E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

But here in the chilling night a very thinned-out crowd is beginning to insist on itself in the night shadows of the great black looming walls of Pentagon, and the people are younger in this growing stubbornness, they are not polite, they are not particularly nice, many of them, but in changing wind flurries intimations of tear gas establish skirmishes hidden from the eye and the meaning of distant shouts. And their manners are not fine but they have to get through many levels of not particularly civilized let alone cool behavior in order to make clear to themselves and to the soldiers the true value of the occasion, which is to say its real nature. And yes, my brothers, war sucks, and american imperialism doth suck, and I’m beginning to feel the imminence of satisfaction. And here most of the older people are gone, and the reporters are gone, and the cameras are gone, and what the later hours of evening find — perhaps it is already midnight — is an accidental community of hard-core Quakers and rads and new boys and new girls of the new life-style and also one pusillanimous adventurer now crept and climbed to the foremost rows of disputants in order to do what is being done. And suddenly he is there, locked arm in arm with the real people of now, sitting in close passive rank with linked arms as the boots approach, highly polished, and the clubs, highly polished, and the brass highly polished wading through our linkage, this many-helmeted beast of our own nation, coming through our flesh with boot and club and gun butt, through our sick stubbornness, through our blood it comes. My country. And it swats and kicks, and kicks and clubs — you raise the club high and bring it down, you follow through, you keep head down, you remember to snap the wrist, complete the swing, raise high bring down, think of a groove in the air, groove into the groove, keep your eye on the ball, eye on balls, eye on cunts, eye on point of skull, up and down, put your whole body into it, bring everything you’ve got into your swing, up from your toes, up down, turn around, up high down hard, hard as you can, hard as you can, harder harder: FOLLOW THROUGH!

Daniel drank his own blood. It was Pentagon Saturday Night. He swallowed bits of his teeth. And he was lifted by the limbs and he was busted on Pentagon Saturday Night.

And I will tell now how one boy in the big cell, in this grand community of brotherhood bust, how this one boy is unable to share the bruised cheery fellowship of his companions or care for the gossip that Artie Sternlicht has topped everyone by landing in the hospital, or feel this group-sing spirit of gap teeth and seventy-six handkerchiefs dried crimson around the head; but sits in the corner, unable to stretch out full length, a spasm of wariness bowing his spine, knotting his fingers to his palms, his knees to his chest, his head to his knees. He cannot enjoy such places. They are too familiar. He knows how far they are from home. He cannot survive such places in careless courage. He is sensitive to the caged air rubbing his skin, the night of this place nuzzling his ears. He sweats in a chill of possibilities knowing now what it means to do what is being done, and sweats every minute of just one night only one night, every second sweating it, a twenty-five-dollar ten-day suspended trip INNOCENT, I’M INNOCENT I TELL YA, eyesight skating up and down the walls like flies, interpreting the space between the bars, and Daniel discusses the endless reverberations of each moment of this time, doing this time in discrete instants, and discussing each instant its theme, structure, diction and metaphor with her, with Starfish, my silent Starfish girl

The next morning I paid my fine and was released. It was another lovely day. I got back to Washington and found the car and drove to the neighborhood of old American houses and found my wife in the quiet white room of the quiet American house. Phyllis immediately began to cry. My right eye was closed. My lips were crusted and swollen and I couldn’t open my mouth wide enough to eat. It hurt me to breathe, but I found I could ease it somewhat by holding my arms against my ribs. Blood was dried all over my shirt.

I didn’t want her to go on and on. “Listen,” I said, trying not to whistle through my teeth. “It looks worse than it is. There was nothing to it. It is a lot easier to be a revolutionary nowadays than it used to be.”

a cognizant original v5 release november 24 2010

Early in December

Daniel Isaacson boarded an American Airlines 707 bound for Los Angeles. He wore his fleece-lined jacket, prison shirt and pants, and sandals. His beard was full, his long hair tied around with a headband of red cloth. His steel glasses shone. His teeth were large and white and shining and his toes, always rather large, looked immense in sandals — they were crude toes, prominently knuckled with thick yellow nails not entirely clean. He waved a big chilled toe at the fascinated lady across the aisle who looked up at him, blushed, and turned away.

A good many of the passengers believed Daniel was there to hijack the plane. He considered the possibility. Two businessmen conferred on the length of his hair. The stewardess found it difficult to maintain her smile when she passed him the lunch menu. In fact she seemed to be angry with him. But she gave him that practiced eyeflick.

After a lunch of sliced steak and small green peas and apple cobbler Daniel received from the stewardess some sort of stethoscope in a plastic bag. For which The Foundation paid a dollar. It is to listen to the fantasy breathing. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold , with Richard Burton. Burton, an English intelligence agent, or spy, is manipulated and finally betrayed by his superiors in an involved plot designed to protect a double agent in East Germany. His innocent girl friend Claire Bloom is killed on the Berlin Wall and Burton chooses to die with her, standing up in turn to be shot. Life is never this well plotted but the picture is meant to be appreciated for its realism. It is photographed in black and white, always a sign of sincerity. Burton walks around like a man with a realistic load of shit in his pants. And The Wall itself is there, with its guard posts and striped gates and floodlights. But is it realism to show the Berlin Wall as a wall? The Berlin Wall is not a wall. It is a seam. It is a seam that binds the world. The entire globe is encased in lead, riveted bolted stripped wired locked tight and sprocketed with spikes, like a giant mace. Inside is hollow. Occasionally this hot lead and steel casing expands or cracks in the heat of the sun, and along the seams, one of which is called the Berlin Wall, a space or crevice appears temporarily that is just big enough for a person to fall through. In a world divided in two the radical is free to choose one side or the other. That’s the radical choice. The halves of the world are like the two hemispheres of Mengleburg. My mother and father fell through an open seam one day and then the hemispheres pressed shut.

Daniel stood at the curb in Los Angeles International Airport waiting for the Low Dollar Rent-A-Car Courtesy Cab. Looking down on the traffic the fringe tops of scrawny palm trees. Here he was in Southern California. The air a strange drink of balmy poison. The sky hazy blue overhead, solid phlegm toward the horizon.

Daniel thought renting a low dollar rent-a-car was a good idea. The courtesy cab came along with its big low dollar sign on the roof and a young black guy got out and came around to the curb and looked for the customer.

“It’s me,” Daniel greeted him. “I called.”

“You? Just you?”

“Yeah.”

The black guy took off his hat and put it back on. “Well, no offense, but they’re not going to give you a car.”