Robert Coover - Public Burning

I glanced coolly up at the clock: Wha—?! It still said seven minutes to eight! “Just…just let me say this last word!” I stammered. “Regardless of what happens, I–I am going to continue this fight! I am going to—.!”

“Great Beltashashur!” stormed Uncle Sam, lifting me up in the air by my collar, the dead weight of flag and pants dragging down my dangling feet. “One more last word outa you, mister, and I tell you what you’re gonna do: you’re gonna find your damfool sittin’-piece on ‘tuther side a the Great Divide! The thrill is gone, boy, every rainmaker becomes a bore at last, so zip your lip! In times like the presence, men shouldn’t utter nothin’ for which they wouldn’t willingly be responsible from here to eternity and back — you ain’t the only pebble on the beach! We got a couple burnin issues on the docket tonight, we gotta ‘sist a coupla flamin Reds, firebrands a the infernal Phantom, to see the light , and we don’t need no more of your hissin’ and blowin’ and generally discom-bobulatin’ splutterations!”

Well, I might have taken his warning to heart — true luck consists, after all, not in the cards, but in knowing just when to rise and go home, Green Island had taught me that and Uncle Sam himself had put it into words for me — if only he hadn’t blown at my shirttails (“What is that which the breeze,” he wondered aloud, “as it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?”), clucked his tongue ruefully, and with all the cameras dollying in, remarked wistfully to the mob at large: “Ah, vanished is the ancient splendor!”

“Wait a minute!” I hollered through the freshly unleashed crash of derisive laughter. “Wait just a goddamn minute!” The laughter subsided for a moment, and there was a moment of grinning silence, waiting to be filled. Even though I was still dangling by the scruff of my neck, I plunged right into it: “MY pants are down! YOUR pants are down! EVERYBODY’S pants in AMERICA are down! Everybody’ ‘s— EXCEPT HIS!” This stunned the Square. A deadly hush fell over everybody. That, I thought, is what you call putting a cap on it….

“You fool!” rasped Uncle Sam, dropping me back down on the stage. He glanced apprehensively up at the night sky, dark and starless. “You’re going too far!”

I was frightened (how had it got so dark so soon?), but I had passed the point of no return — it was like lurching offside in a football game and seeing the flag go down, yet having to complete the play just the same, no matter how punishing and futile: “The chips are down! If you’re not with us, you’re against us!” I cried. “And until the facts are in, a doubt will be raised!”

I had shocked everybody with my sudden challenge, but now, slowly, steadily, a chant sprang up and began to sweep through the Square: “PANTS DOWN! PANTS DOWN! PANTS DOWN!” Louder and louder it grew, spreading, swelling, more and more insistent, led now by some cheerleaders with big red “I’s” on their white sweaters (they moved slowly, dreamlike, as though in great awe of the occasion), while behind them drummers from some band thrummed a heavy augmenting beat. “PANTS DOWN! PANTS DOWN!”

“What mad project of national sooey-cide is this?” complained Uncle Sam, clearly taken aback by the spontaneous uprising — there was nothing more terrifying, I knew, than the aroused voice of the people. As they shouted, he looked slowly about him, as though at the threshold of some door or other, his blue gaze falling finally on me. A gentleness seemed to settle over him, a kind of sadness — I felt sorry for what I had done, and I wanted to take it back, but my heart was in my throat and I couldn’t speak — and then he seemed almost to grin. “Okay, son,” he said, or seemed to say, as he settled back on his heels: “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools as they say’ll learn in no other.”

I stood rooted to the stage floor, petrified with terror and anticipation, my eyes glued helplessly on his strong pale hands as they pushed back his sky blue swallowtail coat, unhooked his braces and unbuttoned his fly, gripped the waistband of his red-and-white striped pantaloons, and pushed them down.

There was a blinding flash of light, a simultaneous crack of ear-splitting thunder, and then—

BLACKOUT!!

There is panic and some scream: “UNCLE SAM IS DEAD!”

“DEAD!” comes the echoing scream, and terror rips through the hooded Square like black wildfire, a seething conflagration of anti-light, enucleating the body politic: “LEMME OUT A HERE!”

Out! the people want out! — but where is out? The emptiness at the edge has inundated the heart, the center is gone, the power cut, there’s no way in or out!

“IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD!”

“THE VICE PRESIDENT’S DONE IT NOW!”

“HOWLY JAYZUSS!”

It is utter madness to try to break out, worse madness to stand still — the communicants, following in the footsteps laid down by their heritage and so seized as ever by the American go-go-go mania, lurch violently in all directions at once, shackled by dread and drawers, flailing their arms about wildly, and so being wildly flailed by what, in this unnatural darkness, this nighttime of the people, seems like some mindless hundred-armed monster! like a black forest of disconnected centipede legs! OH MERCY!

“UNCLE SAM IS DEAD!”

“WHO CAN SAVE US NOW?”

And in the nighttime of the people, there is a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, just like in the old days, a million-mouthed moan more horrible than the roar of Behemoth! People cry out to God, to Christ, Ike, Con Ed, the Pope, to anyone who might listen, who might help, to the Forefathers, to the FBI, Bernard Baruch, loved ones here and gone, fearing even those they call upon, Wyatt Earp, the Statue of Liberty…

“MADRE MIA, WHOSE THIS IS THE SWEET LAND O’—HA-A-ALP!”

In the nighttime of the people, everything is moving and there is nothing to grab hold of. The very pavements seem to dissolve into an undulating quagmire, vortical and treacherous, dragging the screaming citizens by their bundled ankles into the deepest bowels of the earth! Or perhaps it is the violent restlessness of the bundled ankles that is disemboweling the earth — who, since none can see, can say?

“WHY IS IT SO DARK?”

“THEY’VE TURNED OFF THE WHOLE UNIVERSE!”

“WE SHOULD NEVER HAVE BROKE THE SOUND BARRIER!”

Imbalances are unchecked and human dignity is trampled upon in the nighttime of the people. Pageant figures crash into each other, their big heads bursting like ripe melons! Anxieties scurry like vermin, manhole covers rattle underfoot, plate-glass windows explode and splinter, and behind the shouts and moans and crashes and the dreadful ticking of what can only be the Doomsday Clock can be heard the hollow evil laughter of Uncle Sam’s worst nemesis since Nimrod Wildfire….

“OH NO!”

“IT’S THE PHANTOM!”

“THE PHANTOM’S KILLT UNCLE SAM!”

“HE’S STOLE THE LIGHT!”

“HE’S FREED THE SPIES!”

“AND NOW—!”

“—HE’S AFTER US!”

Fears, in the nighttime of the people, seem almost to materialize, to rise like palpable fog from the stricken hearts of the multitude and coil into unseen but damply felt shapes, nebulous, capricious, but no less manifest than destiny itself was in a sunnier time: fears of the Russian Bolsheviks, the Chinese Reds, of cabalists and parlor pinks, Gooks, Nips, Huns and Huks, fears of Hottentots and Snollygosters, MIGs and Mau Maus, existentialists, cancer, Pusan whores and tortured truths!