by Philip Roth
The mother and father of one of them appeal to their daughter on television to
disclose how many people were in the building when it exploded. “If there were
no others,” the mother says, “the search could be called off until the
surrounding walls are removed. I believe in you,” the mother tells the missing
daughter, who, with SDS comrades, used the house as a bomb factory, “and know
that you would not wish to add more sorrow to this tragedy. Please, please
telephone or wire or have someone call for you with this information. There is
nothing else that we need to know except that you are safe, and nothing we need
to say except that we love you and want desperately to help.”
The very words spoken to the press and television by the father of the Rimrock
Bomber when she disappeared. We love you and want to help. “Asked if he had been
‘communicating well’ with his daughter, the father of the townhouse bomber
replied,” and no less truthfully or miserably than the father of the Rimrock
Bomber answering a similar question, “‘As parents, we’d have to say no, not in
recent years.’” His daughter is quoted by him as fighting for what Merry, too—in
her dinner-table outbursts decrying her selfish mother and father and their
bourgeois life—proclaimed as the motive for her own struggle: “To change the
system and give power to the 90 percent of the people who have no economic or
political control now.”
The father of the other missing girl is said by the police investigator to be
“very uncommunicative.” He says only, “I have no knowledge concerning her
whereabouts.” And the father of the Rimrock Bomber believes him, understands his
uncommunicative-ness all too well, knows better than any other father in America
the burden of anguish concealed by the emotionless formulation “I have no
knowledge concerning her whereabouts.” If it hadn’t happened to him, he would
probably have marveled at the tight-lipped facade. But he knows the truth is
that the missing girl’s parents are drowning exactly as he is, drowning day and
night in inadequate explanations.
A third body is found in the townhouse rubble, the body of an
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adult male. Then, a week later, a statement appears in the paper, attributed to
the mother of the second missing girl, that dissipates his compassion for both
sets of parents. Asked about her daughter, the mother says, “We know she is
safe.”
Their daughter has killed three people and they know she is safe, while about
his daughter, who has not been proved by anyone to have killed anybody—about his
daughter, who is being used by radical little thugs just like these privileged
townhouse bombers, who has been framed, who is innocent—he knows nothing. What
has he got to do with them? His daughter didn’t do it. She no more set off the
bomb at Hamlin’s than she set off the bomb in the Pentagon. Since ‘68 thousands
of bombs have been exploded in America, and his daughter has had nothing to do
* * *
with a single one of them. How does he know? Because Dawn knows. Because Dawn
knows for sure. Because if their daughter had been going to do it, she would
never have gone around school telling kids that the town of Old Rimrock was in
for a big surprise. Their daughter was too smart for that. If she had been going
to do it, she would have said nothing.
Five years pass, five years searching for an explanation, going back over
everything, over the circumstances that shaped her, the people and the events
that influenced her, and none of it adequate to begin to explain the bombing
until he remembers the Buddhist monks, the self-immolation of the Buddhist
monks. … Of course she was just ten then, maybe eleven years old, and in the
years between then and now a million things had happened to her, to them, to the
world. Though she had been terrified for weeks afterward, crying about what had
appeared on television that night, talking about it, awakened from her sleep by
dreaming about it, it hardly stopped her in her tracks. And yet when he
remembers her sitting there and seeing that monk going up in flames—as
unprepared as the rest of the country for what she was seeing, a kid half
watching the news with her mother and father one night after dinner—he is sure
he has unearthed the reason for what happened.
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It was back in ‘62 or ‘63, around the time of Kennedy’s assassination, before
the war in Vietnam had begun in earnest, when, as far as everybody knew, America
was merely at the periphery of whatever was going haywire over there. The monk
who did it was in his seventies, thin, with a shaved head and wearing a saffron
robe. Cross-legged and straight-backed on an empty city street somewhere in
South Vietnam, gracefully seated like that in front of a crowd of monks who had
gathered to witness the event as though to observe a religious ritual, the monk
had upended a large plastic canister, poured the gasoline or the kerosene,
whatever it was, out of the canister and over himself and drenched the asphalt
around him. Then he struck the match, and a nimbus of ragged flames came roiling
out of him.
