Antrim, Donald - Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

Down I knelt. Twigs and leaves and rocks were everywhere. I heaped them into a pile. The cleared tract was level and hard against the rounded blade of the trowel plunging in, scraping noisily; I crouched low and bent over, using my body as a baffle against the grainy rasp of steel on dirt. Cautiously I dug. Pebbles bit into my knees. It wasn’t long before I had a sore back and neck. There was a lot of tension that night in the park, all the tension that naturally accompanies proximity to armed strife. Sweat ran into my eyes, and I leaned back and raised a hand to wipe away the salt sting; and I reflected on Chuck Webster’s eerie disappearance. He’d been standing no more than twenty feet from where Ben and I had convened to talk business. Suddenly, he was gone. It wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to have happening in a civic recreational space.

I set aside the trowel and rummaged in the pack, took out The Egyptian Book of the Dead and placed it beside the burial site. The plastic-wrapped foot was soggy. Holding it up, now, up above the shallow hole in the ground (fingers caressing instep, thumb pressing ankle), I experienced, for the second time that night, a thrill of attachment to the man it had belonged to, and I knew I was doing the right thing, bringing Jim’s foot to the embattled park. This little clearing, like Jim’s own neatly clipped lawn that dark night of his passing, was sacred space.

I laid the foot beside the grave. Salty ocean breezes bent limbs of trees into arabesques, making the world a church. I lit a candle, opened the book at random, and read aloud:

“‘I am a shining being, and a dweller in light, who hath been created and hath come into existence from the limbs of the god.’”

Not bad. But what did it mean, really? There was no way for me to know, only to speculate. I’m not an Egyptologist. My previous studies of comparative religion have been confined to medieval Christian variants prominent in the Germanic and Mediterranean regions during assorted state-sanctioned periods of witch and heretic hunting, when ecclesiastical nuance determined the destiny of illiterate, cowed populations. The Inquisition is an archetypal instance of nonsecular terrorism — it’s a template for institutionalized cruelties that have abided throughout modern history. Back when Jim was still alive, back before the ex-mayor, without warning or explanation, launched those shoulder-fired Stinger missiles — and where did a guy like Kunkel get that kind of firepower, anyway? Clearly, high office has its perks — into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool, thus bringing down all manner of pain — a week or so before this happened I gave my standard talk, at a Rotary luncheon, on this very topic: “The Barbarity of the Past: How Ancient Fears Inform the Organizing Principles and Moral Values of Modern Life.”

That lecture, I realized now, holding the sputtering birthday candle in one hand and the archaic burial manual in the other — that lecture was a kind of starting point in the chain of circumstance that had brought me to this dangerous glade to perform esoteric nocturnal rites.

Could I ever have seen any of this coming, that late-summer Friday at the Holiday Inn?

It was a capacity crowd. Jerry and Rita Henderson sat up front. Bill and Barbara Nixon lounged at a neighboring table. I noticed Abraham de Leon picking crumbs from his beard. Tom Thompson chugged cups of coffee. And there was Jim Kunkel himself, looking patriarchal and well tanned but also a bit feeble in yellow pants and golf shirt and shiny white shoes. At that time the old ex-mayor had only a few days to live, but who could know this? Everybody seemed slightly stunned from the volumes of delicately poached blowfish they’d tucked away. It was a tough house. I sipped from my water glass, cleared my throat, leaned close to the microphone and said, “So you see, these dread ministers, the Inquisitors, inflicted every extreme of ruthlessness on reputed heretics, many mere petty criminals or political agitators, not religious activists at all. Ruthlessness on behalf of orthodoxy. It’s the old story. What’s interesting in the case of the Inquisition, and it is a phenomenon that has been demonstrated time and again, in diverse theaters, even right up into the modern era, is the ready accessibility of holy text as a tool of repression.”

Meredith at the back of the big banquet room smiled encouragement. I went to the portable blackboard behind the podium, picked up a piece of chalk, and began sketching diagrams. “Okay, the rack, an unpretentious stretching device, mechanically rudimentary, employed in the regular daily work of coercion and castigation. The rack’s primary social impact was arguably psychological as well as physical. As long as the authorities had recourse to such an instrument, with liberty to use it at their discretion, which is to say at the slightest provocation, the lay community, understandably, inhabited a condition of low-grade panic.” I raised the chalk to fill in picturesque details: “crank,” “berth,” “leather thongs,” and so on. People shifted in their chairs, leaned forward to get a better view. Jerry Henderson was engrossed, peering at the board. Bill Nixon perked right up. It’s difficult to overestimate the value, as a teaching aid, of pictures. When I used to give this almost identical though considerably more elementary “Inquisition talk” to my third-graders — always a hard-to-please bunch — they, like these grown-ups assembled at the Holiday Inn for Friday luncheon, became enthralled, absolutely, as though on cue, when I marched to the board and picked up the chalk and made fine white renderings of dungeon environments. Suddenly the old classroom would fall silent. No gum popping, no spitballs sailing, no notes being passed. The kids’ eager questions reflected a deep concern for history’s artifacts.

“Did the torturers leave the people on that thing for a long time?”

“Did you get taller?”

“Could you get torn in half?”

I could sense my adult audience’s yearning to raise their own inquiries, as I casually dropped the chalk in the chalk tray and returned to the podium. I watched Rita Henderson brush lint from her purple blouse. Jerry folded and refolded a napkin. Jim Kunkel chewed a toothpick. I let all these people contemplate the past. “In those days you were guilty until proven innocent.” I took another sip of water. Heads wagged, a fork scraped a plate, ice rattled.

“Questions, anyone?”

Jim raised his hand. “Pete, would you say that the past lives on in the present?”

“Certainly, brutality has long been the order of the day, Jim.”

“Yep,” he said. Then Barbara Nixon — not a bad-looking woman, incidentally — spoke up. “Mr. Robinson, are you saying that ours is a cruel culture?”

“Something like that.”

“I can’t accept that. We’re good people here. We care about one another.”

“Oh, give it a rest,” Jim growled at her.

Everyone regarded the ex-mayor.

“Excuse me?” from Bill.

“There’s no love here,” was all Jim said.

Bill told him, “I think you owe my wife an apology.”

Barbara nudged her husband, “Forget it honey, he’s just a crazy old man.”

To which Jim replied, to both or either of the Nixons, or maybe — who knows? — to the room in general, “Fuck off.”

At which point Jerry broke in and diplomatically asked, “What I want to know, Pete, is could you be torn in half on one of those racks?”

“Probably not. There were, however, methods of accomplishing such punishment.”

“Drawing and quartering,” said the ex-mayor. There was a feeling, in the room, of unease. I pressed on: “Precisely. The accused is harnessed by hand and foot to four hardy beasts of burden, which are then encouraged by drovers to walk or trot away in different directions.”