Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“What do you know about the Soviet Union?” Sy would ask. “You ever been there?”

Stung, Holliwell would play his trump.

“What do I know about Germany and Auschwitz and like that? I never been there either.”

Sy would stick his hands in his pea-coat pockets with the same wolfish grimace.

“Go ahead — be a Fascist. Be an anti-Semite. They pound that shit into your head.”

But he was not at home in the modern world.

On one of his last visits to New York — it had been a few years before — Holliwell had gotten drunk to the point of riotous indulgence and he had undertaken a sentimenal journey uptown. He had found himself walking around Fort Tryon Park in the fading light, feeling perfectly safe, and everywhere he turned he had seen vistas that were part of his interior landscape, all the scenes of his early adventures imaginary and real. Immediately, he had realized that the neighborhood had nothing for him anymore.

Then he had seen Sy on a bench along Broadway in a black overcoat too warm for the weather and a cloth cap out of The Grapes of Wrath.

Sy had asked after his mother. “Alive?”

She was dead, Holliwell had told him. She had gone back to Glasgow on her Social Security and died there.

He had said to Sy: “I thought you’d be in Florida.”

And Sy had said forget Florida. The fucking animals, they hunt me on the street. They want to break down my door and put a rope around my neck. The scumbags, they ruined the neighborhood, they ruined the city. Fucking Lindsay.

His broken nose was sprouting gray whiskers. He was old unto death.

Then Sy had told him the story of Press who ran the drugstore on Manhattan Avenue.

Press the druggist. Retired, closed the store — he was robbed so often. Visiting his brother on the Concourse. In a car — he wouldn’t dare walk. And the animals got him in his car. Just bang — fuck you, he’s dead. The cops stop the car, they catch the animals, one animal confesses. But Press, they put him in the city dump at Mott Haven — they don’t remember where. The cops can’t find him. The city says we can’t find him, the dump’s too big. A needle in a haystack. He’s there now, under the garbage. A religious Jew. Nice for his family. A fucking dog you bury in the ground.

While he told the story of Press, Sy looked across Broadway where a Hispanic woman in red boots was leaning against a squad car, talking to the cops inside. Holliwell’s last view of him was walking along behind the woman in the direction of the river, hurrying until he caught up in mid-block and they turned the corner together.

The hotel where Sy and Holliwell and his mother had lived was still standing. It was a welfare hotel now and the junkies were lined up on a metal rail outside, resting their scarred hams on the pigeon spikes, blowing their noses into Orange Julius napkins.

This time he would refrain from sentimental journeys and gestures. Sy would be dead now, like his mother.

He took his drink to the window to look down at the patch of Central Park that was visible from his room. The lights were going on; the lawns darkening. It was remotely possible, he thought, the depression and the war years being what they were, his mother being who she was — that Sy was his father. But it was unlikely. There had once existed, at least legally, a person called Michael J. Holliwell who was his father of record.

The thought of Sy made him feel like mourning, really like weeping. Drunk again, boozy ripe, ready to sniffle with promiscuous fervor over lost fathers and hillbilly songs. He put the glass down. The juice was turning on him altogether, softening him up; it was all catching up with him. His past was dead and his present doing poorly. In his briefcase was an unfinished address to the Autonomous University of Compostela but lie was too far gone, he decided, to even look at it.

Hunger made him feel ashamed; he experienced it as further evidence of his frail sensuality. He ate from room service and nearly finished the bottle.

When he had put the empty tray outside his door, he dutifully took up the briefcase and opened it on his night table. After a moment, he took out the address and set it aside face down. Beneath it in the case were his air tickets and a yellow file folder in which he kept a changing collection of notes and clippings, drawn from the long hours he spent in idle reading. At any one time, Holliwell’s file might contain bits from the Times and the news magazines, religious pamphlets, anything which seemed to him when he read it to have some relevance to the proper study of mankind. Often, when he reread the pieces in his file, he experienced difficulty in recalling why he had clipped them in the first place. If, after a while, he could not use the pieces in an article or introduce them into one of his classes, he would throw the entire stack away.

The file which Holliwell was bringing with him to Compostela contained only two items — a National Geographic article on Port Moresby and a letter that had appeared in his local alternative newspaper.

Holliwell took the printed letter from the file and set it before him. “Dear Editor,” it began.

Now it is evening again and the metal bars that separate we poor shadows from the outside world have slammed shut with a soul chilling echo. Before me lies another night in which moon and stars are only a phantom memory on the ceiling of my cell. During the night I shall experience many things. Some will be the faces of those I have loved and lost, others will be the memories of hatred and violence. And during the long night ahead I will cling to my dreams, hoping to find in the peace of slumber a surcease from the rage that gnaws inwardly at my heart.

My convict’s world is a lonely one and I would be bold enough to ask of there is a reader (woman, race not important) who would share my lonely hours with me by writing and speaking to me of the outside world from which the so-called justice of our society has banished me.

Yours truly,

Arch Rudiger

#197–46

Box 56 G.F.

Farmingdale, Wash.

Holliwell had found the clipping in his daughter’s room. It had lain for something like a year between her book of the films of Rita Hayworth and her copy of The Last Unicorn until he had finally snatched it up and incorporated it into his collage.

Once he had read the letter aloud to his wife; she had looked at him, closely suspecting mockery.

“I hope she answered it,” his wife had said. She had helped to fashion Margaret’s sense of social and moral responsibility.

Holliwell was quite certain that she had not.

He lay back on the bed, holding the clipping between his fingers, indulging Arch Rudiger with the pity he felt for himself. It reminded him of a few nights of his own.

Holliwell had ended by feeling guilty about Arch and he had assuaged his guilt by fantasizing the ideal response.

Dear Arch 197–46,

I know that you are a young community male while I am a student at a privileged and elitist woman’s college in the East. My family’s immense wealth and status fill me with shame when I consider the cruel injustice which you have suffered.…

Holliwell threw the clipping into the wastepaper basket and then tossed the Port Moresby article in after it. He turned on the television set to watch the first part of a World War II movie and fell asleep in the flickering light of burning Germans.

“Well,” Sister Mary Joseph said, “I don’t believe for a minute that it all ends in the old grave.”

She and Sister Justin Feeney were sitting in the shade on the mission veranda drinking iced tea. Sister Justin frowned at the sunlit ocean. Mary Joe’s Bronxy certainties drove her to fury.

“Let’s not talk theology,” she said.