When they made no motion toward the map, he put a fingernail to a spot 150 miles southwest of the newest pin. There, in boldface, but several typeface points smaller than the Amarillo-Lubbock class, lighter, even, than the Abilene-San Angelo persuasion, in a font darker than your basic Ropesville-Shallowater mirage town, was a filled bull’s-eye labeled Hobbs. The family stared at the name, uncomprehending. Rach, the first to assimilate to the idea, said, “Not possible. It’s got two b’s.”
An hour later, the only thing the family knew for certain was that Pop’s metaphorical mind might lead him anywhere. They could do nothing now but live. Artie and Rach retrieved their presents from the trunk of Mr. Nader and planted them alongside the gifts of the other three, under the prematurely trimmed tree. Yet they could not bring themselves to act on the bright wrappings. Opening presents, giving in to acquiring, seemed the grossest impertinence. Rach rustled up some carols, but they were halfhearted and top-heavy because Artie could not hit the lowest notes in the bass. Mom kept the mugs full of cocoa, no task at all since no one was drinking. They slipped into a ridiculous Christmas where everyone was too stupid or cowardly to quit faking bravery.
Out of the shared silence, Eddie Jr. said, “What have I been thinking? I have no school until past New Year’s. No obligations at all.” This observation evolved into a notion that evolved into a full-fledged idea, despite Artie’s vocal objections and attempts to sidetrack it.
Eddie would not be derailed. He roused himself and went to call the car-rental place. “The car-rental place,” Rach reminded everyone, a backhanded barb at the size of Barb City.
“They’ve still got one on the lot,” Eddie reported. “But they can’t make any promises about it still being around tomorrow. Big day for the car-rental business, Christ’s nativity.” The family, circumspect, was split on a decision. Eddie called back and reserved the vehicle, borrowing the magic numbers from Rachel’s credit card. Mom looked on dazed at the cashless transaction, incredulous that her own daughter could have grown up to use the same cards forbidden her.
Eddie went up to his bedroom to pack his things. Artie followed, aware of the burden of being the Sensible One. The Home-Fronter. While Little Bro transferred his worldly goods into a suitcase, Artie lectured him on how unfeasible the plan was. “The odds are impossible. You’ll never find him.”
“You’re probably right,” Eddie agreed pleasantly, and continued packing. He felt exhilarated, just fitting everything he needed into a three-day rucksack. “Where do you think the corduroys should go? How you supposed to get shirts in this thing without wrinkling?” Liberation washed over him as he discovered that his newly bleached underwear perfectly filled an odd spot at the edge of the bag, taking up almost no room at all. Packing a bag revealed his freedom.
“Completely impractical,” Artie objected. “It’ll cost you a hundred to rent a car. And then the motels and all. Even if you’re only out a week, it’ll run you your life savings.”
“Yer sister’s putting it on her plastic. And I’m going to hit yer mother up for a couple of C-notes.” The kid was importunate, but as charming as ever.
“You know how unlikely it is that you can track the guy past Amarillo? What leads do you have?”
“Aw, how big can things be out there? It all fits on two atlas pages, right? He’s got to be somewhere between Dallas and L.A.” Baiting Big Brother, Eddie remembered, had a lot of basic entertainment value.
“You’re throwing your time away, you know. It’s impossible. Stupid. Can’t be done.”
“Look,” said Eddie, at last giving Artie the gratification of anger. “Let me just do it first, okay? We can figure out the probabilities afterwards.”
The kid took a shower, thinking ahead to the grime of driving. He came downstairs, combed and groomed and packed. Mother tried to hide her evident approval of the plan, or rather, the nonplan: “He cleans up pretty well, doesn’t he?” Rach laughed and scratched, for the same reason she always did: not just sadism or incongruity or tension, although these were all there, but for the escape of the punchline, somebody poking through the far side, breaking through the barrier.
She addressed Mom’s compliment: “That’s the most hyperbolic thing anyone’s ever said about the boy.”
Lily sat placidly on the sofa. Failing to attract attention through inattention, she announced, “Dad said he was happy, didn’t he? Why don’t we just leave him be?” She did have something beatific about her. Something reconciled.
