Robert Coover - Public Burning

“YIKES! ONE OF ’EM’S GOT ME!”

“TAKE THAT, YOU SONUVABITCH!”

“I CAN’T BREATHE!”

“AA-AR-RGH!”

In the nighttime, thus, the people wrestle with their fears and with each other, not knowing whether what they’ve got hold of is a diseased idea of the Marxist Virus, Nigger Nate’s scrotum, the mess in Washington, or their own grandmother! Principally it is their own sudden and unprecedented impotence that terrorizes them, but sometimes this fear feels like the dry rot of corruption and Communism, other times it’s got the texture of a boxcar of pussyfooters or the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!

“YECC–CH! IT STINKS!”

“IT’S ALL HAIRY!”

“IT’S GOT A MOUSTACHE!”

They feel themselves swarmed about by mousy little engineers, scabbed sheep, dirty books, and goon squads, but when they lash out, try to get a handle on what’s tormenting them, the emanations dissolve and mutate, leaving them with nothing more than a numinous armload of the March of Time, heavy water up the snoot, and a fistful of torn Jell-O boxes and sweaty pubic hair….

“MY GOD! IT’S A CREEPING SOCIALIST!”

“A FIVE PERCENTER!”

“THE FIFTH COLUMN!”

“YEE-EEEE-K!”

“THE VOICE FROM THE SEWER!”

“IT MUST BE ALGER HISS!”

“THE ANTICHRIST!”

“HOLY SMOKE!”

“BRING BACK THE LIGHT, LORD!”

“LIGHT!”

But the light does not return, and in the ever deepening nighttime of the people, the shapes of their fear are drawn from ever deepening wells, roiling visions of the imminent imbalance of terror commingling now with shades of half-forgotten nightmares from all their childhoods: V-2s and gas ovens and kamikazes, the hurricane that tore through Overlord, the holocaust at the Cocoanut Grove, gremlins and goose-steppers, malaria, unfaithful wives, starvation at Guadalcanal, TJ-boat wolfpacks and Jap snipers and warplanes over Pearl Harbor, vampires and striking workers, hoboes, infantile paralysis, bread lines, bank failures, mortgage foreclosures and dust storms, King Kong and Scarface Al, Wobblies, werewolves, anarchists, Bolsheviks and bootleggers, Filipino guerrillas and Mexican bandidos, the Tweed Ring, earth tremors, the Cross of Gold! Down they spiral into irrational panic, as upward swirl the spooks of terrors past! Chinafyers! Assassins! Jim Crow! The Wild Bunch! Robber barons and longhorns! Black Jack Ketchum, Butcher Weyler, and Rattlesnake Dick! Du Bois! Debs! The Daltons and Darwin and the lone pray-ree! Amelia Bloomer! Maria Monk! The Grangers and Youngers and Molly Maguires! Flaming crosses! Hookworm! Apaches! Carpetbaggers! Booth and Buckshot and Billy the Kid! Sherman’s Bummers! Amputation! Bleeding Kansas! Dead Man’s Gap and yellow fever! Humboldt Desert! The Alamo!

“I REMEMBER!”

“IT’S SANTY ANNY!”

“OH LORD, THEY’RE ALL AROUND US!”

“ABOLITIONISTS!”

“COMANCHES!”

“I CAIN’T HOLD ON!”

“REDCOATS!”

“THEY’RE BURNING WASHINGTON!”

“LOOK OUT!”

The shouts of the people spark and crackle in the night air as though to suggest that their own panic might somehow save them, but the sparks give off a lightless light like a child’s Fourth of July tin pinwheel, confusing them more than illuminating them, stinging their eyes, pricking their skin, and spiraling them ever deeper into the dark pit of memories and voices in their minds, like an old man driven in his dreams to suffer yet again the terrors of his boyhood passage, the night in the forest, the first wounds, the pangs of birth, the mysterious emptiness beyond conception. Their skin crawls at the chill slithering embrace of spectral Lobsterbacks and Coercive Acts, darkling waters, smallpox, cold-blooded Hessians, and lice! The pitch-black forest of flailing limbs in which they find themselves is alive with dragoons and grenadiers, witches and wolves, hunger, quitrents, mutineers, mastodons, and — obscene and naked, daub’d with various Paints — Hell’s swarthy Allies dire, with Visage foul, and horrid awful Grin! their primeval enemy, the bloody Savages, like Fiends of Hell, the very image of the Prince of Darkness—

“FLAMING EYES!”

