Robert Coover - Public Burning

But they weren’t even listening. I stuffed my hand absently in my jacket pocket, reminded by the Lincoln quotes of my successful Checkers ploy (“…here it is — I jotted it down — let me read the notes…”), and felt a postcard there. It was the drowning-man syndrome all over again, but I fished it out just the same, trying to look as mysterious as I could. It was the postcard I’d grabbed off that rack in Ossining. It said HELLO FROM SING SING! across the top and showed two cartoon cops standing beside an electric chair with a privy hole and a raised toilet lid, one of them explaining to the other: “He fell through.” I stared gloomily down that black hole, thinking: the hell with it, it isn’t worth it. All this jackassery: I’d Had Enough, Stassen could have it. Pat was no longer praying, I noticed, if that was what she had been doing before. She wasn’t laughing like all the others either, but I wasn’t necessarily encouraged by that. She was just looking in my direction, her eyes crinkled up sadly and gazing as though at some point just behind my loft ear, her thin white hands twitching nervously in her lap, picking at each other. I remembered how Ethel’s big dark eyes had peered so deeply, so directly, so trustingly into mine — almost as though probing my very soul; you could almost say, rediscovering it — as she’d said: “I envy you your power, Richard. Your majesty. You are a great man!” I felt myself being drawn back into her impassioned life-giving embrace, where everything seemed possible once more, and everything possible seemed good. “I have faith in you, Richard! You will unite the nation and bring peace to mankind…!” Yes, faith — not loyalty, but faith! That’s what I needed! Not a dutiful peck on the cheeks, but full firm committed lips pressed on mine, not tight jittery haunches, but a soft yielding bottom, not thin secretive stone-cold fingers, but a warm hand tearing at my hair, kneading my—

I shook it off. Christ, I was getting excited again. I pulled my shirttail down in front and raised my arms (this did not quite work), looking for something meanwhile to cover myself with. What I saw was Uncle Sam looking like he’d just swallowed his corncob pipe and was trying to cough it up again. He was pointing frantically up at the Times Tower, whore under the time and weather clock, which told me it was nearly ten minutes to eight and eighty degrees (whoo! it felt like twice that at least!), the news getting flashed to the world was: LET US STRIVE ON TO FINISH THE WORK WE ARE IN…! Well, I thought, I can’t be too far off the track. “The issue at stake,” I cried, turning back to the mob in the Square, adopting a scowl of deadly earnestness, and recalling for some reason the night I mounted a table at the Senior Beer Bust at Duke and gave a deadpan parody of a talk on Social Insecurity (what had I said? was there something I could use?)— “The issue at stake, to put it starkly, is this: whose hand —” and here I thrust out my hand in a gesture I knew was very effective, “— whose hand will write the next several chapters of human history?” And then I saw for the first time the blood on my hand: my God, there was blood all over it! from my ass! it was coming from my ass! Oh Jesus! “Let’s — let’s not deceive ourselves!” I gasped, really frightened now: what was happening to me? “The heat is on! We have the fight of our lives on our hands! We already have seen bloodletting and…and there’ll be some more blood sp-spilled before it’s over!” No, not blood: lipstick! Oh shit, I thought, as I mopped the sweat from my brow and plunged helplessly on: “ I know that this is not the last of the smears!” Needless to say, I had just — as though compulsively — wiped the sweat from my face with my lipsticked hand, a fucking mess, but I couldn’t stop myself… “I was warned that if I continued to attack the Communists and crooks in this country they would continue to smear me, and in spite of my explanation tonight, other smears will be made!” Ah, it isn’t what the facts are but what they appear to be that counts when you are under fire, I thought, as the laughter cascaded around me. Some puffy-eyed clown was trying to crawl up on the stage in front of me…familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Out of some gangster movie maybe. Like this whole goddamned mob. I realized that out in all that roiling hysteria there was one static point of reference that my eye kept coming back to: an old bearded bum standing motionless in one of the VIP aisles in a floppy hat and tattered old overcoat, his arms out at his sides like a cheap stuffed doll. A teddy bear. His pinprick eyes, not quite real, and shiny beet-red cheeks gave the impression that he’d been crying. He stood there as though planted, old boots driven into the pavement, like a fat scarecrow…or a message. The turmoil in the square raged around him, but the old bum was untouched by it. I knew him. I’d seen him in my own mirror. I felt myself being pulled back aboard the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special , rocketing north toward all those grand discoveries — about life, about myself — intimations of freedom from the Death House of politics and propriety, the possibility of a fresh start, a new life of love and adventure, instead of all this pretending…and I thought for a moment that maybe I was only dreaming, that in a minute I’d wake up again on the VIP train (and this time I’d join in, I thought, I wouldn’t hold back), or back in my office, at home, even back at Dress-Up Day at Whittier High School with Ola — but then something— whick! — stung me on my left ball, and as I clutched my nuts and doubled away in pain, only to take another one— swack! — on my poor overabused butt, I knew I was where I’d always been: front and center on the stage of human history, never mind how silly or brutalizing, a victim of my own genius and God-given resources, and nowhere to go but on…and on and on…

Well, by God, I could and I would. I think of history in terms of tragedy — but not my own. I saw Uncle Sam, his pipe coughed up at last, the stem turned into a peashooter, striding forward to cut me off, but I didn’t give him a chance. Taking my cue from the flag-leafed Bond clothing store statues I’d just glimpsed rearing chalkily above me, a bronze shield between them with the legend EXCELSIOR, I coldly turned my other cheek and, hopping to the other side of the stage, snatched the first piece of bunting I could reach (which turned out to be a flag actually, the first one, circle of thirteen stars), wrapped myself in it, and then whirled with a vengeance (which was not as easy as it sounds, hobbled as I was: I had to face them cross-legged in the end, nearly lost it again before I’d even got started) on this mindless boozed-up but malleable rabble: “My fellow Americans!” Uncle Sam stopped short, eyeing me curiously. Herb Brownell, slipping out from behind the wings with his program notes, blinked and stepped back in again, elbowing Judge Kaufman in the right eye. The Warden was back there, too, I noticed, muttering something in the ear of the skullcapped Prison Chaplain and chewing bemusedly on his long black cigar — and now out front I discovered my old man, sitting on the edge of his chair, glowering intently, just as he used to do at all my school debates — my biggest thrill in those years was to see the light in his eyes when I destroyed my opponents, and by God I was not going to let him down now. Or Mom either, seated quietly beside him, hands folded in her lap, a goddamn saint. “We live in an age of anarchy!” The mob, which had been applauding itself drunkenly, now broke into laughter again, but there were cheers and whistles as well. Let them laugh, I thought. This is a generation that wants to laugh, a generation that wants to be entertained, thanks to the movies, TV — a sea of passivity, but so much the better for us swimmers. I stared boldly out at them, mob and cameras alike, feeling very much in control of things once more, wiser than I knew…. “We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years!”