Edgar Doctorow - Drinks Before Dinner

EDGAR Children — there is the answer! Look, look how this gun pulls me forward. It moves, it is magnetized! This was the reason it was given me, to hold it, homing in along the last few irresistible inches of its momentous journey.

CLAUDETTE Oh God in heaven—

EDGAR Think, Claudette, of the enormous distance it has come! From the street to your dinner party. We make death. We make death. In the fullness of our being we design it and engineer it and mine it and cast, it and build it and assemble it and test it and aim it and make careers in it.

JOAN For God’s sake, Edgar! Somebody stop him!

EDGAR This is nothing personal. It can’t be stopped. It’s the world coming to an end. Not brain matter but an arms cache will explode when I fire. This small shot will fuse the armament of the earth. Think of all the handguns, rifles, machine guns, grenades, torpedoes, shells, mines, firebombs, frag bombs, ground-to-ground missiles, ground-to-air missiles, heat-sensing bombs, self-propelling smart bombs, proton bombs, neutron bombs, nuclear warheads, multiple nuclear warheads — in this head. This warhead. It is plated in steel and rooted in concrete. This head is the world’s unholy armory waiting to be lit by my tinder.

ANDREA Edgar, it’s not right! I dissociate myself from this!

( He points the gun at ALAN’s head )

EDGAR A child gave it to me to end the world!

MICHAEL Edgar, wait!

EDGAR Why should we wait? Why should we want to wait? One shot will take it all out. Let’s get to it. Let’s get on with it! Let’s see what’s on the other side.

MICHAEL But he’s lying! He knows something he’s not telling us! Why should he believe in the end of the world? He has no right to believe in the end of the world! What does he know that he’s not telling us? Are there plans? They have them for everything — wouldn’t they have to have planned for the end of the world?

(EDGAR lowers the gun )

EDGAR Give him some whiskey someone. He’s trembling.

(JOEL does this. He crouches next to ALAN and holds the glass )

ALAN Either shoot me or let me go. I know of no plan. If it exists, I know nothing about it.

MICHAEL It could exist. Edgar, it has to exist! And if it does, that is not quite the end of the world, is it? Something would go on, something would be left! He knows! If the government had to plan for the end of the world, what would they think of? What would they try to do?

(CLAUDETTE pulls her children close to her, kneels between them )

CLAUDETTE Children. They would try to save children. They would hope to save a few children.

JOEL Is that it, Alan? They would do that even if there was no hope, wouldn’t they?

ANDREA Think, Mr. Secretary! Who would be called upon for the sake of the children!

ALAN They would not have to be called upon. They would respond on their own. There would be no plan. They would react instinctively … People who come into their own under states of extreme disaster … People who become very interested and efficient in the teeth of disaster … Not your sort … Not people who go to dinner parties. Unfashionable people. You’d be bored by their conversation. But they know things. They know how to survive. It would be some instinctive effort of these people who would have the brutal, insensitive strength to survive. It would be a conspiracy of survivors who would save the children. They would attempt to save their own children, but if their children didn’t come up to the mark, they would find other children.

( Pause )

EDGAR Go on.

ALAN They would make some astounding selfless effort of organization to save some children. There would be help from the government, but it would be secret and unofficial. Officially the world would not be ending. Rockets and space launches would be under heavy guard in various places in the country. These would be for the purpose of venting the torment of the masses who, despite all assurances, would know that the world was ending. There would be nothing painless about it. Enormous mobs of tormented, mourning, enraged masses would periodically rush the heavily guarded gantries of rockets officially denied to be for the launching of survivors into space. They would be massacred. An ethic of genocide will justify the killing of these enraged masses. It will be seen as a form of mercy to save people the experience of the world’s end. And of course the rockets and space launches will be dummies. The space vehicles will be dummies. The conspiracy of survivors will have decided that nature is not secure in space, that life is not natural in space. They will have designed something for the earth, some completely self sustaining ecosystem, a terrarium deep in the sea, perhaps, where the selected specimens of humanity can begin again. Yes. This would be a venture of scientists and military men with government technology at their disposal. Revolutionary groups protesting its elitism would try to sabotage it. Morally they would be right, but they would fail. Millions would die in protest. But our computers would secretly be scanning the traits of every child in the country just reaching breeding age. And at the moment the ecosystem was ready, the moment the ark was complete, the computers would designate the children who were to survive. All the weak and deformed would be eliminated, of course, all the congenitally deformed children with twisted spines or macrocephalic heads or arms attached to their shoulders. All the physically normal but ordinary, sensitive children would be eliminated too. Only champions would be chosen, champions of survival, champions of selfishness, cunning, muscular strength, sexual vigor, children with the ability to kill, and a complete lack of concern for the horrors of their own consciousness. Helicopters will come out of the night and land in the streets and on lawns and kidnap these children designated for survival. And while the world erupts, on some back road somewhere an ordinary yellow school bus will make its way unremarked and ignored through the chaos. In the yellow school bus will be the chosen children. Not many. Perhaps ten of them. Perhaps twenty or thirty. And the bus will turn a corner somewhere, in some mining town somewhere on a river. The light in the sky will be amber, and the old school bus will have turned in that light a darkened yellow, like an egg yolk. And it will go around a corner and be gone, and a few hours or days after it has disappeared, the last unprotected person on earth will be dead. The conspiracy of survivors will be dead. But the ark will be under way.

MICHAEL My God.

ALAN It’s more than a plan, it’s an inevitability. The same flaw in the human race that destroys it provides the conspiracy of survivors with the responses that save it. The same insufficient humanity that brings doom provides a few people with the insensitive strength to plan beyond the doom.

EDGAR Yes. And we survive the fire as we survived the flood. Clouds of radiant poison will fall through the trees on the mountaintops and drift down the mountainsides into valleys. And while men in the night drum the earth with their running feet and people run in terror over the corpses of the deformed and mobs tear down the gantries of empty rockets and while people choke on their blackened tongues and cattle go down on their knees and cities explode and the seas boil — the children on the school bus will see this. They will have the vision of the world’s end imprinted on their brains. And in numbers of generations and individuals to come, those memories will erupt at night in terrible dreams. And one day again in the universe these dreams will come true. The dreams will again come true because the children of the survivors will be made in their image and will build a new earth with the genius of the conspiracy of survival. Everything that has happened will happen again. The ark will be built to resemble a lavish apartment overlooking a ruined city. The ark will look like this room. We are on the ark now. The world has already ended.