Robert Coover - Public Burning

Uncle Sam picked up one of my large lined yellow legal pads, and, peering down his long white nose at it, commenced to read: “‘I can’t speak for the lives of other men, but my own has always seemed to me to have purpose, and so events which might have seemed like accidents or casual decisions to others’—what the hell is this?”

“It’s a…a position paper…”

“Yeah, some position all right — it’s all flat and sprawled and bends ever’ which way! I ain’t seen such wretched penmanship in high places since the days of the early railroad barons! Gotta give you credit, them ‘t’s’ are real killers, but the rest is all stingy and crabbed and outa balance! And why is it, boy, when I set you to cogitatin’ a problem like this case, you think only about yourself?”

“Not…not only—”

“What are you jerkin’ around like that for? You got the Saint Vitus Dance? And look at me when I’m talkin’ to you!”

“I… I can’t—!”

“No, you’re in bad shape, mister! The solid earth, that’s what you need!” What I needed right now was to lie down, but he was blocking my access to the sofa. A man ought to be judged by the decisions he made or didn’t make, I thought light-headedly, not by how he dots an “i” or crosses a “t.” “The actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! There are times when in the course of human events, you gotta let the dead Past bury its dead, and act — act in the livin’ presence! No more time-outs, son, it’s out-under-the-open-sky-root-hog-or-die time!”

I turned and stared dismally out the window on the balmy June day. Perhaps he’s right, I thought. I could go on a speaking tour, see America. Anything would be better than this. On a patch of grass, far away, I could see a group of people. They seemed to be playing croquet. Or else taking snapshots of the Capitol. Or carrying pickets. Ah, why did nothing in America keep its shape, I wondered? Everything was so fluid, nothing stayed the same, not even Uncle Sam. Of course, this was what stayed the same…. “Aren’t we making too much of all this?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from breaking. Foolhardy maybe, but I knew the rules: stay on the attack, find your opponent’s weakness and lean on him, and if he attacks you, don’t answer, don’t go on the defensive. I was scared, though. I didn’t know where I was with him any more. I tried to recall the arguments the Phantom had used on me, but all I could remember was Ethel Rosenberg doing the Dirty Crab, slapping the stage with the cheeks of her ass, and the bit about Native Dancer and Sonja Henie. I gritted my teeth. “All these old, uh, acts…we’ve made our point…”

“Where the battle against the Phantom is concerned,” said Uncle Sam ominously, “victories are never final so long as he is still able to fight!” This was familiar. I’d heard it somewhere before. I turned to face him: he was staring at me darkly. I knew what was coming next, it was as though we were in some play, I felt like I’d fallen into a river and was getting swept helplessly along: There is never a time…. “There is never a time when it is safe to relax or let down!”

“No,” I said, groping for my lines, my place. “No…but what can the Phantom do? Like you said, this one’s in our home, uh, ballpark…”

“Yeah, well, so was Grant’s second Ordination and look what that onry galoot done to that!” replied Uncle Sam.

“Grant?” I gasped in disbelief. I didn’t know whether I was on dry land again, or going down for the third time. “You mean the…the Phantom? Way back—?”

“You durn tootin’! Cast such a outdacious petterfactin’ shadow that all the thermometers went bust in the freeze, coldest goddamn Investiture in national history, Grant never got over it! Oh, that sarpint had us all on the skids in that one, I never felt such a awesome chill — except for the time I tried to incarnate myself back into Warren Harding, not noticin’ he was dead! And whoopee! what a wind! It come rippin’ hell’s bells outa the north big as all outadoors and gettin’ blacker by the minute — seemed like it was tryin’ to push all the District real estate clean over into Prince Georges County! It whistled bucklety-whet through the parade like shit through a tin horn, whippin’ away decorations, clothing, wives, horses, and even Old Glory — blasted Grant’s daughter Nellie all the way to England and broke his goddamn heart! It sure tore up jack! And cold? The champagne at the Ball froze solid as the rock a Prudential, not to mention the poor little singin’ canaries and emancipated jigaboo servants! I swear to Jesse, if we hadn’ta got one helluva dance revved up, he mighta turned the whole Tabernacle to ice crystals, shattered it with his twister, and blowed it clean off the face of the earth! No, son, you don’t fuck about none with the Phantom!”

“But…you mean—? but it’s the middle of June—!”

“Of course it’s the middle of June!” roared Uncle Sam. “My God, it ain’t hard to see why you bombed out as a used-car salesman and orange-juice czar, you haven’t got the brains for anything faster than politics! I’m warnin’ you, mister, you had better set yourself for a mighty carnage, a evil hour of darkness and adversity and bodacious peril, a most horrible contwisted embranglement that’ll tar up the earth all round like that Worcester tornado and look dreadful kankarifferous!” He strode violently through the room, lean and long-legged, kicking through my paperwork as through a snowdrift, a pile of dead leaves, hands clutching his blue lapels, whirling on me from time to time and riveting me with a fiery glance — terrible those eyes: you could see the lightning coiled behind them, ready to flash out, that incredible power…that could be mine…if only…“On accounta we are up against the archenemy of the whole human race, sir, the meanest son of a misbegotten wildcat on the skin of the goldurn globe, all hot sulphur but the head and that’s aquafortis!”

“Aquafortis—?”

“Heavy water, boy! Pure sorcery and dangerous as a Massassip allagator with a tapeworm! They call him Sudden Death and General Desolation, half cousin to the cholera and godfather of the Apocalypse! He’s all what most maddens and torments, all what stirs up the lees a things, all what cracks the sinews and cakes the brain, all the subtle vinimus demonism of life and thought, that mysterious fearsome force which from time immemorious has menaced the peace and security of mankind and buggered the hopes of the holy, the Creator of—”

“But, but I thought, uh, heavy water was—”

“Hold your tongue, mister, whilst I’m recitin!” Uncle Sam bellowed, spinning on me fiercely, “or you shall smell brimstone through a nail hole!” I thought he was going to draw a six-shooter like Andy Jackson and gun me down. It occurred to me I ought to leap out the window to save myself, but I couldn’t even move. “I say, he’s the Creator of Ambiguities, out to conquer the world, refashion it in his own craven image, enslave it to his own Utopian ends! A warlock, a wizard is he, and lord a the wind and the sea, half wild horse and half cockeyed catamount, and the rest of him is crooked snags and red-hot snappin’ turkle! You hear me? The massacree of isolated communities is the pastime of his idyll moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of his life! Why aren’t the Rosenbergs talkin’? Who’s sewn ’em up? Why’s the whole world goin’ crazy? Who made you get a grip on your old whang-doodle insteada the problem at hand? It’s the Phantom , boy, our natural and habitual enemy, a rantankerous mean shape—”