Mom slipped Eddie Jr. the expected bank wad and made him promise to call the next evening. Rach said, “It’ll be just like Houston Control. We’ll be your navigation beacon. Over.” Mom voiced her reservations about his starting out at night. But Eddie said it was best to get a jump on it, since the old guy had such a big head start.
“I’m not tired, anyway. You certainly don’t expect me to sleep, do you? Besides,” he added quietly, “if I don’t do this on a lark, I’ll talk myself out of it.”
They exchanged kisses all around. Artie grabbed his brother at the door, looking for some way to renounce his previous pragmatism as simply a test of good faith. “Keep us posted. Holler if you need help. And don’t be afraid to break off. Win your winners and lose your losers, as the man says.”
Eddie pinched his brother on the shoulder awkwardly, intending to make a more encompassing gesture but missing. It was okay. All manner of things were okay. He gave Artie a transcendental grin, opened the door on an unnaturally cold midwinter, and repeated, for the one who now couldn’t, the old Hobson warhorse: “We sometimes need coaxing to act on our own.”
1945
Thus Disney conceives the great fifth reel of You Are the War. Following a rapid courtship as shy, fetching, and painful as any the screen has ever assembled, Eddie Hobson marries the beautiful Joan Leslie. They discuss, in a few days of hurried home leave, the hope of their mutual futures: children. They plan for enough offspring to surround themselves with a sustaining fortress of goodwill. In montage, Eddie kisses his war bride good-bye and returns to his tour of duty, sweeping up and closing down the American Theater, Southwest. He floats from base to base like a bad penny, closing them down in his wake. He gets transferred to the remotest reaches of endless gypsum deserts near the Tularosa Valley. Late one summer night, taking a cigarette break from a barracks card game, Eddie receives another visit from the mouse, who appears suddenly from out of his cartoon dimension.
The visit takes PFC Hobson by surprise. On each previous encounter, Mickey has arrived just in time to rescue the boy from personal crisis. But tonight Eddie feels better than fine. In fact, he has just been imagining the life he and Miss Leslie will share come the end of his duration and six. He has taken Mickey’s previous color-segment pep talks to heart. He now sees how even he is necessary in the wider effort, and he feels ready for anything history might put in his way. Seeing his old friend pop out of nowhere, he assumes this must be just a social call. Perhaps the little guy has come to say adieu, for PFC Hobson feels he no longer needs him.
“What’s up, Governor?” he jokes with the mouse. “What can I bail you out of this time?”
But Mickey only smiles weakly. “Something is about to happen, Eddie,” he squeaks. “Something I need to prepare you for.” Hobson tries to laugh the greeting off, but Mickey remains adamant, increasingly grave. He takes the rapidly aging child lead’s hand and the neighborhood flashes rainbow and polychrome one last time. They set off on the trail of denouement, one that puts to the test every set that World World has to offer.
First they soar out to the marble monuments of Washington, D.C., arriving in the blink of a shutter. There, the Supreme Court has just decided that the mass imprisonment of Japanese is constitutionally justified on the grounds of military emergency. An overwhelming sickness at heart comes over Eddie. He watches in secret as the justices reach their decision. He witnesses the final triumph of self-defeating realism, a last, mass surrender to dreadful practicality, the dying spark of
his age, the Age of Utility, the beginning of what will be a long and spasmodic end. Eddie calls out to the justices to stop. But, as always in this genre, they cannot hear him. “Those people are innocent,” he shouts. “Don’t they know what they are doing?”
“Wait and see,” says Mickey. Wait and see. He reaches his white kid gloves into the pockets of his patented red shorts and pulls forth two small handfuls of iridescent ore. A brilliant animator’s pen gives the precious metallic dust all the colors of the rainbow.
“What is it?” asks Eddie, wide-eyed in astonishment. He cannot conceal his childish delight.
“Close your eyes.” Mickey commands him, “Concentrate for all you are worth on the future.”