“FACE AS BLACK AS SOOT!”

“A PAIR OF MIGHTY HORNS—“

“—AND CLOVEN FOOT!”

“LEAPIN’ LIZARDS!”

“WE’LL ALL BE KILLT!”

“EEEEY AA-AA-AHH!”

Meanwhile, over at the Martin Beck, a few candles have been lit and the cast of The Crucible is carrying on as usual, playing tonight to an audience of one: the author, slumped gloomily in the back row all by himself, his long legs stretched out over the seat in front of him, no doubt wishing he might address that mob of drunken lunatics outside in the words his character Proctor used a little while ago to the serving girl Mary Warren, discoverer of witches “come,” as she said, “to see the great doings in the world”: “I’ll show you a great doin’ on your arse one of these days!” Ah well: art…not as lethal as one might hope…. Onstage now, Elizabeth, Proctor’s wife, has just learned from Mary (“The Devil’s loose in Salem, Mr. Proctor; we must discover where he’s hiding!”) that she has herself been “somewhat mentioned” in court, and when Mary has gone, she says quietly to no one in particular: “Oh, the noose, the noose is up!” Her husband, stubbornly optimistic, disagrees, but he is wrong, and deep down, for all the brave face they put on it, they both know it. It is the Deputy-Governor Danforth who has the truth (in effect, he owns it): “We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealments!” Yes, mister, there is a prodigious guilt in the country — the town waits at the scaffold, and who weeps for these weeps for corruption! The author sighs unhappily, well aware that it was not easy for these people, the people of Salem; for the edge of the terrible wilderness was close by, full of mystery, dark and threatening, the Devil’s last preserve, as they called it, his home base and the citadel of his final stand: to the best of their knowledge, the American forest, just over their shoulders and stretching endlessly west, was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God. Which, he reflects — folding his hands solemnly before his face and wishing that, just for tonight, he might change the ending of his play (what is the power of the author, for Chrissake, if even this is denied him?) — is still true….

“STOP!”

“THEY’RE ALL OVER ME! I CAN’T GIT ’EM OFF!”

“N O-O-OO!”

“LOOK OUT, IT’S — GURGGHH!”

Whoo, it’s wilder than ever outside in Hell’s Kitchen — which now the jammed-up populace, their Breasts enrag’d still with a mighty Phrensy, take variously to be Valley Forge, Little Bighorn, Transylvania, or Nightmare Alley: the spectral presences, curling up from the bowels of the denuded celebrants like some kind of unspeakable parody of the current baby boom, have proliferated monstrously, assuming invisible but apprehensible shapes more frightening than any that have come before — for the people in their nighttime have passed through their conventional terrors and discovered that which they fear most: each other! Amid a crescendo of ticking clocks, mad diabolical laughter, shattering glass, and recurring notes of impending doo-oom, the eidola of squatters and gooney birds, frat rats and dirt farmers, puritans, populists, and brainwashed vets rise now to intermingle with those of coffinmakers and craven cowards, desperadoes and draft dodgers! What is truth? What is perversity? In the nighttime of the people it’s all one! Terrible the grim phantasms of terrorists and traitors, more terrible yet — because beloved, or thought to be — those of founding fathers, trustbusters, first ladies, and village blacksmiths! No longer able even to cry out for help (for to whom can they now cry in such utter dissolution?), the people fall about in sweaty disarray, bodies slapping frightened bodies, chairs scraping and clattering, cameras crashing, as above and betwixt them twist the swollen instable emanations of Jacobins and Rotarians, damyankees, isolationists, abstract painters, Klansmen, foxhole atheists, Two-Seed-in-Spirit Predestinarians, hanging judges and traveling salesmen! There’s Ethan Allen! Black Bart! Tom Swift! Bird and Duke and Sitting Bull! Sergeant York! Punjab! Sojourner Truth and Bet-a-Million Gates! And all as big as skyscrapers and scary as hell! Lynched Negroes, still dangling hugely from their ropes like strange bloated fruit, entwine with the gigantic ghosts of radiated Japs and bushwhacked settlers! Oh my God, it’s awful! The people thrash about helplessly amid such horrors, their manifold shrieks of terror modulating into a single eerie moan, as around them the restless shades of Joe Hill and Glenn Miller wind and weave grotesquely through those of Sacco and Valentino, Dillinger, Slovik, and Stonewall Jackson!