Robert Coover - Public Burning

The doors slide open, he gets shoved out of the subway car, slips on a revenging grapefruit, slams into an I-beam that bears the legend TRACK 3, and then staggers on up the stairs into what turns out to be the exercise yard of a federal prison, if his left eye is to be trusted, or else the New Jerusalem. Police are protecting some construction or other from the souvenir-hunting zeal of summer tourists. What is it? It appears to be a stage with an electric chair. Or else a movie lobby with sawdust on the floor. Above him, a billboard seems to read I TELL YOU, FOLKS, ALL POLITICS IS APPLESAUCE, but he no longer trusts what his eyes tell him. I’ve walked through that 3-D movie, he thinks, and I’ve come out the other side. He doesn’t really believe this, it’s just a joke to lighten a little his sinking heart. Sinking because it’s all coming together — the stampeding masses, the creeping socialism and exploding waxworks, the tracks of history and time-lapse overviews — into the one image that has been pursuing him through all his sleepless nights, the billowing succubus he’s been nurturing for nine months now, ever since the new hydrogen-bomb tests at Eniwetok: yes, the final spectacle, the one and only atomic holocaust, he’s giving birth to it at last. Like the mad artist, we’re all going to die horrible fiery deaths, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, nothing we can do to stop ourselves, it’s in the script, in the frozen semen, the waxen MOTHER LOVE. What does it mean that Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar or that Edison invented the light bulb? Nothing, it’s all over, the human race is shutting itself off, it has a craving for emptiness and futility, we’ve grown too much brains and we can’t cope, it’s all wasted, my life is wasted! Thus, he laments the waste of his life and Shakespeare’s. The theater marquee above him reads A GOOD MANY THINGS GO AROUND IN THE DARK BESIDES SANTA CLAUS.

In the lobby, he feels safer. It’s not as bright in here, things are not so clear. He finds display blow-ups of what he takes to be pages from the Books of Knowledge but turn out to be transcripts of the record of the Easter Trial. He concentrates on them, thinking: At last I’m going to do something with my life! On page 493, someone called THE WITNESS is saying: “He said there was fissionable material at one end of a cube and at the other end of the cube there was a sliding member that was also of fissionable material and when they brought these two together under great pressure, that would be…” He cannot find page 494. But he knows, he knows; he feels his body full of cubes and sliding members. THE COURT is asking about Jell-0 boxes. Imitation raspberry! There is testimony about smallpox inoculations, implosion lenses, and flushing money down the toilet. The statue of Columbus. Stop Me If You Have Heard This . Doris Day is singing “I Didn’t Slip, I Wasn’t Pushed, I Fell.” Somehow, this all makes sense, THE COURT says: “It is so difficult to make people realize that this country is engaged in a life and death struggle with a completely different system!” He blinks. He realizes he has come upon some radical truth. In one eye, anyway. But then THE COURT says: “Yet they made a choice of devoting themselves to the Russian ideology of denial of God, denial of the sanctity of the individual and aggression against free men everywhere instead of serving the cause of liberty and freedom.” This he doesn’t understand at all. The fault of the cubes and sliding members maybe. He is feeling lightheaded. The walls seem to be full of groundhog holes. The theater air-conditioning is off and the lobby is stuffy. He staggers out into the street again, gulping for air, pursued by a recurring note of impending doooom.

The area is full of people who shove and push. Perhaps they are actors pretending to be prisoners in the prison yard. Peddlers are hawking Cherry-Oonilla ice cream and miniature A-bombs that produce edible mushroom clouds. He samples the ice cream, but as he bites into it, his right eye tells him it’s Marie Antoinette’s left pap from the wax museum — no telling which eye to trust, it tastes milky and waxy at the same time. People are carrying signs that his right eye tells him read SAVE THE ROSENBERGS! and HEIL EISENHOWER! his left BOMB CHINA NOW! and ETHEL ROSENBERG BEWITCHED MY BABY! He is no longer surprised by these ocular reversals, in fact he is very clear-headed, which is the main cause of his panic. It strikes him that he is perhaps the only sane man left on the face of the earth. The faces of the earth, because he still sees two of them. He plunges forward through the Community of God, crawls over a barrier that says DIG WE MUST FOR A GROWING NEW YORK, is struck down by the Preamble to the United States Constitution. “ I did it!” he cries, rearing up, his face smeared with the bloody remains of his Cherry-Oonilla ice cream cone. “A crime worse than murder! I’ve altered the course of history!” He knows this is true, knows he’s done it, because he has imagined it: sanity is murder. “I’ve brought on the holocaust!” He staggers to his feet, slams into the stage, clambers up on it. One eye shows him a distant policeman, his limbs outflung, caught in a web of concentric circles, intersected by pointer lines indicating the relationship of the planets to the human microcosmos; in the other eye, the electric chair, identified by a small brass National Parks sign as THE LIBERTY TREE, comes bounding toward him, then recedes, like a ball strung to a bat with elastic. He realizes he has grown a moustache and a fake-fur collar, a pair of spectacles. “Don’t be afraid!” he shouts, staggering about, searching for the chair. “The Court is innocent! Doris Day is innocent! Go home to your children!” For all his bravado, he feels like a dreaded outcast, the last pariah, a scabbed sheep, the target of a punitive expedition, the victim of Martian theory, chapfallen, weary to an extreme, his human decency violated, his human dignity trampled on — only Beauty sends him reeling so earnestly around the rocking Death House. “ I shall do my duty, distasteful as it may be! I will save you all!” The chair hits him behind the knees and he falls into it as into a vat of boiling wax, a miracle of fit and flattery. I am the coward who dies many deaths, he weeps, as police with flailing nightsticks crash forward on melting ankles, trailing stars and planets like small balloons. “The President said it: ‘The one capital offense is a lack of staunch faith!’ THROW THE SWITCH!”

But they drag him out of there, whacking and prodding with their sticks, push him into a long white car. “BEWARE THE MAD ARTIST!” he wails, but they’re all laughing.

“Jesus, that’s the thirty-second nut we’ve had in the chair today,” a policeman is saying, tipping his cap back.

“Hope we don’t see no more. That’s the last loony wagon we’ll be able to get in here through that pack-up!”

“They’re cleaning out the Whale’s belly for us, and once the show starts, we can stow ’em there.”

“Whew! Didja check those weird cardboard specs, Chief?” says another. “He looks like that silly little character with the big glasses who’s always turning up in those Herblock cartoons, asking stupid questions!”

“Yeah, I know. He probably thinks he’s Albert Einstein. The last one claimed to be John Wilkes Booth in drag and wanted to set himself on fire, and the one before that had horns, a tail, and the face of Leon Trotsky painted on his ass. Okay, boys, take him away!”

They punch him in the arm with a needle and he passes out, thinking: Well, that does it. I’ve done everything I can, and what’s come of it? A few bruises. A few laughs for the condemned. A misspent Friday, a curious episode on the way to Armageddon, nothing more.