King of the World

by Thomas Berger

  “Nobody looks to see who’s driving an ugly thing like that. A chimp could be behind the wheel.”

  While the car was at rest, Cornell checked out the positions of the gas pedal and brake and satisfied himself that henceforth his foot could find them without the help of his eyes.

  He had been driving for several hours, and he was not certain where he was. Meandering through the New Jersey suburbs, he had come upon a traffic-clogged motorway presumably leading to New York and of course rejected that; kept going and found nearby an older, deserted, secondary sort of road, took it, took others of the kind when they intersected the one on which he was traveling and his taste was for a change, but kept rolling. Within an hour it seemed that he had been driving all his life. A serenity came over him. The powerful, beautiful, comfortable car, which responded immediately, precisely, to the touch, yet remained virtually silent, was an instrument of his will.

  Eventually he was far enough from the New York area to find an empty superhighway. He swung onto it and pressed his foot down. Within a few moments of surging acceleration the speedometer needle reached 100. He maintained this speed for an hour and a half before seeing another vehicle. Then a car with a flashing red light appeared in the rear-vision mirror. Finally Cornell realized he was being pursued by a police car. There was still some unused power in the Rolls, which he could bring into play merely by pushing down his shoe. He pressed the pedal to the floor. Within a few miles, he lost his competitor altogether.

  He made a cackle of triumph. “How about that?” But she was asleep. At more than a hundred miles an hour, while being chased by a cop! With a man at the wheel. He had never before been the recipient of that sort of confidence.

  He saw no other cars. The landscape at length became green and rolling, with a horizon of purple hills. Insofar as, obsessed with the driving, he noticed it, he thought it very nice. In a distant meadow he noticed some black-and-white horses: no, cows. Cornell was familiar with few of the particulars of nature. He had lived all his life in a forest of people—or really, of women.

  The appearance of the only gas station he had seen since the one he robbed caused him to look at the gas gauge. Feeling the physical and spiritual disappointment of deceleration, he glided in the entry lane and came to rest at one of the clusters of pumps. The place, though well kept, had a deserted look. Apparently nobody much drove anywhere these days except around New York and the few other large cities whose traffic problems were always being shown on TV.

  A neat-looking attendant appeared. She wore a spotless tan uniform and saluted Cornell with a finger to her cap. He push-buttoned the electric window down, and was met by a terrible blast of heat. He had forgotten the car was air-conditioned.

  “Yes, ma’am. How many?”

  Cornell was pleased by the authority with which he said, as if it were routine: “Fill ’er up.” He raised the window again, and turned and saw the girl’s eyes come open.

  “You want to use the restroom?”

  She sat up and looked out. “Where are we?”

  Cornell shrugged. “Darned if I know.”

  She was somewhat testy after her snooze. “Don’t you think we should find out?” She climbed out into the heat. Cornell watched her go towards the station. He was in some suspense as she clearly headed for the outside door marked “Women.” He scrambled out and called: “Wait a minute.”

  She had her hand on the doorknob of the women’s room. He reached her, and saying “Excuse me,” gently pushed her aside and entered the female john.

  Later, while paying the attendant from the senator’s wallet, he asked: “Where is everybody? I haven’t seen a car all day.”

  “Over in Boston,” said the young woman. “Nothing much but military traffic here.” She narrowed her eyes and assumed an inside-dopester tone. “They built this highway for the invasion of Canada, you know.” She jerked her shoulder at the Rolls. “Nice machine. What’d it set you back?”

  She was beginning to assume a too-familiar style for a person of her rank. Did she suspect?

  Cornell said haughtily: “If you have to ask, you can’t afford one.”

  The girl returned then, still somewhat out of sorts. As he pulled onto the superhighway, she asked: “Did you find out where we are?”

  “Massachusetts.”

  “I’m hungry!” she said petulantly.

  The speedometer was soon at 100 again. How marvelous it was to drive, to feel that smooth force under you.

  “I don’t know if there are any restaurants around here,” he said. “But whoever keeps those cows has to buy food someplace. We’ll take the next exit and look for a little town with a grocery.” He glanced at her sulky face. “O.K.?”

  She shrugged and crossed her legs, the split skirt opening up. He remembered that when she was dressing he had seen no hair on her legs, or perhaps it was too pale to be conspicuous. He felt his own chin and its slight stubble. What would happen if he did not shave again? How long would the facial hair grow? All at once his sanguine mood changed. “Look, my offer still stands. We could turn back and go to the FBI office in Boston—”

  “I don’t want to hear that.”

  “We’ve driven for hours with no destination. Where are we going? What will we do? We can’t keep driving forever.”

  She was silent.

  “It’s all been romantic and adventurous so far, but what about tomorrow and the day after? And where are we going to spend the night?”

  She said: “It took all these years for you to get some nerve. Don’t lose it now.”

  “Easy for you to say. You lost yours at the sperm camp.”

  “That’s a rotten thing to mention.”

  His reply was lofty: “I’m sorry, but it’s true. What’s a woman without her work?”

  “Why, why,” she sputtered, “you shit, you! My work was apprehending you.”

