Flying to America

by Donald Barthelme

  — Someone’s sitting on our garbage can?

  — Maybe that’s not illegal?

  — Oh my God he’s got it out in his hands. Oh my god he’s pointing his gun at it.

  — Oh my God. Shall we call the cops?

  — Open the window.

  — Open the window?

  — Yes open the window.

  — O.K. the window’s open.

  — William! William, wherever you are!

  — You’re going to say you’re sorry!

  — William! I’m sorry!

  — Andy’s put everything away!

  — William I’m sorry I let my brother hoist you up the mast in that crappy jury-rigged bosun’s chair while everybody laughed! William I’m sorry I could build better fires than you could! I’m sorry my stack of Christmas cards was always bigger than yours!

  — Andy quails. That’s good.

  — William I’m sorry you don’t ski and I’m sorry about your back and I’m sorry I invented bop jogging which you couldn’t do! I’m sorry I loved Antigua! I’m sorry my mind wandered when you talked about the army! I’m sorry I was superior in argument! I’m sorry you slit open my bicycle tires looking for incriminating letters that you didn’t find! You’ll never find them!

  — Wow babe that’s terrific babe. Very terrific.

  — William! I’m sorry I looked at Sam but he was so handsome, so handsome, who could not! I’m sorry I slept with Sam! I’m sorry about the library books! I’m sorry about Pete! I’m sorry I never played the guitar you gave me! William! I’m sorry I married you and I’ll never do it again!

  — Wow.

  — Was I sorry enough?

  — Well Andy’s run away howling.

  — Was I sorry enough?

  — Terrific. Very terrific.

  — Yes I feel much better.

  — Didn’t I tell you?

  — You told me.

  — Are you O.K.?

  — Yes I’m fine. Just a little out of breath.

  — Well. What’s next? Do a little honky-tonking maybe, hit a few bars?

  — We could. If you feel like it. Was I sorry enough?

  — No.

  Florence Green Is 81

  Dinner with Florence Green. The old babe is on a kick tonight: I want to go to some other country, she announces. Everyone wonders what this can mean. But Florence says nothing more: no explanation, no elaboration, after a satisfied look around the table bang! she is asleep again. The girl at Florence’s right is new here and does not understand. I give her an ingratiating look (a look that says, “There is nothing to worry about, I will explain everything later in the privacy of my quarters Kathleen”). Lentils vegetate in the depths of the fourth principal river of the world, the Ob, in Siberia, 3200 miles. We are talking about Quemoy and Matsu. “It’s a matter of leading from strength. What is the strongest possible move on our part? To deny them the islands even though the islands are worthless in themselves.” Baskerville, a sophomore at the Famous Writers School in Westport, Connecticut, which he attends with the object of becoming a famous writer, is making his excited notes. The new girl’s boobies are like my secretary’s knees, very prominent and irritating. Florence began the evening by saying, grandly, “The upstairs bathroom leaks you know.” What does Herman Kahn think about Quemoy and Matsu? I can’t remember, I can’t remember . . .

  Oh Baskerville! you silly son of a bitch, how can you become a famous writer without first having worried about your life, is it the right kind of life, does it have the right people in it, is it going well? Instead you are beglamoured by J. D. Ratcliff. The smallest city in the United States with a population over 100,000 is Santa Ana, California, where 100,350 citizens nestle together in the Balboa blue Pacific evenings worrying about their lives. I am a young man but very brilliant, very ingratiating, I adopt this ingratiating tone because I can’t help myself (for fear of boring you). I edit with my left hand a small magazine, very scholarly, very brilliant, called The Journal of Tension Reduction (social-psychological studies, learned disputation, letters-to-the-editor, anxiety in rats). Isn’t that distasteful? Certainly it is distasteful but if Florence Green takes her money to another country who will pay the printer? answer me that. From an article in The Journal of Tension Reduction: “One source of concern in the classic encounter between patient and psychoanalyst is the patient’s fear of boring the doctor.” The doctor no doubt is also worrying about his life, unfolding with ten minutes between hours to smoke a cigarette in and wash his hands in. Reader, you who have already been told more than you want to know about the river Ob, 3200 miles long, in Siberia, we have roles to play, thou and I: you are the doctor (washing your hands between hours), and I, I am, I think, the nervous dreary patient. I am free associating, brilliantly, brilliantly, to put you into the problem. Or for fear of boring you: which? The Journal of Tension Reduction is concerned with everything from global tensions (drums along the Ob) to interpersonal relations (Baskerville and the new girl). There is, we feel, too much tension in the world, I myself am a perfect example, my stomach is like a clenched fist. Notice the ingratiating tone here? the only way I can relax it, I refer to the stomach, is by introducing quarts of Fleischmann’s Gin. Fleischmann’s I have found is a magnificent source of tension reduction, I favor the establishment of comfort stations providing free Fleischmann’s on every street corner of the city Santa Ana, California, and all other cities. Be serious, can’t you?

  The new girl is a thin thin sketchy girl with a big chest looming over the gazpacho and black holes around her eyes that are very promising. Surely when she opens her mouth toads will pop out. I am tempted to remove my shirt and show her my trim midsection sporting chiseled abdominals, my superior shoulders and brilliantly developed pectoral-latis-simus tie-in. Jackson called himself a South Carolinian, and his biographer, Amos Kendall, recorded his birthplace as Lancaster County, S.C.; but Parton has published documentary evidence to show that Jackson was born in Union County, N.C., less than a quarter mile from the South Carolina line. Jackson is my great hero even though he had, if contemporary reports are to be believed, lousy lats. I am also a weightlifter and poet and admirer of Jackson and the father of one abortion and four miscarriages; who among you has such a record and no wife? