Robert Coover - Public Burning

The sun is settling on the tips of the skyscrapers, the temperature crests at 85 degrees and out on the periphery begins to drop, the humidity begins to rise: out at the edges, one can feel the chill spread of shadows — the people, now arriving by the tens of thousands, press forward, into Times Square, into the center where it’s still warming up. Loudspeakers are turned on and tested out, and a bop-talking disk jockey from California is invited to emcee an hour or so of pop records: Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Ray, Harry Belafonte…“Hey, zorch, man!” his hepcat fans holler — which is fuzzbeard lingo for the “colossal!” of their folks’ generation — and their bodies start to swing and bounce, sending massive ripples through the tightening crowd like the wind blowing across Kansas wheat fields. Some weirdos turn up, Frisco fans of the deejay, with green hair and purple lipstick; they get absorbed (this place can absorb anything) but not imitated.

In between numbers, the disk jockey goes down into the mob with his “raving microphone” to interview dignitaries, zanies, and ordinary mortals against a background of teen-age screams, and to conduct a straw poll on which of the two spies should be burned first. Of the first thousand votes cast, 438 are for Julius, 417 for Ethel, but there are also a number of votes for Mayor Impellitteri, the Dragon Lady, Jackie Robinson, Alger Hiss, Kilroy, Syngman Rhee, Justice Douglas, and Clifton Fadiman, among others, and including one vote each for Mr. and Mrs. Richard Nixon and two for Harold Stassen. Bobo Olson and Paddy Young, who follow the Rosenbergs on the program tonight with a fifteen-round middleweight-championship fight, are intercepted ducking into Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant for some pre-bout sirloins: they vote sportingly for each other.

Out back, poking around in Dempsey’s garbage, is an old panhandler who has been working this area since it was Indian territory, long enough certainly to know that though the meat’s better over at Al and Dick’s Steak House, it’s also picked closer to the bone — lot easier to get a full meal back of Dempsey’s. This old man is, in his way, as good as a Ford or a Rockefeller at picking up the country’s loose change, though he’s been slipping a bit since the turn of the century. Now, as he makes his addled way down Broadway, gumming a T-bone, he encounters a gathering of millions. He blinks, casts a bleary eye at the clock over the Square, mops his brow in disbelief, then shrugs, pockets the bone, and hobbles hastily back to his cellar digs for his cap and overcoat.

Below the streets meanwhile in the Times Square subway station, now closed off to ordinary traffic and guarded by G-men, T-men, and city vice-squad detectives, the first trainloads of VIPs are beginning to pull in. The earliest to arrive are first-term Congressmen and their wives, minor administration officials, federal judges from outlying districts, pro-statehood delegations from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Formosa, and Alaska, and (in the line of duty) the Advisory Board on Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments, but others of higher rank are not far behind. Handshaking and elbow-tugging, they circulate through the vast undergound complex, doing their best to impress each other and learn a few more names. Special bars have been set up for them, and they dip in cautiously, trying not to let the heat beneath the street and the gathering excitement make them soak it up too fast.

Some slip topside to peek out from backstage at the crowds rapidly filling the Square — still hours to go, and already the crush and jostle is terrific! They’d like to sneak out a minute and visit some of Walt’s sideshows, but they’re afraid they might not be able to make it back through the jam to their special reserved seats in the VIP section in time for the main proceedings. It’s going to be a big show all right — there are bands, choirs, preachers milling about backstage, the Pentagon Patriots have arrived and are unpacking their instruments, Gene Autry is tuning up and Nelson Eddy is gargling with lemon water — but what they all see when they look out is that bare twilit stage and the antique Rube Goldberg contraption bolted to the middle of it. The chair. Two people will sit there tonight and die. Without them, none of this would be possible. Those two are to the program what the soul is to the body: the inner mechanism that sums it up and gives it meaning. In the middle of the middle of the Western World stands this empty chair: and only the Rosenbergs can fill this emptiness. Not the Nazi war criminals, not the disloyal union agitators or the Reader’s Digest Murderers, not even the grisly necrophile John Reginald Halliday Christie can sit that seat tonight. For the Rosenbergs have done what none, not even these, may dream to do. They have denied Uncle Sam, defied the entire Legion of Superheroes, embraced the Phantom, cast his nefarious spell upon the innocent, and for him have wrested from the Sons of Light their most sacred secret: the transmutation of the elements. This is no mere theft, no common betrayal, and “plain, deliberate, contemplated murder,” as young Judge Kaufman has said, “is dwarfed in magnitude” beside their crime — for they have sought nothing less than the ultimate impotency of Uncle Sam!

Yet if one is filled with dread and loathing, he is also filled with awe. They have done something that has changed the world. Which of these petty politicians peeking out from backstage, listening to Georgia Gibbs sing “Kiss of Fire” over the p.a. system, has not dreamed of doing as much? But feared the price? The Rosenbergs have done it. They have propelled themselves toward the center with such ferocity that now not even Uncle Sam could prevent their immolation, and by doing so they seem for a moment to have brought History itself alive — perhaps by the very threat of ending it! Even their beggarly childhood on the Lower East Side, their clumsy romance, their abandoned children, their depressing withdrawn lives in the enemy’s service, acquire suddenly monstrous proportions, as if, by their treachery, new and appalling archetypes have been called into existence to replace the comforting commonplaces of “Stella Dallas” and “Young Widder Brown” being broadcast this afternoon across the nation on NBC radio. Everything they have touched seems suffused now with a strange dark power: this book or habit, that console table, this wristwatch. For years they kept on a shelf a coin-collection can labeled SAVE A SPANISH REPUBLICAN CHILD. Which child is that, and saved for whom? Replicas of this can are being sold by the dozens out there in the Square this afternoon, but there’s no magic in them — where is the original, they all wonder, what its force? Even Julius’s Talmudic name “Jonah,” Ethel’s mysterious “Madame” at the Carnegie Hall Studios, the inverted links with America’s historic heritage in the location — Monroe Street, Knickerbocker Village — of their one-bedroom flat on the Lower East Side seem to hint at uncracked codes, unpenetrated conspiracies.

The disk jockey breaks for the five-o’clock news: Still no confessions. The Rosenbergs are playing it right down to the wire. The Phantom is said to be active in Milan and Genoa, Paris, London, and Teheran, but all this is coming to seem very remote. No breakthroughs in Korea or Berlin — if anything, the situations are worsening — and in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a housewife has been injured by a stray shell from an atomic cannon while lying at home in her own bed. Zap. Disquieting, but these frenzied last-gasp activities of the Phantom are to be expected as the hour of the executions draws near. Up in Queens, a forty-year-old window cleaner drops out of his safety belt to his death, there are floods in Bombay, somebody gets shot in Chicago. Weather forecast: a heat wave is predicted. No doubt.