The cartoon creature stretches on tiptoe and sprinkles the stuff in Eddie Hobson’s hair. A violent burst of color and deep brass tremolos announce an astounding host of images that rush forward from all four corners of the screen. The glittering instant is the high-water mark of forties animation, of animation in this century. The images pour forth in terrifying fecundity, foretelling the faces and icons of things still decades off with amazing prescience and specificity. How Disney’s artists do it remains one of the trade secrets of the industry.
“What is all this?” Eddie shouts, taking cover behind his guide. “What’s happening?”
A spooky moment, the scene easily surpasses the Wicked Witch wreaking her holy terror, its closest rival in sheer fright. It surpasses the mouse’s cameo as Sorcerer’s Apprentice: every broom for itself, and each with a mind of its own. Only this time the images are far more threatening. Eddie’s heart ices and extinguishes as these amorphous phantoms take shape and fly out of the frame. They grow to unbelievable size and infest whole continents while he hides, powerless to intervene. He considers lunging at one, but Mickey holds him back. For to touch the shapes is surely to disappear.
When the animation settles and the terrible flux subsides, the first thing they see is jubilation. Far off in space, they hear the nations celebrating. The mouse produces a magnifying glass, and they peek in on New York, Paris, Peking. A Victory Parade such as the world has never before mounted snakes its way through streets thronged with people. Strangers grab one another and embrace. Victory in Europe, in the Pacific. V-E, V-J. The death of the world by water and fire has been postponed.
Eddie smiles at his guardian from ear to ear. “So you were just testing me.”
But Mickey returns the most chilling look of pity in the history of cinema: there is more to current events than anyone suspects. They watch in time lapse as the globe’s population, only slightly nicked during five years of wholesale slaughter, doubles and redoubles in one lifetime. They see the place expand beyond all reckoning. They watch the four-color map splinter into infinitesimal factions, unmendable, a perpetual seesaw of provincial suspicions.
Heart cannot say just what Eddie sees. Only the cartoon cave shadow, drawn in after the fact, remains. But whatever Eddie looks on, his face confirms a first full grasp of the worst. Mouse and man, from distant vantage, follow the trail of Operation Paper Clip: the butchers of Dora, those same Nazi scientists Eddie thought the war was against, get clean tickets to help fuel the victors’ ever more exotic competition. He sees the ideal cause, the one that took Artie, the one he would have laid down his life for, go cynical, sacrificed to contested postwar claims.
For all the hoopla of Victory, Eddie now sees that the war has decided nothing. It continues: that much is obvious, even in Silly Symphony. It simply changes from massive stroke to slow cancer. It spreads from titanic fronts to steady brush fires smoldering everywhere he looks across the earth’s fragile crust. “Does it never end?” he asks sotto voce, unable to look Mickey between the ears. “Who in their right mind could possibly have wished this?”
“Nobody,” comes the soft rodent reply.
“If nobody . . . then how . . . ?”
Another Fairy Dusting, and they fly on. The fitful flowering of group will, the advantage of ganging together, withers and disintegrates. Constitutions take over their constituency. Defense becomes a transitive verb. Alarms create the nightmare emergencies they warn against. Each does unto the other before the other can do first.
Eddie follows the aerial view through to all its bitter ironies: decades of exposures and counterexposures. Landscapes of hysteria and accusation. Mandates for mutual escalation. A rift tears open between big and little. Headlines no longer mesh with experience. A nineteen-year-old from another time watches the ascent of unbeatable efficacy plunge human need into the dark.
The sole, flukish warm spot in all the frozen universe defaces itself, graffitied beyond recognition. Species strip away. Forests unacre and are lost. Humankind proudly peels off even the protective atmosphere. Hobson does not comprehend it, not for a minute. But he needs no guide to spell out how badly things have gone wrong. In ten minutes of artist’s conception, he reaches the same unavoidable conclusion of anyone paying attention. “Get me out of here.”
“That’s what they all say,” Mickey says sadly. But unlike Scrooge or George Bailey, they have no place to get out to. A wave of the white glove indicates they can reach any location in front of them. “Where would you like to go?”
“Teaneck,” the frightened kid says, desperate to get down to eye level. “I want to go home.”
