Robert Coover - Public Burning

I hadn’t reached this decision in the calmest of circumstances. In fact it was just when the horseplay aboard the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special had really started to peak that it had come to me what it was I had to do. But this was to be expected: in a critical situation it wasn’t supposed to be easy, and I often got my best ideas just when the going was toughest. We hadn’t crashed, as I’d feared, but we hadn’t slowed either — if anything, we’d started screaming along faster than ever, and the closer we’d drawn to New York, the sicker I’d become and the wilder the scene around me. The songs had got dirtier, the laughter louder, people were wandering around a lot, exchanging flasks and getting very playful with each other. A couple of young legal assistants up at the other end of the car had got into a scuffle that no one had seemed to want to break up. Girls were squealing giddily. A plump prissy clerk from the General Accounting Office, strutting fruitily up and down the aisle in crushed field hat, sunglasses, and corncob pipe, and singing “Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fly Away!”, had slipped on some spilt booze and crashed into the arms of TIME’S showman kid brother LIFE, launching what had showed every sign of becoming an outrageous romance. Anything to keep LIFE busy. The sonuvabitch had been snapping a lot of pictures, probably for one of those anthropological features, “LIFE Goes to a Party,” and the popping flashgun had been making me very goddamned edgy. The few drunks with any voice left were singing “Roll Your Leg Over”…

“If all little girls were atomical spies,

And I were the hot seat, I’d juice up their thighs!

Oh roll your leg over, oh roll your leg over,

Oh roll your leg over, the man in the moon!”

What was I to do? I had to think! I knew, if I was to avoid a no-win policy, I had to launch a counterattack — but how? and against whom? What I needed was an issue, just one good issue — when you’re in trouble like that, you’ve got to find an issue and concentrate on it , not yourself — I was back on my own one-yard line, it was time to throw a long one! time to punt and pray! Maybe that was it, maybe I ought to pray! My Quaker upbringing and religious experience in the Society of Friends had got me out of tough jams in the past, maybe they’d work for me now! But it had been too goddamn noisy. I couldn’t even think.

Young women had gone bouncing around the car as though being tossed by the violent rocking of the train, waggling their boobs and falling into guys’ laps, grabbing on to whatever they’d found there. Somehow they’d missed me. They hadn’t missed me with the food they were throwing around, though — nor with the bottles of pop they were shaking up and firing off at each other like…fire hoses…. Oh shit, I’m sorry about what I’ve done , I’d thought, feeling the tears spring on cue to my eyes. That was the play I’d learned to cry in, Bird-in-Hand . I’d played the old innkeeper — those lines had come rolling back to me now like an ancient judgment: I shall be sorry for it till the end of my life! Ah, that poor old fellow! I knew that coolness — or perhaps the better word for it was serenity — in battle was a product of faith, but this was more than I could take! And all because I believed in the American ideal of trying to do my best, trying harder, wanting to do good in the world, to build a structure of peace! Oh, I’ve behaved so as I ought to be ashamed, I know , I’d wept unprompted as an egg salad sandwich hit the window beside me and splattered into my lap— but this business ‘as pretty near broke me ‘ eart…!

“This Communist spy had showbizz aspirations,

Tonight she will be Broadway’s hottest sensation!

Oh roll your leg over, oh roll your leg over…!”

But wait a minute, wait a minute — what about all these plays, I’d wondered? We’d all been in them, even Eisenhower in high school at the turn of the century — he’d played the sheeny buffoon in a parody of The Merchant of Venice and stolen the show: “Dwight Eisenhower as Launcelot Gobbo, servant to Shylock,” the town newspaper had reported, “was the best amateur humorous character seen on the Abilene stage in this generation!” It was as though we’d all been given parts to play decades ago and were still acting them out on ever-widening stages. Tragic lover, young author, athlete, host, father, and businessman — I’d played them all and was playing them still…

“I wish little girls were all Jews from the slums,

And I were the Judge, I’d blister their bums!

Oh roll your leg over…!”

Yes, and a bum, too, one of my best roles, in George M. Cohan’s Tavern , our senior play — and a prosecuting attorney: when I laid my case before the American people and asked them to judge me, yea or nay, during the fund crisis last fall, I was in effect presenting them with the climax of Night of January 16th . But the important one — right now, anyway — was my lead in Bird-in-Hand! That play was about the conflict between political parties, and how love bridged the gap between ideologies. I hadn’t played the lover, of course, that role was long behind me, I’d been old Thomas Greenleaf, the girl’s father who stood in the way: “But look here, my girl, class is class, we’ve always known who was who and which hat fitted which head!” But as the villain, I was also the hero, the bridging took place in me, and I had ever since been the healer of rifts, the party unifier, the fundamentalist who could perceive the Flux, the hardliner who knew how to cry…

“I wish little girls were all free-loving Commies,

And I were Joe Stalin, I’d make them all mommies!

Oh roll your leg over, oh roll your leg over,

Oh roll your leg over, the man in the moon!”

And then I’d realized what it was that had been bothering me: that sense that everything happening was somehow inevitable, as though it had all been scripted out in advance. But bullshit! There were no scripts, no necessary patterns, no final scenes, there was just action , and then more action! Maybe in Russia History had a plot because one was being laid on, but not here— that was what freedom was all about! It was what Uncle Sam had been trying to tell me: Act — act in the living present! I’d been sitting around waiting for the sudden inspiration, the stroke of luck, the chance encounter, forgetting everything that life had taught me! Like that night I gave myself to Jesus in Los Angeles, I had to get up off my ass and move , I had to walk down that aisle — not this aisle, of course (I cautioned myself and sat back down), it was too full of crazy people — but the point was I had to make a commitment and act on it! Deeds, not words: that was Ike’s hewgag, but now, unless I wanted to break my back on the railroad track, I had to make it mine!

This, then, was my crisis: to accept what I already knew. That there was no author, no director, and the audience had no memories — they got reinvented every day! I’d thought: perhaps there is not even a War between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness! Perhaps we are all pretending! I’d been rather amazed at myself, having thoughts like these. Years of debate and adversary politics had schooled me toward a faith in denouement, and so in cause and consequence. The case history, the unfolding pattern, the rewards and punishments, the directed life. Yet what was History to me? I was never one to keep diaries or save old letters, school notes, or even old legal briefs, and I had won both sides of a debating question too often not to know what emptiness lay behind the so-called issues. It all served to confirm an old belief of mine: that all men contain all views, right and left, theistic and atheistic, legalistic and anarchical, monadic and pluralistic; and only an artificial — call it political — commitment to consistency makes them hold steadfast to singular positions. Yet why be consistent if the universe wasn’t? In a lawless universe, there was a certain power in consistency, of course— but there was also power in disruption! I’d let go of the armrests and, farting liberally, had begun to feel a lot better — though troubled at the same time with the uneasy feeling of having learned something truly dangerous, like the secret of the atom bomb — which was not a physical diagram or a chemical formula, but something like a hole in the spirit. The motive vacuum. And I’d understood at last the real meaning of the struggle against the Phantom: it was a war against the lie of purpose!