Robert Coover - Public Burning

“Ah, what horrid scene is this, which restless, roving fancy, or something of an higher nature, presents to me; and so chills my blood! Do I see motly armies and painted Salvages spreading desolation thro’ the land, dispossessing the free-born of the inheritance received from their forefathers, this goodly patrimony ravished from them by those who never knew what property was, except by seizing that of others for an insatiable Lord — and here, where Satan’s seat was —!” Thus might the shade of the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew, Poet and Patriot, rightly cry were he to peer down through the darkness with X-ray eyes upon the people locked in this blind desperate battle with their own worst fears and with each other, limbs entangled and hair on end, mouths stretched for screaming and perhaps in fact screaming, no longer distinguishable from one another as Sinclair Weeks here, Patti Page there, but all folded into a single mindless seething mass, jerking and pitching as though being shot through with erratic bursts of high-voltage current. He would discover not so much a violent disorder below him as a kind of frenzied stasis, much like a microscopic pool of excited amoebae, atoms let loose in a walled void, bingo balls in a whirling basket, and so a movement at once fervid and infinitely varied, yet at the same time in a random way rhythmic and predictable, and so imitative of the contained agitation of the universe.

And inevitably, in all this hysterical jangling around, flesh is finding flesh, mouths mouths, heat heat, and the juices, as Satchel Paige would say, is flowin’. The people are no less beset with confusion and panic, horrendous anguish and pain, like to the throes of travail, but they are also suddenly hot as firecrackers — or maybe not so suddenly, maybe it’s just the culmination of that strange randy unease they’ve been feeling all day, ever since waking this morning in their several states of suspended excitation. Now, plunged into a nighttime far deeper than that from which this morning they awoke (or thought they did), the people seek — with distraught hearts and agitated loins — a final connection, a kind of ultimate ingathering, a tribal implosion, that will either release them from this infinite darkness and doleful sorrow or obliterate them once and for all and end their misery. “What indignity is yonder offered to the matrons! and here, to the virgins! O dishonest! profane! execrable sight!” It is astounding to consider how many orifices, large and small, and how many complementary protuberances, soft and rigid, the human body possesses, all the more so when that number is raised to the nth power by jamming thousands of such bodies several layers deep into a confined space and letting everything hang out! Nor in such a wet and wretched nighttime are the people — deprived virtually of every sense but one, frantically giving and receiving with all their gaps and appurtenances, and their minds frozen with delirium, booze, terror, and the seizure of imminent orgasm — limited to other people: no, it’s an all-out strategic exchange, and any animal, vegetable, artifact, or other surface irregularity will do! The massa’s gone away, and they are really crackin’ corn! “Where! in what region! in what world am I! Is this imagination (its own busy tormentor)? Or is it something more divine? I will not, I cannot believe ‘tis prophetic vision; or that God has so far abandoned us—!”

“WAIT!”

“VOTS DOT—?”

“NOTHIN’ OUT THERE, BROTHER!”

“ITS THE END!”

“MY GOD, I’M ABOUT TO—!”

“NO. LOOK—!”

“AH—!!”

“WHA—?!”

“THRO’ THE MISTS OF THE DEEP—!”

“OH!”

“SAY, I CAN SEE!”

“I’LL BE DURNED!”

“IT’S A LIGHT!”

“A LIGHT IN THE WEST!”

“THERE IT IS!”

“I’LL BE BLESSED!”

“BUT WHAT…?’”

“IT’S A FLYING SAUCER!”

“IT’S A BOID!”

“ISSA PLENN!”

“NO! ITS…IT’S UNCLE SAM!”

