Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  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.

  17.

  The Eye in the Sky

  I had to stop in a washroom on my way to the office to clean up, couldn’t let my staff see me like this. I slapped through the swinging doors, still keyed up, ready for battle, but the place was empty. Those goddamn organ grinders out there pissed me off, Pearson especially—Winchell wasn’t so bad, he’d never got past the sixth grade, after all, never read a book, probably couldn’t, you had to make allowances. Understood his role, too: an entertainer; you could work with that. Apparently we were in the same class of reserve Lieutenant Commanders, he also was up for promotion. Shit, maybe I ought to quit politics and go back in, the Korean War’s nearly over, shouldn’t be too dangerous, and it sure as hell would be easier than this. I recalled those days in the Navy with a lot of
affection, I’d grown up there, tried everything I’d been scared to try till then—I hated to think how square I’d been before, a silly little Sunday-school bigot, ranting about the disgusting evils of tobacco and alcohol and gambling, never saying anything worse than “hell” or “damn,” shying from women, hadn’t even gone with a whore—well, all that’d be different now. Commander Nixon of the USN. I was still young enough to cut the mustard, so why not? Well, for one thing, the seasickness…and having to kill all that time, kiss the asses of a lot of clowns who kissed mine now—no, it was a drop in rank, I was better off here, in the thick of it, no matter how rough it got: once you get used to the fast track, once you’ve hit the big leagues like I have, you can’t resign yourself to just puttering around. Anyway, I’m at my best when the going is hardest—that’s when you find out who has what it takes. I once wrote a note to myself, I made it up myself, I still have it somewhere: “Live so that you can look any man in the face and tell him to go to hell!” I looked up at myself in the mirror. “Go to hell!” I shouted.

  I realized I was still very wrought up. Something of a mess, too. My shirt was limp with sweat, face and hands streaked with horseshit, some on my suit, my jacket shoulder scuffed and splitting at the seam, jowls already darkening with bristle, hair mussed, face bruised, Jesus. I’ve always been very particular about my physical appearance, even as a little boy. Something deep in my character. I used to get up at least half an hour early on school mornings so I’d have plenty of time, my mother always remarked on this. I brushed each tooth, using all the right motions, gargled ritually, made Mom smell my breath to make sure I wouldn’t offend anybody on the bus. I was always afraid this might be part of my problem with girls. I never could get used to kissing them on the mouth—I thought I could smell my own and worried that they did, too. Even at Duke, where we had no running water in our cramped room, and where a certain unkemptness was fashionable, presumably bespeaking a student too involved in his studies to take proper care of himself, I maintained my tidiness. The other guys thought, when I snuck out of bed early every morning, lit their fire for them, and disappeared, that I was off cracking the books somewhere, but in reality I was in the gym using the showers. Had the whole place to myself then, I liked the feeling of it, stalking around in the dawn light like a wild animal, it set me up for my day in the law library. In fact it was in there, in front of the gymnasium mirrors in the morning grayness, where I first tested out some of the great trial-lawyer gestures that became my hallmark as a politician.

  I washed up as best I could, combed my hair, straightened my tie, brushed my clothes off with toilet paper. I found my handkerchief stuffed in a jacket pocket, remembered where it had been that day, and flushed it down a stool. Weirdly, as it got sucked down the hole, I seemed to hear a child cry—I realized my imagination was working overtime, like I still hadn’t come out the other end of those goddamn dreams. Have to take a vacation when this thing is over. I cleaned my shoe with soap and water. The lace was crusted with the stuff and had got broken when I tore the shoe out from under the cabbie’s seat, so I threw it away. To get at the crud in between the sole and top of the shoe, I wrapped toilet paper around a pencil point, an old trick I learned long ago on those long hot evenings after cleaning out the stables at the Prescott rodeo. Sooner or later, my enemies in the press would try to use that rodeo job against me, too—he got his start in life with both feet in the shit, they’ll say. Just as they’ll claim that I learned all I knew about politics when the bosses took notice of my good work and promoted me out front to bark for the Wheel of Fortune. Well, that’s fair game, you’ve got to be able to take it in politics, but they’ll be wrong about it, as usual. The stables taught me discipline and silence—the best test of a man is not how well he does the things he likes but how well he does the things he doesn’t like—while the Wheel of Fortune gave me an appreciation of risk and the rudiments of mob psychology. I learned out there how to make my mark among total strangers, people whose lives were totally different from my own, and how to keep quiet about it after. The whole Frontier Days Rodeo scene gave me a special ceremonial perspective on the legend of the American West, too, and it ended once and for all whatever squeamishness I might have had toward the cruder side of life. I can be around blood, shit, dead bodies, beatings, tragedy, any kind of garbage or ugliness, and not be bothered like most. In a concentration camp, I not only would survive, I would probably even prosper. And it was why Uncle Sam, I knew, could count on me tonight at the electrocutions, where others might lose their color, if not their courage and suppers as well. Tonight! Whew, it hardly seemed possible that it was really going to happen, after all, just a few hours from now! I didn’t know if I was pleased or not. I felt like I used to feel when an exam was rushing up on me I wasn’t prepared for. Hey! I had to get that speech written!