Mickey warns him that his parents will be gone, his own generation grown up and dispersed. Eddie, hysterical, persists. He needs to shrink to a scale he can understand. He needs to return to a size he can put together.
But once they are there, he sees that that scale, even from the ground, is forever blown away. Something has happened: a spider’s web, an invasive forest, a spell of narcolepsy, falls over the entire town. People in the street cannot see each other. Everyone he passes is undone, eyes forward, trading feeling for the freedom to be left alone. The average tenant lives in cinder blocks, buying water in containers. They spend their days in endless litigation, suits against enormous institutions that have no people at the switch. They surrender all event, all involvement in the common project of being alive.
The stakes of the world outside them grow too abstract to consider; they trade sense for sensation, frantic to enjoy. Entertainment is plusher than ever. Slick, quick, and perfectly produced music strapped to the head replaces singing. All threat, all chance, all achievement, all breakthrough, all the horrible danger of tying one’s life to the fortunes of others, takes place only in electronic tales, in little films, for a tiny screen, not like any motion picture Eddie has ever thrilled to, not so much fables as pacifications. Rotating itches replace the grand passion; car chases fill in for the awful moment of fragility. No one needs go through things anymore, or risk arriving at the unforgiving minute alone.
Mickey and his charge rest on a rotting park bench, next to a wall of pathetic, urgent initials. Near them a silent scrawl screams: SHUT UP AND BUY, BUY, BUY. “What has happened to them?” Eddie’s face races through a hundred calculations, all of them flawed.
“Ask me one I can answer.” The mouse shakes his head and takes the human’s hand. He gives his reading of the derailment. It’s really very simple: two men are put in separate rooms. They can play it safe or they can put their fate in the hands of another. Lack of trust begets lack of trust. The fear of being undercut trickles into the garden, as irreversible as falling. The choice of those first two people filters into four, the four eight, and the eight several billion. “That last step’s a doozy,” Mickey explains.
“How did it start? How did suspicion get in?” But Hobson already knows at least one port of entry, and then some.
In reply, Mickey takes him to the government vaults of late century. Thieves in the night, they uncover the final evidence in the AJAn case, papers proving that government lawyers knew of no military emergency. They manufactured one for the Supreme Court hearing. Mickey explains that this evidence will be discovered again, late in the century. But by then, a federal court will deem it too expensive to
make reparations.
The last color trip is all but over. Eddie feels the mouse summoning strength to bring him back to the air base, circa 1945. He needs additional answers, and fast. “What will happen to me?” he shouts. “Will I at least find enough room to love my family?” The mouse reveals everything in store for the Hobsons-to-be. He traces the fate of the sons and daughters, describing the way Eddie’s great moment makes over their lives without their ever knowing.
But Eddie cannot hear him. His face tips off how he is stranded on a deserted set in front of blank scrim, talking to emptiness, waiting for the delivering animation. He can no longer sustain the extended conversation with something not there. No matter how often Walt shoots it, they cannot get a decent take. On repeated viewings, the minuscule slip of the boy’s features becomes apparent: the small price Disney pays for using an amateur.
The mouse fades before Eddie’s eyes into airy insubstance. Eddie yells for more answers. Everything he has just seen hangs in the balance. “Is it inevitable? What do you expect me to do?” But he is alone, pacing the desert by himself, back on cigarette break. “Tell me how free I am, Hobson,” he says silently, holding back the jitters. “You tell me.”
As with each visit in the first four reels, no one knows he has been gone. His friends call him back to the game. He turns to join them, throws his cigarette out onto the desert floor. He is greeted in mid-turn by the glorious light of day. Only brighter. In that last, classic hesitation, Hobson cannot tell what is happening. “Fairy Dust,” he says to himself. “Only believe.”
The light increases. For the first time, Hobson’s black-and-white surroundings go color without getting whisked off anywhere himself. It is the high-water mark of forties realism. “Who is going to open the time capsule?” he asks the evacuated sound stage. Except for the silent, off-camera command—keep rolling; this is what we’re after—his only answer is the beating of insect wings.
Prisoner's Dilemma Page 33
