaragua and Ramirez in the Dominican Republic, and also to rebels in Paraguay and Haiti.

  But Bolivia was his obsession. He’d been nursing it for years, all because of geography. He looked at the Bolivian altiplano and thought how a revolution there could spread in all directions—to Brazil, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, and most of all to his homeland in Argentina.

  From the start there were problems. The Bolivian Communist Party wanted to pursue an electoral strategy and didn’t want to support us. And the CIA was tracking us the entire time.

  My mission was in the cities. I had been in Bolivia since November of 1964 under deep cover as an ethnologist, making contacts in the government and universities. Che arrived two years later, operating in the countryside. But they had one setback after another, and then in March of 1967 everything started to come apart.

  Three compañeros arrived in La Paz with no one to take them into the jungle. So I did it, and once I got there I was delayed, and the result of that was that my cover was blown. So I stayed with the guerrillas. That was very exciting for me, to finally get my own M-1 rifle and be a part of the fighting. It was what I’d been waiting for all my life.

  The
n, in April, on a long march, another compañero and I got sick. We had high fevers, and Che made us stay behind with a second group. We were supposed to reconnect, but it was difficult—the radios never worked properly, new recruits deserted, and the peasants would constantly betray us.

  For example, in August we met a man named Rojas who gave us food and put us up at his house and promised to guide us across the river the next day. But there was something about him I didn’t like, and the more we questioned him, the more evasive he got, until he finally admitted that he had alerted the army about us and they were waiting in ambush for us. Without a doubt, if we had trusted him we would all have been slaughtered.

  The very next day we finally met up with Che’s group. We were badly shaken from our close call, and they were in terrible shape as well. Che was sick with asthma, everyone was hungry, exhausted, and in low spirits.

  We argued for days after that. Che wanted to stay. He didn’t care about the risk, he only wanted to finish what he’d started. It was one of his flaws—he could be fatally stubborn. We kept telling him, over and over, that he was endangering everything. If he died in Bolivia there would be no revolution in Argentina, and the struggle for the rest of Latin America would be set back years, maybe decades.

  Finally he was so sick that he couldn’t argue any more. We took him across the border into Argentina, where the montoneros [leftist rebels] met us with medicine and food and guns and many men. I think he saw then that we had made the right decision.

  How was it when you and Che met with Perón?

  The entire event was dreamlike. The montoneros first smuggled us into Cordoba, and we flew from there to Mexico DF, and from there to Spain. We were travelling for over 24 hours with little sleep. Che was in his “Ramón Benitez” disguise, where he shaved back his hairline and had gray at the temples and thick, black-rimmed glasses. I was “Marta Iriarte” with blonde hair and cat-eye sunglasses. Our own parents would not have known us.