  Cornell didn’t like what he was doing, or at least he told himself that, with certain guilty, delicious reservations, but he did not want to be eternally responsible for her unwomanning: as, in an access of clairvoyance, he realized she would try to make him if she gave up her career.

  “Let’s not get personal,” he said. “Basic principles are involved.”

  “Go to hell.”

  He put his chin in the air and made no reply. He had done his duty, whether she thanked him for it or not.

  Twenty minutes later they cruised into the main street of a little town, passed what looked like a former movie theater, the marquee blank, the interior now a washer-dryer salesroom; a bar with blacked-out windows; a police station with accompanying volunteer fire-department garage; and finally saw a sizable supermarket. He pulled into the vacant parking lot behind it.

  He asked the girl what she wanted to eat.

  She was waspish. “Steak and baked potato.”

  “All right, all right. You were whining about being hungry. What do you want to eat?”

  “Anything you want.”

  “Oh, for Mary’s sake.” He climbed out and entered the store by the rear door. He used to go out with a girl with the same exasperating trait: What are you in the mood for tonight?… Anything you want…. You name it…. Really, anything’s O.K. with me. Sometimes this would go on for a quarter of an hour. He had preferred women who picked a place and took him there without comment, and once inside the restaurant imposed their tastes on him: he had always liked any dish that was recommended confidently. It occurred to him that the situation was reversed now.

  He marched to the meat section and seized a package of liver-wurst. The place was vast, brightly lighted, and unoccupied except by one person way up at the checkout counter. Cornell found a tier of breads and chose a loaf of sliced rye. A quart of milk and two oranges completed his list. He carried the provender to the checkout.

  The clerk was a big, dull-eyed eunuch in a dirty green skirt and pale blue smock. He wore a pathetic pair of cheap mother-of-pearl earrings. He index-fingered Cornell’s purchases, listlessly
rang them up, and sacked them as if in a dream. Cornell gave him thirty dollars from the senator’s wallet.

  “Big store,” said Cornell, “for a little town. I guess the farmers come from miles around.”

  “From miles around,” repeated the eunuch, counting on his fingers, and then returning the change. He droned, as if by rote: “Come back soon.”

  This encounter depressed Cornell further, but when he got to the car the girl was in a good mood.

  “What’s for supper?” She grabbed the bag and found the meat package. “Oh, no! Not liverwurst!” She threw it on the top of the dashboard. “I hate liverwurst.”

  He angrily produced the wallet. “I specifically asked you what you wanted and you refused to say. So go in and get what you like.” He handed her a fifty-dollar bill.

  She spurned it with outthrust lower lip and seized an orange. He made himself a sandwich and chewed in silence: the bread was dry as a shingle and the liverwurst was tasteless. He opened the spout of the milk carton and drank awkwardly from it

  “Look,” he said, “we have to think seriously about tonight It’s almost six o’clock. There’ll still be a couple of hours of daylight, but what then? Should we look for a motel? I don’t know if we can find one out here in this godforsaken part of the world.”

  She had peeled her orange and was eating a segment.

  “We could sleep in the car.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “Sure,” she said, sucking noisily at the pulp, “no problem. As long as it runs, this can be our home. In fact, it can even stop running. We could park it in the woods somewhere and live there.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Cornell.

  She raised her eyebrows and popped another wedge of fruit into her mouth.

  Cornell said: “Isn’t it crazy? I don’t even know your real name. I thought of you for a long time as ‘Harriet,’ because in jail you called yourself ‘Harry.’”

  She kept chewing, making liquid sounds.

  After a few moments he said: “Well?”

  She swallowed. “What does it matter?”

  “I’ve got to call you something, don’t I?”

  “How about ‘You’?” She blinked, exposing those purple lids.

  “You know my name.”

  “I mean, you can call me ‘You.’ Names are a lot of crap anyway. They come out of a computer at the birth facility. They’re not really personal.”

  “Well, what is, if it comes to that?” He found her peculiarities very tiresome. He sighed and said: “How can I call you ‘You’? It’s confusing and stupid, if you ask me.”

  She peered at him. “Now that you can drive, you don’t need me at all. It wouldn’t take much for you to beat me up, I’ll bet, throw me out of the car, and drive away alone.”

  Cornell lost the control he had been so careful to retain. “You really take advantage of a person!” He was close to tears. “You don’t know how to be a friend. You are unfair and nasty and horrible and—”

  She grinned triumphantly: “See!”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “Go on,” she said. “Hit me.”

  He drew himself against his door. “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.” He started the car. He had to back up to get out of the parking slot, and he had never done that before. Now his faculties were corrupted by indignation.

  At last he shouted: “Dammit, tell me how to get this thing out of here!”

  “I’m not speaking to you,” she said. “You owe me an apology.”

  He would sooner have bitten off his tongue. He took his hands from the steering wheel and crossed his arms on his breasts—or where they once had been: it still felt funny not to feel them in this attitude.

  She sat there eating the remainder of her orange. He seized the other one, peeled it, and threw the refuse out the window. Her peelings, he noticed, were overflowing the ashtray onto the carpet. He mimicked her piggish sounds with his own orange, slurping loudly and smacking his lips.