There is sometimes a performer in a circus, advertised as the fire eater, who
makes flames seemingly shoot out of his mouth, and there on the street of some
city in South Vietnam, this shaven-headed monk somehow made it look as though
flames, instead of assaulting him from without, were shooting forward into the
air from within him, not just from his mouth, however, but in an instantaneous
eruption from his scalp and his face and his chest and his lap and his legs and
his feet. Because he remained perfectly upright, indicating in no way that he
could feel himself to be on fire, because he did not so much as move a muscle,
let alone cry out, it at first looked very much like a circus stunt, as though
what was being consumed were not the monk but the air, the monk setting the air
on fire while no harm at all befell him. His posture remained exemplary, the
posture of someone altogether elsewhere leading another life entirely, a servant
of selfless contemplation, meditative, serene, a mere link in the chain of being
untouched by what happened to be happening to him within view of the entire
world. No screaming, no writhing, just his calmness at the heart of the flames—
no pain registering on anyone on camera, only on Merry and the Swede and Dawn,
horrified together in their living room. Out of nowhere and into their home, the
nimbus of flames, the upright monk, and the sudden liquefaction before he keels
over;
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into their home all those other monks, seated along the curbstone impassively
looking on> a few with their hands pressed together before them in the Asian
* * *
gesture of peace and unity; into their home on Arcady Hill Road the charred and
blackened corpse on its back in that empty street.
That was what had done it. Into their home the monk came to stay, the Buddhist
monk calmly sitting out his burning up as though he were a man both fully alert
and anesthetized. The television transmitting the immolation must have done it.
&
nbsp; If their set had happened to be tuned to another channel or turned off or
broken, if they had all been out together as a family for the evening, Merry
would never have seen what she shouldn’t have seen and would never have done
what she shouldn’t have done. What other explanation was there? “These gentle p-
p-people,” she said, while the Swede gathered her into his lap, a lanky eleven-
year-old girl, held her to him, rocking and rocking her in his arms, “these
gentle p-p-p-people… .” At first she was so frightened she couldn’t even
cry—she could get out of her just those three words. Only later, a moment after
going to bed, when she got up and with a yelp ran from her room down the
corridor and into their room and asked, as she hadn’t since she was five, to get
into bed with them, was she able to let everything out of her, everything awful
that she was thinking. All the lights remained on in their bedroom and they let
her go on and on, sitting up between them in their bed and talking until there
were no words left inside her to panic or terrorize her. When she fell asleep,
sometime after three, it was with their lights all still burning—she would not
let him turn them off—but she had at least by then talked herself out enough and
cried herself out enough to succumb to her exhaustion. “Do you have to m-m-melt
yourself down in fire to bring p-p-people to their s-senses? Does anybody care?
Does anybody have a conscience? Doesn’t anybody in this w-world have a
conscience left?” Every time “conscience” crossed her lips she began to cry.
What could they tell her? How could they answer her? Yes, some people have a
conscience, many people have a conscience, but
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unfortunately there are people who don’t have a conscience, that is true. You
are lucky, Merry, you have a very well-developed conscience. It’s admirable for
someone your age to have such a conscience. We’re proud of having a daughter who
has so much conscience and who cares so much about the well-being of others and
who is able to sympathize with the sufferings of others….
She couldn’t sleep alone in her room for a week. The Swede carefully read the
papers in order to be able to explain to her why the monk had done what he did.
It had to do with the South Vietnamese president, General Diem, it had to do
with corruption, with elections, with complex regional and political conflicts,
it had to do with something about Buddhism itself… . But for her it had only
to do with the extremes to which gentle people have to resort in a world where
the great majority are without an ounce of con-| science.
Just when she seemed to have gotten over the self-immolation of I that elderly
Buddhist monk on that street in South Vietnam and began to be able to sleep in
her own room and without a light on and without awakening screaming two and
three times a night, it happened again, another monk in Vietnam set himself on
fire, then a third, then a fourth … and once that started up he found that he
couldn’t keep her away from the television set. If she missed a self-immolation
on the evening news, she got up early to see it on the morning news before she
left for school. They did not know how to stop her. What was she doing by
watching and watching as I though she intended never to stop watching? He wanted
her to be not upset, but not to be not upset like this. Was she simply trying to
I make sense of it? To master her fear of it? Was she trying to figure lout what
it was like to be able to do something like that to yourself? I Was she
imagining herself as one of those monks? Was she watch-ling because she was
still appalled or was she watching now because I she was excited? What was
starting to unsettle him, to frighten him, was the idea that Merry was less
* * *
horrified now than curious, and soon he himself became obsessed, though not,
like her, by the self-immolators in Vietnam but by the change of demeanor in
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his eleven-year-old. That she’d always wanted to know things had made him
tremendously proud of her from the time she was small, but did he really want
her to want to know so much about something like this?
