E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

I decided that if I was hassled I would break the line and jump over the turnstile. Dale bought the tickets and I noticed significant looks between a guard and a ticket-taker. A man approached me. Dale headed him off and talked to him for a moment. The thing was I was a freak, yes, but he would take the responsibility. Our tickets were presented and like a foreigner going through customs I was accepted into Disneyland.

Linda and I and Dale walked briskly down Main Street USA. We passed a horse-drawn trolley, an old-time double-decker bus. We passed a penny arcade with Charlie Chaplin flipcard Movie-olas. Giant music boxes that make the sound of the whole band. We passed an apothecary. A red and white striped ice cream parlor. People sat smiling in beerless beer gardens. People filled the sidewalks and the street. People strolled past the bay-windowed shops. People stared at me.

“How do we find him?” I asked Linda.

“They’ll be in Tomorrowland,” she said. “That’s what he likes best.” In the Plaza at the end of Main Street we go through the gates of Tomorrowland. The whole world turns colorfully modern. Linda leads us to the Richfield Autopia.

People wait to board the little gas cars of the Richfield Autopia, a tracked ride that offers the illusion of steering to the person behind the wheel. Little snarling Autopia convertibles pile up at the freeway stop, drivers jump out, and drivers waiting their turns at assigned and numbered places jump in. Cars stream by, the air is filled with the droning of kicky toy engines. Linda points over the fence. There he is. With Sadie next to him, sitting straight and proud. In the toy car. She has a whole book of tickets. She hands another ticket up to the attendant and they don’t get out. Selig grips the wheel waiting for the new run to begin. His arms are bare, he wears an Hawaiian shirt. He is incredibly old. His chin moves up and down, his lips flap against each other, his mouth opens and closes and there flashes across his face a moment of astonishment, a moment of pugnacity, astonishment, pugnacity, in alternating palsies of the nerve. He is white-haired. His hands shake as they grip the wheel. A car bumps them from the back, a child laughs, their grey heads look up to heaven, and they lurch forward on the journey into Autopia.

My heart was beating wildly. I found myself needing more air than I had. I was aware that Dale and Linda were on either side of me and were watching me closely.

“I want to talk to him, Linda.”

“You still do?”

“Yes.”

She was very grim. In a few minutes Selig and Sadie came into view and pulled up again. Sadie prepared another ticket for the attendant and for a moment did not hear her daughter calling to her.

“Mama! Mama!”

But the car shot off again, Sadie looking back over her shoulder to see who had called her.

It was decided that Dale and I would retire to the shade of the Coca-Cola Tomorrowland Terrace while Linda waited for her parents and prepared them for meeting me. I felt as if we were making arrangements for a burial. At the Coca-Cola Terrace a rock band was just finishing a set. The rock musicians had short hair. They waved and their stage sank out of sight to the applause of the matrons.

“He’s senile,” Dale said to me as we sat waiting. “She tried to tell you that. There’s nothing left up here,” he said tapping his temple.

People stood on line for hamburgers and Coca-Cola. Embossed on the edges of my vision were all the errant tracks of the overhead rides and rocket spins, the sinking submarines and the swiveling cars; the starting and stopping of strollers, the ruthless paths of careening infants. I sat with my arms folded at the formica café table. In the middle of my eye, out in the sun the Mindish family was about to deploy itself. Linda beckoned and Dale went out to join them.

Sadie Mindish was being stubborn. She believed if she came any closer some terrible contamination, or sudden death, would befall her. She kept peering in my direction and then giving Linda hell. Linda spoke to Dale and Dale held the old lady’s hand and talked to her. Sadie pulled her hand away and waved her arm in my direction. The lawyer stood in front of her to block me from her vision.

Linda came toward the terrace leading her father by the elbow.

I sat across the orange formica café table from Dr. Selig Mindish. His daughter kneeled beside him asking him if he’d like a chocolate milk shake. Her knees were blanched in her sheer stockings.

“Chocolate milk shakes are his favorite,” she explained to me. Then in a louder voice she asked her father again if he wanted a milk shake.

I leaned forward with my hands on my knees so that he had to see me. The whites of his eyes were discolored. He needed a shave. Brown spots and moles had attacked his skin. His white hair was thinned out. His eyes were sunken in age sockets of fat and skin. His jaw moved up and down, his lips made the sound of a faucet dripping as they met and fell apart. But there was still in him the remnant of rude strength I remembered.

I said, “Hello, Mr. Mindish. I’m Daniel Isaacson. I’m Paul and Rochelle’s son. Danny?”

Linda was kneeling beside him holding his hand. He struggled to understand me. His head stirred like a turtle’s head coming out of its shell. He smiled and nodded. Then as he looked in my eyes he became gradually still, and even his facial palsy ceased, and he no longer smiled. I was sickened to see water well from the congested yellow corners of his eyes. Tears tracked down his face.

“Denny?”

“It’s all right, Papa,” Linda was saying. She patted his hand. She had begun to cry. “It’s all right, Papa.”

“It’s Denny?”

For one moment of recognition he was restored to life. In wonder he raised his large, clumsy hand and touched the side of my face. He found the back of my neck and pulled me forward and leaned toward me and touched the top of my head with his palsied lips.

Recently in Houston, Texas, surgeons implanted a new heart in the body of a fifty-four-year-old car salesman whose own heart was killing him. Two weeks after the surgery the salesman rejected his new heart. In Brooklyn a seventy-year-old grandmother divorcee with acute heart disease received the heart of a seventeen-year-old girl killed just hours before in an auto accident. The grandmother lived only three days before her body rejected the new heart. Heart rejection is a problem. The body attacks its own new heart as it would any foreign object. The heart is attacked by the body’s antibodies. It is destroyed. In Los Angeles a young woman who had been bedridden for years and whose natural color was blue received the heart of an eighteen-year-old basketball player just minutes after his death by cerebral hemorrhage. Two days later, pink and lovely among her pillows, she was smiling to photographers. In a week she was walking around. In six months she was married to a young doctor who had interned on her floor. Within the year she was dead of her heart’s rejection. Doctors still have a lot to learn about why we reject our hearts. Yes, doctors have a lot to learn. An old peddler from Delancey Street received a new heart at Mt. Sinai and spit it out minutes after regaining consciousness. That’s what we call heart ejection. A black postman in Pittsburgh, Ohio, received the heart of a white steelworker killed in a bar brawl. The black man died immediately. That’s what we call heart dejection. Medical Science has a lot to learn.

In Atlantic City, New Jersey, doctors put a new valve in a blood-pumping machine. The machine rejected its new valve and the man attached to the machine died.

There was some question about the signs. People were confused. Everyone was milling around and we were sitting on somebody’s old desk waiting to be told what to do. Mr. Fischer had dropped us off and said he’d be back. People were on their knees on the floor drawing signs with paintbrushes. It was an empty store. A man was sawing lengths of lumber and stacking them against the wall. Then there was a flurry of excitement at the door, someone cheered, and two people came in laughing and dropped stacks of big cardboard signs with pictures of my mother and father in the middle of the floor. Susan and I sat on the desk with our legs crossed, facing each other, trying to keep some sort of fortress against the scene. Every once in a while someone would come in and we’d know without looking that we were being appraised. In all that noise you could hear some things very clearly. Is that them? Those poor kids.