Robert Coover - Public Burning

“Dick!” Pat called from the foot of the stairs. The maid had the sweeper going in the living room, and I could smell bacon frying on the stove in the kitchen. So much for corned beef hash. “Your car’s here!”

“What—!” I glanced at my watch: holy shit! nearly eight! I was going to be late for the goddamn Cabinet meeting! I scrubbed my face angrily — it smarted where I’d hit the wall last night, but I deserved it for so much lollygagging — and applied talcum and deodorant, hobbled into the bedroom for a fresh white shirt, muttering irritably under by breath. I was ordinarily a very punctual man: down to breakfast every morning by seven, fruit, toast, a cup of coffee with a half teaspoon of sugar and a touch of cream, break up the squabbles between the girls, check the newspapers and thumb through the Congressional Record , get picked up by John just before eight, read The New York Times on the way in, and be at work in my office before most of my staff turned up. That I was nearly an hour behind this morning was yet another sign of how disturbed I was by this damned thing— I’ve got to get to the office , I thought with some anxiety, rushing stiff-legged down the stairs, knotting my tie on the run, folding a white handkerchief for my breast pocket, tripping over Julie’s doll Tiny, and taking the last of the stairs three at a time, and clean up that mess!

The Friday-morning commuters into the center gather, as is their ancient custom, before their great civic monument, The New York Times , there to commune with the latest transactions of the Spirit of History as made manifest in all the words and deeds of living and dying men fit to print. On great slabs of stone, lead, and zinc, words and pictures appear and disappear, different ones every day, different yet somehow reassuringly familiar. It is as though — the slabs seem to tell us — a certain constancy of purpose motivates the Spirit, even when perverse, bringing a kind of fragile episodic continuity to the daily debris of human enterprise, a “handle” as they say on the Great White Way, though it’s not certain whether this is thanks to the Spirit or to The New York Times’s monumental sign language. TURKS URGE GREEKS / TO RUSH BALKAN TIE. PANAMA AND FRANK / SEE KAYE ON FILM. FAVORITISM REFUTED / IN WESTERN PEA SALE. It is a kind of hunting magic, a talisman against the terrible flux: men fear only surprises, HOLY NAME PARADES IN BROOKLYN.

Some have broken fast, some do so now before the monument. Symbolic foods appropriate to the sober occasion are taken: eggs, smoked flesh, the seeds of living things, uroboric bagels and doughnuts, sustenance drawn from swollen teats, SENATE GROUP FOR OLEO IN NAVY. British Girls Advance, PRODUCERS TRAIL MARY MARTIN. There is a ceremonial drone of wheels on rails, clicking turnstiles, respectful murmurings and rustlings, rhythmically accented by sudden hornblasts and whistles, the wheeze of air brakes, the blowing of noses, the clatter of dishes and whump of doors, a man asking for tickets, CHINESE STAB AT 6 U.N. POINTS. The Milkman Is Slipping. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM WEEK BACKED, EXECUTED GERMAN / A JOBLESS PAINTER. The worshipers move methodically among the slabs, breaking bread and sipping hot stimulants, muttering the traditional responses, snorting and farting, momentarily losing themselves, absorbing the positional metaphors that will preserve the earth’s gravity one more day and stay their own panic. PLANTS DISPERSED / TO FOIL BOMBINGS. BRONX PASTOR’S SON GETS CALL. Weddings, murders, mergers, wakes. Recipes and riots, batting averages and book reviews. The Cold War between Uncle Sam and his enemies, hot wars in the bushes. Ominously, the world chooses to publish today The Art of the Checkmate , and Frankenstein , say the slabs, is being reissued. Reissued?