  Finally she said, looking straight ahead: “You are the most childish person I have ever known.”

  He replied frostily: “Aster didn’t take me back to age of ten and give me toys to play with.”

  “You are really malicious.”

  That remark hit home. He stopped eating the orange and threw the rest out the window.

  “Please,” he said, “tell me how to put this in reverse.”

  “Why don’t you try ‘R’?”

  He blushed. How blind could you get from anger?

  He drove in stoic silence for a time and then, unexpectedly encountering another large motorway, took it, traveling with the sun on the back window, in the direction marked “Boston.”

  The girl made no protest—not that one would have done her any good. He intended to realize the plan she had rejected: go straight to the FBI office, surrender himself, and clear her name. It was the only answer. Having a conviction, a destination, he felt whole, as he had not since—that evening on which he had unsuspectingly started for Charlie’s? No, since birth he had lived a pointless life; and from the time of his arrest on, it had been a burlesque and he a sexless monstrosity without an identifiable self.

  Castration held no terror for him: in the moral sense he had always been a eunuch. Ironically, until now. He would lose his manhood through an assertion of his virility.

  Virility? His progression of thought, so straight and clear and true, was suddenly tortuous, befouled, corrupt. What was masculine about self-assertion? He floundered for a while in the swamp of his emotions—though driving steadily—but firm ground was reached at last. He was not a pervert. He was sacrificing himself: there was absolutely nothing more masculine than that.

  At peace, he proceeded to become one with the fluid motion, the hum of the wheels, the rushing ribbon of road.

  Within an hour, he passed, at a hundred miles an hour, not one but five exits leading to metropolitan Boston, and followed the motorway on its swing towards the north.

  Furthermore, he did this with only the faintest glimmer of reflection, and no shame whatever. It was as if by the very making of the resolve he had satisfied it. At bottom, he was still a normal man.

  Be ready, when the hour comes, to show that women are human and have the pride and dignity of human beings. Through such resistance our cause will triumph.

  CHRISTABEL PANKHURST, 1911

  16

  THEY HAD TRAVELED the entire length of the Maine Turnpike and were now on a narrow asphalt road to both margins of which grew an unbroken wall of big Christmas trees, and it was dark and they had no place to stay the night.

  In addition to which the fuel gauge told a bleak story. He passed it on to the girl, who an hour or so back, when it became clear that they were leaving civilization, had got over her sulk and was by now almost jolly.

  “Well,” she said, “it looks as if we’ve done it.”

  He, on the other hand, had got more and more sardonic.

  “We sure have. No gas, food, or shelter.” And it was cold outside. A long time earlier she had shut off the air conditioner, and about ten miles back she had switched the heater on.

  She stretched her short legs and wriggled smugly.

  “Listen,” said he, “I’m not kidding. See for yourself. We’re out of fuel. And look at that forest. What do we do when the car stops?”

  “I told you ages ago: sleep in it.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Plenty of room. You can have the rear. It’s beautiful, padded leather.” She turned around, kneeled on the seat, and began to poke at something on its back. “Hey, you know what? There’s a bar here, a little built-in bar, and it’s full of bottles.” He heard a clink. “Isn’t that terrific?”

  “What’s terrific about it? Are they full of gas?”

  She was leaning so far over that her behind was almost across the top of the seat. He had a strong urge to slap it.

  Her fishing produced a bottle. “It wouldn’t matter
if you ran off the road here.” She sounded drunk already. He had known girls like that, whom the very prospect of drinking made irresponsible. With a few actual glasses under their belts, they were capable of becoming downright disorderly.

  “Put that away,” he said firmly. But she went on, trying to unscrew the top. He was driving slowly now because of the darkness. The very brilliance of the headlights tended somehow to falsify surfaces and distances and give the effect of traveling through a tunnel.

  She had finally got the bottle open, and he heard a gurgle and smelled the unpleasant odor of strong drink.

  “I told you to put it away!”

  She said: “Since when are you the boss?”

  The word gave him pause. He had said repeatedly that what he wanted to escape from was authority in itself, no matter who the master and who the underling.

  “I’m not,” he hastened to say. “It’s for your own good. You haven’t eaten anything but an orange all day.”

  “’Swhy I need this,” said she, already slurring her speech and waving the bottle inordinately. It was just as he feared: she was one of those. She upended the bottle again. The whiskey smell was awful in the closed car. Cornell feared he might get woozy from the fumes. He opened the window. The air was quite cold and had a marked scent of its own, which, after several deep, breaths, he decided was rather the absence of an odor. For the first time in his life he was smelling unadulterated air. He had read this about Maine, a strange state where hardly anybody lived. What a place to choose for escape: they might never be caught, but how could you survive without other people to sell you liverwurst, TV dinners, and Kleenex?

  The girl leaned against him. “C’mon, take a blast.” She shoved the bottle in front of his eyes. He dodged it, and almost ran off the road.

  “Please put that away,” he said, trying to be nice.

  Her answer was surly: “Make me.”

  He replied pleasantly: “You know I could.”

  “You could shit too.” She took another swallow.

  “You’re beginning to get on my nerves,” he said.

  “You bore my ass off,” said she.