  I hustled out of there and on up to my office. The girls greeted me as usual, but they were less than natural about it, something in the way they ducked their heads, glanced at each other, fussed with the pamphlets and brochures stacked out for tourists. Had they spotted so quickly my laceless shoe? Caught a whiff? Or—ah! I’d forgotten to lock the door to my inner office last night, they’d witnessed the mess in there. Encountering so much disorder in an office kept as neat as mine must have been as shocking to them as finding Foster Dulles’ office filled with empty gin bottles or Cardinal Spellman’s quarters littered with lace panties. I should get them out of there, I thought. I didn’t have much time left, and they were no help at a time like this. A nuisance, in fact.

  I checked the mail, signed some letters, remarked favorably on a peculiar-looking beanie with five fingers sticking up that one of them had bought for a nephew, asked for a cup of coffee, looked over the advance copy of a special feature article on me for this Sunday’s Washington Post, apologized laughingly for the confusion in the other room, glanced at the appointments calendar. “I was working late last night on a report for the President, and let me say frankly, I, uh, didn’t get a chance to straighten up after,” I said with a loose chuckle. For some reason, I didn’t recognize a single name on the appointments calendar. “This Rosenberg thing, you know—the President wanted all the, uh, facts before making any final, I’ve been working sixteen hours a day on this thing, any final judgment on their petition for clemency.”

  “What’s going to happen, Mr. Nixon? Has it been postponed again? We heard all the shouting—”

  “No, the Court has held the line and the President has refused clemency. Everything’s all right. It is my understanding that they will be executed tonight, sometime around eight, if all, uh, goes well.” It was cold in here, the girls had the airconditioner on, and my shirt was sticking damply to my skin. I hoped I had a fresh shirt somewhere in my office. I realized I was reluctant to go back in there. One glance brought back everything from last night and my butt even began to ache again. I sat down on one of the tall black leather chairs out where the girls were.

  “A pity,” one of the girls said. “Those two little boys…”

  “Well, let’s not deceive ourselves, they should have thought more about those little boys when they started working for the Phantom,” I said with a smile. I leaned forward earnestly. “We’re fortunate that we have a President of the United States who isn’t a sucker and who isn’t going to be made one. I think the only man that can save America is Dwight, uh, Eisenhower.”

  “Well, maybe,” the girl said, handing me a cup of hot coffee, “but it seems like it should be enough if they just electrocuted the man and let the woman go take care of the kids, maybe just cut off one of her arms or her tongue or something—I mean, it was probably mostly his fault anyway, women always do what men tell them to. I certainly do!”

  I laughed jovially. “That’s funny,” I said, standing up. “I always had, uh, the idea it was just the opposite!”

  The girls laughed. “Oh, you men!” one of them said.

  I felt pleased with myself. I sat down again. I wasn�
�t usually so successful with this kind of banter. Maybe that encounter with the Phantom and the reporters had loosened me up: a good fight stirs the blood. And other things, too. Certainly, everybody was in a jocular—almost holiday—mood now, and whatever uneasiness there might have been when I entered had apparently been forgotten. “Well,” I grinned affably, “if the dry rot of corruption and Communism, which has eaten deep into our body, uh, politic during the past seven years, can only be chopped out with a hatchet—then let’s call for a hatchet!”