E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

When I was in bed I remembered something that had happened at the Shelter. You needed a fever to remember this: I was under some kind of compulsion to prove myself to the other unreclaimed kids in the hardcore. I had this tremendous urge to make it so thoroughly as a Shelter kid that I would become one of the leaders. Leaders are the only ones who ever feel at home. The rest are displaced by the anxiety of trying to make it with the leaders. I wasn’t the best athlete. I mean I did all right but some of those kids were unbelievable stars. One black kid named Roy did everything better than most big guys could: every time up was a hit, he could run like the wind, he could jump higher, catch better, make impossible shots — he could even make the old dead lunk volleyball work, he could make it soar like a kite. Everything he touched was gifted. And he was just the best. There were others there with specialty bags. So my chances as an athlete were not good. But I thought I had as good a mind and tongue as anyone there. I thought I could get there with my mind, which is a tough way to make it in a kid society. A mind without the right attitude, without the right tone, is disastrous in that situation — you end up as some kind of over-articulate fag intellect and you’re out in the cold. So it was a challenge. I’m trying to account for the reasoning, if there was reasoning, that led me to do my imitation of the Inertia Kid. Maybe the ultimate extension of intellect is clowning. In the sitting position Inertia Kid has this hunch in his shoulders, and his head sat crooked as if one of his neckbones was out of socket. His tongue protruded and his eyes saw nothing. His hands lay as if broken at the wrists, the thumb of one in the palm of the other. Without having to think about it, I was able to do a perfect takeoff. I could do his walk, which was a pigeon-toed shuffle. I could do him asleep, which was always on his back with his eyes open. He never closed his eyes to sleep. Only his breathing changed when he was asleep. I did all these routines, becoming in one moment popular for them, a new thing in the society, a wit, a mime of affliction, a priest. And I was able to do my routines without ever having really consciously observed the Inertia Kid. In fact I found it difficult to look at him.

This is the only time in my life I have ever performed. I haven’t got a performing nature. There are some for whom the turn-on of performing is so total that they must never perform or risk obliteration. I found myself doing the Inertia Kid when nobody was looking. In order to do like he did you had to disconnect your heart muscle, you had to give up your heart, just give it up to its own weight, you had to lift all the rubber bands off the wheels, and slack off the tuning pegs and let the heart lie there in you with disconnected eyes, and unconnected tongue, and limbs lying in their own slackened strings. I could even get the saliva to dribble out of the corner of my mouth. There was for a few days a steady demand, the routine got longer and longer, the cruelty of my observation of the Inertia Kid soon beyond cruelty, a fascinating trip of its own for the wonder of the others, and each time it got harder and harder to stop.

Oh little big brother, pull out, pull out, my wing commander shouts as his grinning and best pilot goes too deep into the stunt. Pull out before the sound plunges into the earth and from one moment to the next there is stillness. I even forgot to breathe. I listened for my heart to stop. My guts strained for air while I tried to remember how to breathe. I was blacking out trying to remember what the light was for.

Why do we need it? What do you do in it? What is it you’re supposed to use it for? What is so valuable after all? What is it that is worth desiring?

A foundation. I desire a Foundation.

“Do you want to go home?”

“Yes.”

“If I take you will you be a big girl and do what I say?”

“Yes.”

“Because we have to do it so that no one sees us. And so you have to listen to me and do what I tell you to do. All right?”

“All right.”

“OK, now, that’s a promise.”

“Yes.”

“Say I promise, Daniel.”

“I promise, Daniel.”

“All right. Now today is Thursday. We’re going to escape Saturday. That’s not today and that’s not tomorrow, but the next day.”

“I want to escape now.”

“Susan, you just made a promise. You better listen to me or we won’t do it at all. If we escape before then it will be easier for them to catch us. You don’t want them to catch us, do you?”

“No.”

“All right. All you have to do in the meantime is what they tell you. Go to sleep when they tell you and eat when they tell you. I’m not going to wait for you if you’re tired so you better not be tired. And if you eat something you won’t be hungry when we go. Once we escape I don’t know when we’ll eat. So you’ve got to eat all your food and go to sleep. All right?”

“Yes.”

“And on Saturday we’ll go.”

“Yes.”

“And listen, you can’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t. I hate them.”

Saturday the discipline relaxed. Some of the kids were taken home for the weekend. There was no school. There was more free time. After breakfast there was a free period in the yard. There were a lot of kids in the yard all running around. On Saturday no one would stop you in the street to ask why you weren’t in school.

It was a chilly morning. I looked up into the grey sky of swiftly moving clouds and my heart turned over. I was wearing my mackinaw and my leather hunter’s cap. Susan had on her snow jacket with the hood. I had my sneakers but she only had her shiny black ankle-strap shoes. “All right now, sit down here at the fence. That’s it. Now when I say you lie down. I’ll lift up the fence and you roll under it.”

“All right.”

“Then I’ll crawl under. Then run. Run as fast as you can.”

I had this idea that if we went home to Williams, somehow that would have the effect of getting our mother and father home too. I felt that as long as we were in the Shelter, they would be in jail. I felt that they would have no chance of reaching home unless we were there. I wanted to put it all back together. My reasoning seemed logical at the time. I had no sense of faith or belief. It merely seemed logical that if Susan and I went home, it would be restored. Paul and Rochelle might even precede us. We would meet them.

“All right now, get ready. Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

“No.”

“I don’t know where to find any bathroom, so you better go now if you have to. I’ll wait for you.”

“I don’t.”

Alone in the Cold War, Daniel and Susan run down Tremont Avenue. It is a busy, curving cobblestone avenue lined with stores and delicatessens, movies and automobile showrooms and bars and Chinese restaurants. From west to east it snakes over the hills of the Bronx, a major artery. Trolley tracks, no longer used, flow down its center. It bleats with traffic. Daniel has some knowledge: he knows that the Shelter is in the East Bronx and that his home is in the West Bronx. But he doesn’t know which way is west. He looks for signs on the front of the buses nosing past. He looks for the sun but there is no sun. They scurry along, the little girl pulled by her brother, hurrying along the storefronts, darting past doorways, weaving through the people walking, shopping, waiting for lights at corners. Daniel’s side hurts. Each step brings him pain. He is sweating. “No so fast,” his sister whines. “You’re going to make me fall.”

Every few minutes she has to stop and pull her socks off her heels; her white cotton socks slip down into her shoes, and she has to tug them up.

Ahead the Third Avenue El crosses over Tremont Avenue, leaving a tunnel of shadow, a premonition of long distances. In this darkness of black steel beams that shimmy when the trains roar overhead, the green traffic light shines cool and bright. A newsstand nestles under the stairs leading up to the trains. The smell of hot dogs and juicy fruit gum and popcorn. The suggestion of being lost in the city.