VERY RECENTLY, 19 COPIES OF THIS BOOK WERE LITERALLY BURNED. Shadows cloud the pilgrim faces as they learn that the French World War I ace who shot down seventy-five Bosch planes from his old Spad biplane is dead, but the shadows are dispersed a moment later by the revelation that Ruth Hussey has had a daughter after two sons. Martha Raye is obtaining a divorce from Nick Condos on the grounds of extreme cruelty. The communicants try to imagine this cruelty and wonder if they will be able to watch some of it tonight in Times Square.

Or whenever. If ever. There is a pervading unease here at the monument this morning: something is wrong, every responsible voice in the nation has been insisting the executions had to take place last night and they didn’t, and now even The New York Times , ordinarily impervious in its grandeur to common panic, must acknowledge that the nation needs these deaths and needs them soon, for as Arthur Krock announces, deep inside the maze:

The operation of justice in the United States is subject to inordinate delays, anyhow, and the Communists have already taken full advantage of this in the Rosenbergs’ case to injure the reputation of the judicial system here with our friends abroad and otherwise make effective anti-American propaganda. By granting the stay, and on the grounds he gave, Justice Douglas has enabled the enemies of this nation to besmirch it further….

They read that as a consequence of Justice Douglas’s action the Supreme Court is today in special emergency session — CASE SEEN IN PERIL — and that before it the associate counsel for the atom spies has said of the New York Supreme Court Justice Irving Saypol that “there never was a more crooked District Attorney in New York than the one who tried the Rosenbergs!” Perhaps, they conclude hopefully from this, the Phantom has overreached himself. ROSENBERGS MAY FIGHT / INDICTMENT IF DEATH / SENTENCE IS UPSET. Circumscribing all these speculations: the picture of a man sweating behind bars in a B. Altman & Co. advertisement (“Are you facing a 90-day sentence?”‘), a movie review of Devil’s Plot , and a floor-level peek up the skirt of a woman strapped into the seat of a Colonial Airlines plane to Canada. Father’s Day ads for sizzling steaks. “The Mighty Atom” is dead. TONIGHT AT 8:30. “Something to fit every taste.”

Which is to say, information is one thing, The New York Times another. One does not assimilate data in a trance. Communion services are essentially tactile, not cognitive, a confrontation of life with life. What compels the attention and taps the wellsprings of prophecy on these pilgrimages is not this announcement that little Arlene Riddett, 15, of Yonkers, won the girls’ championship in the 28th annual marbles tournament in Asbury Park, New Jersey, nor that picture of two East Berlin demonstrators throwing stones at Russian tanks on Leipzigerplatz, but the fact that these things touch each other. There are sequences but no causes, contiguities but no connections. The government of Argentina orders the price of theater tickets cut by 25 % and the President of the United States is given a large toy model of Smokey Bear. The execution of an unemployed housepainter in Berlin takes shape beside the report that a new collection of wall coverings and shower curtains offers a variety of choices to homemakers who wish to decorate the bathroom: BATH WALLPAPERS / ARE EASY TO CLEAN. “Panorama” is one of the wallpaper designs, made up of impressionistic scenes of the country against a background of abstract motifs reminiscent of ancient calligraphy. Design as a game. Randomness as design. Design ironically revealing randomness. Arbitrariness as a principle, allowing us to laugh at the tragic. As in dreams, there is an impressive amount of condensation on the one hand, elaboration on the other. Logical relationships are repressed, but reappear through displacement. There are pictures of shower curtains with cats carrying umbrellas in their tails. The housepainter’s wife said her husband had merely left home that rainy morning to collect his unemployment check. He had a bad cold and planned to come straight home. Handy Man of High Degree . “Shot through with compassion and humor…” Advertisements for airconditioners, summer suits, and umbrellas provide the setting for the crash of the Globemaster IN FIERY SPIN NEAR TOKYO. Cool and carefree as a breeze, SOME UNUSUAL WAYS WITH COLD SOUP. The news that 905 MORE CAPTIVES / ESCAPE FROM CAMP is paired with an ad for UNITED HUNTS. Send them off to camp looking their nicest after a trip to Best’s Children’s Barber Shop .