Robert Coover - Public Burning

A secretary had staggered through the aisle on her way to the toilet, and three guys and a woman, shouting, “PANTY RAID!” , had tackled her and commenced to rip her skirt off. She’d tumbled hard into the empty seat next to me, giving me a jarring thump, but I’d hardly noticed — I could have been hurt, but I’d given little thought to the possibility of personal injury to myself, not because I was “being brave” but because such considerations just were not important in view of the larger issues involved. The whole nation is falling on its ass, I’d thought, my own career is atrophying, only a wild and utterly unprecedented action will save it, will save them, get things going again! But what?

And then, as they’d dragged the dazed woman out of the seat and spread-eagled her down at one end of the car, it had suddenly come to me what I had to do! I had to step in and change the script! It was dangerous, I knew, politically it could be the kiss of death, but it was an opportunity as well as a risk, and my philosophy had always been: don’t lean with the wind, don’t do what is politically expedient, do what your instinct tells you is right! As Uncle Sam had once lectured me, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will come round to him — and my instincts now told me, as down at the far end the secretary screamed, the crowd roared, and the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special shot underground and began to decelerate: You must go on up to Sing Sing! You’ve got to reach them! Promise them anything — first-class passage to Moscow, free time on TV, box seats at Ebbetts Field, a Cabinet post, anything! But get those confessions! Stop these executions! Don’t let that show go on tonight! Hurry!

In Penn Station, the others — hastily combing their hair, wiping away the blood and vomit — had jumped down off the train and rushed to follow the signs to the Times Square subway trains, but I’d ducked away, found a phone booth, called the Warden up at Sing Sing Prison: “Hello, Warden? This is Vice President, uh, Richard Nixon calling. Are the, the atom spies still up there?”

“Yes, sir. We’re keeping them here under guard until the last possible moment.”

“Good. I will, ah, be coming up to talk to them.”

“You will—?”

“I’m catching the next train.”

“I see…uh…is it clemency, Mr. Nixon?” he’d asked hopefully.

“A new offer,” I’d said.

“Boy, you fellows are really keeping the pressure on them, aren’t you?”

“Pressure?”

“Well, I mean, since you sent Bennett here a couple of weeks ago, you’ve hardly let up.”

“Bennett—?”

“The Bureau of Prisons Director—”

“Ah.” I didn’t know about this. “Well, we’ve, uh, got some new information. Listen, will it be difficult for me to get in?”

“It’s all cordoned off, but you should have no trouble passing through.”

“No, that’s true, but, uh, it’s important that I draw as little attention to myself as possible. You know, in case it, ah, all falls through…”

“Oh yes…”

“Could you arrange to pass me through under some other name?”

“Yes, I could do that. What…?”

“Eh… Greenleaf. Thomas Greenleaf.”

“Greenleaf. Like the poet…”

“That’s it.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll arrange it.”

On my way across the glass-domed concourse, I’d spotted a novelty shop, and it had occurred to me that maybe I ought to have a disguise, a beard maybe, like Greenleaf had in Bird-in-Hand . No beards in the shop, though — the best I’d been able to find was a cheap handlebar moustache. At the New York Central ticket window, the guy had asked me: “Sure you want on that train, bud? Just runnin’ it north to pick up the Albany crowd, wasn’t plannin’ to stop.” That’d be Tom Dewey and his lot — Jesus, what if I failed and had to suffer another one of these goddamn trainrides, and this time with Dewey’s bullyboys? Probably have that man-eating Great Dane with him, too. “Yes, hurry it up, I don’t want to miss it!” I sure as hell hoped I could pull this thing off.

Hustling toward the train, running all alone against the tide, I’d sniffed hastily at my armpits and wished this place was actually one of those Roman baths it’d been modeled after. It was hot and I’d felt sticky and ugly with sweat. Why do I always perspire so much? “Oh, you work hard at stirring up a good stew,” Uncle Sam once told me, “but people see you work, they see the sweat drop in the soup.” Well, couldn’t be helped, a man had to live with his liabilities. I needed a shave, too, a clean suit — I’d be playing out this hand looking more like Beetle Bailey than Steve Canyon, but it would have to do. Hadn’t eaten since breakfast, I’d realized. My stomach was churning, my mouth was dry, but I’d recognized these symptoms as the natural and healthy signs that my system was keyed up for battle. When a man has been through even a minor crisis, he learns not to worry when his muscles tense up, his breathing comes faster, his nerves tingle, his temper becomes short — in fact, far from worrying when this happens, he should worry when it does not. And I was also feeling an exhilaration, a sense of release and excitement. The worst, I’d reassured myself, was over. Making the decision to meet a crisis is far more difficult than the test itself. And I had made mine: I was changing trains for the future! I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I’d felt I’d found my form again. I understood the Rosenbergs as no one else in the world could understand them — not their families, their children, their co-conspirators, the FBI, not even each other. And out of that understanding I could provoke a truth for the world at large to gape at: namely, that nothing is predictable, anything can happen.

I’d reached the train and had stepped aboard, but I’d suddenly been shaken by a cold chill and had stepped back down: was I making a mistake? The train was completely empty, I’d be all alone. I could see others jumping down off the incoming trains and racing eagerly for the subways uptown, and I’d nearly lost heart. The American people are very volatile. They can be caught up emotionally with a big move, but if it fails, they can turn away just as fast. I always felt guilty whenever I deviated from the majority, and now I was bolting the executive party to boot. But what was the alternative? It was Hobson’s choice: certain failure, if perhaps less spectacular and final, up at Times Square — or a possible long-shot breakthrough up at Sing Sing, however hazardous. Maybe I should call Pat, I’d thought, maybe she could help me decide. But what would I say? Anyway, she’d probably left home already — for all I knew, she and the girls might be somewhere here in Penn Station right this minute! Couldn’t let her catch me like this, she’d never understand. Saint or no, she could be a real bitch at chewing people out, and right now I couldn’t take it, not in public anyway. She was like the good fairy who was all right in her place but wouldn’t leave you alone. Besides, the choice, the decision, I’d reminded myself, had already been taken. Had it not? Had it not? The whistle had screamed and I’d leapt aboard the empty train, thinking: Oh my God! they’ve left me alone to do it all!

Once we’d pulled out and started to roll north out of the city, I’d begun to feel better. It always helped to move. Connected me with time somehow, made me feel like things were in mesh. Like that time I came flying back from the Caribbean to find all those microfilms in Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin patch. Or my wedding day when Pat and I struck off for Mexico City, the whole fantastic world out in front of us, timeless, borderless, ripe and golden as the unspecified fortune sought by all of the poor but honest boys of the fairy tales. Motion — even random movements — made me feel closer to reality, closer to God. Not that I ever thought much about God — but I knew what I was talking about. Ask the man in the street and he’ll tell you that God is a ‘“Supreme Being.” But “being” is only the common side of God — his transcendent side is motion . Monks on hilltops know nothing about contemplation, all that’s just idle daydreaming. I knew a lot about that, too, I’d spent a lot of time flat out in the back yard staring off into infinity, but I knew you had to keep moving if you wanted to find out who you really were and what the world was all about. It was the real reason I’d always loved trains — not to escape west or east or any other direction like that, but to pull back from the illusions of fixed places so as to make the vital contact. If I’d had time for theology, I might have revolutionized the goddamn field.