Yes, it is Uncle Sam: as dawn’s early light will pierce the deepest of sleeps, so he comes now, that mighty Yankee Peddler, boring an incandescent hole through the black western sky on his return, not from the netherworld, but back from the ridge where the West commences: Yucca Flat, Nevada! — and bearing in his lean gnarled hands a new birth of freedom, a white-hot kernel of manifest destiny: a spark from the sacred flame! Onward he comes, scorching the dropped curtain of night like one of those paper horse-race games torched by the lit tips of cigarettes, leaving a glowing trail behind him which even as it turns to ash seems to let a little light leak through — or perhaps this is an illusion, an afterimage burned not into the sky but into the light-starved retinae of the people wallowing in their nighttime in the Square! Certainly the shock is there, the searing pain — it’s one thing to sing about seeing the glory, fellow saints, another actually to have the fucking stuff fry your eyeballs! For a moment Uncle Sam seems to hover flickeringly above them, his craggy features lit eerily from beneath by the fiery glimmer in his cupped hands, his coattails flapping blackly behind him — and then he plummets suddenly down upon them like a falling star! The people, interrupted in the mind-shattering throes of what might have been some ultimate orgasmic fusion, are as yet unable to cope with this new information — they cry out, shield their eyes, and fall back in slippery confusion, tumbling out of some linkages and into others, but generally shrinking back into their old isolate and terrified selves. When they open their eyes again, it is to see their Star-Spangled Superhero standing stark and solemn above them on the Death House stage, cradling freedom’s holy light in his outstretched hands and gazing down upon them with glittering eyes sunk in deeply shadowed sockets — weird this light he holds: fierce enough to blind if stared at directly, yet casting no radiance, illuminating nothing except Uncle Sam’s hands and face, as though virtually all its light were bent in upon itself! They can sense the tall buildings rearing up over them, the darkened marquees trembling perilously on their thin chains, the statues on the Bond clothing store undraped and tilting dangerously toward each other in a wild monumental grope, horrifically reminiscent of the Rosenbergs’ famous moment of unfettered passion up at Sing Sing, but they can see nothing, nothing except the ghastly deep-shadowed pallor of Uncle Sam’s gaunt face and the ball of fire in his hands. His mouth opens: they gasp and freeze…!

“In nomine Domini,” intones Uncle Sam gravely in the sudden breathless silence, “cornbread and hominy, intery mintery cutery corn! do you like jelly, punch in the belly, tumblin tumbleweeds, tattered and torn! whisko bango poker my stick, een teen tuther futher, sother lother dick! sui filiiquery nickery neck, ite ad crackabone hallibone heck! silence in the courtroom, the judge wants to spit, allie-allie-in-free: you — are — IT!”

And he slowly opens his great hands and releases the dazzling fireball!

“Philosophers have explained the world,” he cries, “it is necessary to CHANGE the world! So hang on to your hats, folks, cause jist as that old astronomicalizin Prophet Nate Ames soothsaid nigh onto two hundred years ago, the Coelestial Light directed here by the Finger of God is gonna drive out the long! long! Night of Heathenish Darkness! I shit you not! stand back! it’s the NEW New Enlightenment!”

The little orb of blinding light hovers for a moment on the palms of his hands, slowly expanding, pulsating like a living heart, so bright that even the people with their eyes squeezed shut see it there — then suddenly it flashes outward, cutting through the Square like a sheet of sun, inundating the streets and all the city and nation and oceans beyond with glaring light, with white heat, like some kind of super flashbulb, as suddenly contracts back in on itself, dragging people to their heads, knees, and elbows, and whipping them as in an orange whirlwind toward the stage, and then — WHOOSH! — the darkness lifts up off the Square like a great mushroom cloud, rising high into the lightening sky and sucking all the fears and phantasms of the people’s nighttime up with it — and a lot of the people as well, for a foot or two anyway, before dropping them back on the sweaty pavements in an exhausted bare-bottomed heap. “Whoopee!” hollers Uncle Sam gleefully, his blue coattails rising momentarily with the cloud and snapping and cracking fiercely over his head in the purifying storm: “This here light shall go clean up to Heaven — it’ll throw its beams beyond the waves and shine in the darkness there, it’ll aivaken desires and produce revvylutions and overturnin’s until the world is free like what ice are! There’s nothin’ left for us to do but to take ’em all and, in the words of Billy McKinley, uplift and civvylize and otherwise hawg-and-pester ’em till o’er the ramparts we watch they ain’t nothin’ but congenial Christians, empty shoppin’ baskets, and plentya parkin’ space! I chant the new empire, and when we Yankees has once sot our souls upon a thing, we always have it, so harness my zebras, gift of the Nubian King, boys: all I ask is a free field and no favor and a mite less indecent exposure! And somebody separate that elephant and jackass there! what’re they doin’? That’s plumb disgustin’!”