E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

Mrs. Madge Green, with one prosthetic breast, drives her Buick Riviera to the S&H Redemption Center. Her Pontiac Bonneville. Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowl. Look at her lying there making a fool of herself. Teach her to play her stupid games. Look at the actress. Isn’t she something else! Look at how just lying there, not saying a fucking thing, not doing a thing but lying there and picking up bedsores she can still be morally preemptive. What character! To be truthful, Susan, I can live with your death. I will make a fuss because it will be expected of me. But I can live with it. I know how to do that. I’m not saying I won’t hang sad, but at suppertime I’ll be hungry, right? I’ll want a hamburger with everything on it.

You know I’m not shittin’ you, man. I can live with anyone’s death except my own. You know it. Everywhere in my life people have been trying to die and lots of them have made it. As it is I’ve done too much for you — and for what? You don’t talk, you don’t reinforce their sense of you. All they have is my word. I remember your voice, but how can I expect them to remember your voice. You can’t write out voices. All I can say about your voice is that it is so familiar to me that I cannot perceive the world except with your voice framing the edges of my vision. It is on the horizon and under my feet. The world has always been washed in Susan’s voice. It breaks where her voice breaks, under declaration, or late toward sleep, or at moments of love — only to more fully characterize itself. It is the feminine voice that passes solidly through ontological mirrors. It lies at the heart of the matter, the nub of the thing, the core of the problem, in the center, on the bull’s-eye, smack in the middle. We understand St. Joan: You want to fuck her but if you do you miss the point.

Susan, the other night I dreamed that with someone looking on I lifted my heavy scalloped gourd of a face with its eyes closed and affixed it to my head. It was not a funny dream. The eyes were closed. The thing weighed a ton but it wasn’t the whole head, just the facial edifice, curled like a bent-penny head of Lincoln, or the Roosevelt side of the dime or the Kennedy half dollar, curvilinear, like a watermelon. I felt the flesh with my fingers, with the tips of my fingers down my temple and cheek and it felt like dead flesh. I noticed its imperfections, this skin. It was cold, like clay, which is to say not cold but without warmth. A touch of a smile tipped its lips in sleep. Was that you with me in the dream, looking on?

To be objective, the weaker her signals the stronger mine become. We know the art of that. But what is happening is that as my signals grow stronger she has to move further and further away to hear them. Attentively, she will back off into nothingness.

To be objective, she is dying.

To be objective, they are still taking care of us, one by one.

Life recedes like the tide going out, the waves of life shrinking back, and over her forehead and down through her eyes a dryness, a loss of life. And she looked so pale, my God, she is dying and there is nothing Daniel can do. She is washing up on the beach, and when the last moisture sinks below the sand, and the sand dries in the sun, she will be dead. And my whole family will be dead.

When I picked her up there was no weight to her. There was no heft of ocean and slide of salt dune, no ocean of seabed shifting. Her arms hung down from the shoulders, her skinny legs from the knees. I felt her backbone against my arm, the bones of her thighs across my arms. Her head lolled back as if her neck were broken. Susan , in her ear, Susan , whispering, Susan hugging her bones and her dry weightlessness, Susan kissing her eyes. Only the warmth of her bones told me she was not dead.

When I laid her back down the shock of what I had done distributed itself through her body, and her feet twitched and her hands twitched. And her head rolled on the sheet and her eyes closed and opened and closed and opened. Then slowly the tremors slackened. And once again her arms moved out slowly and her feet hooked the mattress and she fixed herself to the bed, sucking to the bed with the vacuum pores of her shrinking bone marrow, and she stared once more at the ceiling and listened to the slow ebb of the sea.

We understand that when St. Joan led them into battle none of the soldiers watched the way her ass moved. We understand that Churchill found it of immense value to have played with toy soldiers as a child. Every line of every novel of Henry James has been paid for. James knew this and was willing to accept the moral burden. We can accept our moral burdens if our underlinen is clean. That is why we have toy soldiers. Susan digs all this. A starfish is not outraged. We must preserve our diminishing energies insofar as we direct them to the true objectives. A certain portion of the energy must be used for the regeneration of energy. That way you don’t just die like a bird falling, like a rock sinking, you die on a parabolic curve. You die in a course of attack. Susan knows this. To be a revolutionary you need only hold out your arms and dive. It is something like the sound barrier, there’s a boom when you break through, a concussion of space, a compression of the content of space. An echo ricochets through the red pacific twilight all the way over the ocean.

We understand Churchill found it of immense value to have played with toy soldiers as a child. We understand Truman found it of immense value to have commanded artillery as a young man.

From under his jacket Daniel pulls a cardboard tube. From this he withdraws a poster which he smoothes flat. Standing on a chair he tapes the poster as high as he can on the wall facing her bed. The ceiling would be better but even on a chair he can’t reach it. The poster is a black and white photograph of a grainy Daniel looking scruffy and militant. Looking bearded, looking clear-eyed. His hand is raised, his fingers make the sign of peace. It is a posed photo blown up at a cost of four ninety-five.

JACK P. FEIN

Ny Times

229 West 43rd Street

Fein is the reporter who did the reassessment piece in the Times on the tenth anniversary of the execution. He’s a robust bald-headed guy with grey sideburns.

“Do you remember the trial?” he asks me.

“We weren’t allowed to go.”

“It was a piss-poor trial. The case against them was nothing. Talking Tom’s word as a convicted spy wasn’t worth shit. All the government had was Mindish’s accomplice testimony that to believe you’d have to believe it’s possible that a radio repairman was trained and educated enough to draw intricate plans of the most sophisticated kind, and that he would reduce them so that they would fit on dental x-ray film — I still don’t understand why anyone would have to do that. It was too much. And that this stiff was valuable to the Russians. Insane I The Russians had everything they needed. They had all that stuff. They had professionals right there, they had their own men right on the spot. Anyway, the day after the Times ran my piece I was having lunch downtown and just as I’m leaving the restaurant Red Feuerman walks up behind me, the chief prosecuting attorney. He’s now Judge Feuerman of the Southern District, it was a career-making case, baby, everybody did well. Feuerman grabs me by the elbow, like this, you know how some guys grab your elbow like it was a tit or something, and he says, ‘Jack, you let the wrong guys get to you, I can’t believe you’d buy their story.’ ‘What story, Red, you’re not gonna stand there and tell me without smiling that you had a case!’ ‘Someday when you have the time,’ he says, ‘come up to my office and I’ll show you some things.’”