Is it a sin to take your own life? How can the others stand by and just watch?
Why don’t they stop him? Why don’t they put out the flames? They stand by and
let it be televised. They want it televised. Where has their morality gone? What
about the morality of the television crews who are doing the filming? … Were
these the questions she was asking herself? Were they a necessary part of her
intellectual development? He didn’t know. She watched in total silence, as still
as the monk at the center of the flames, and afterward she would say nothing;
even if he spoke to her, questioned her, she just sat transfixed before that set
for minutes on end, her gaze focused somewhere else than on the flickering
screen, focused inward—inward where the coherence and the certainty were
supposed to be, where everything she did not know was initiating a gigantic
upheaval, where nothing that registered would ever fade away….
Though he didn’t know how to stop her, he did try to find ways to divert her
attention, to make her forget this madness that was going on halfway around the
world for reasons having nothing to do with her or her family—he took her at
night to drive golf balls with him, he took her to a couple of Yankee games, he
took her and Dawn for a quick trip down to the factory in Puerto Rico and a week
of vacation in Ponce by the beach, and then, one day, she did forget, but not
because of anything he had done. It had to do with the immolations—they stopped.
There were five, six, seven immolations and then there were no more, and shortly
thereafter Merry did become herself again, thinking again about things immediate
to her daily life and more appropriate to her years.
When this South Vietnamese president, Diem, the man against whom the martyred
Buddhist monks had been directing their protest—when some months later he was
assassinated (according to a CBS Sunday morning show, assassinated by the USA,
by the CIA,
· 156 ·
who had propped him up in power in the first place), the news seemed to pass
Merry by, and the Swede didn’t convey it to her. By then this place called
Vietnam no longer even existed for Merry, if it ever had except as an alien,
unimaginable backdrop for a ghastly TV spectacle that had embedded itself in her
impressionable mind when she was eleven years old.
She never spoke again of the martyrdom of the Buddhist monks, even after she
became so committed to her own political protest. The fate of those monks back
in 1963 appeared to have nothing whatsoever to do with what galvanized into
expression, in 1968, a newly hatched vehemence against capitalist America’s
imperialist involvement in a peasant war of national liberation… and yet her
father spent days and nights trying to convince himself that no other
explanation existed, that nothing else sufficiently awful had ever happened to
her, nothing causal even remotely large enough or shocking enough to explain how
his daughter could
be the bomber.
Five years pass. Angela Davis, a black philosophy professor of about Rita
Cohen’s age—born in Alabama in 1944, eight years before the birth in New Jersey
of the Rimrock Bomber—a Communist professor at UCLA who is against the war, is
* * *
tried in San Francisco for kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy. She is charged
with supplying guns used in an armed attempt to free three black San Quentin
convicts during their trial. A shotgun that killed the trial judge is said to
have been purchased by her only days before the courthouse battle. For two
months she lived underground, dodging the FBI, until she was apprehended in New
York and extradited to California. All around the world, as far away as France
and Algeria and the Soviet Union, her supporters claim that she is the victim of
a political frame-up. Everywhere she is transported by the police as a prisoner,
blacks and whites are waiting in the nearby streets, holding up placards for the
TV cameras and shouting, “Free Angela! End political repression! End racism! End
the war!”
Her hair reminds the Swede of Rita Cohen. Every time he sees
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that bush encircling her head he is reminded of what he should have done that
afternoon in the hotel. He should not have let her get away from him, no matter
what.
Now he watches the news to see Angela Davis. He reads everything he can about
her. He knows that Angela Davis can get him to his daughter. He remembers how,
when Merry was still at home, he went into her room one Saturday when she was
off in New York, opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and, seated at her
desk, read through everything in there, all that political stuff, the pamphlets,
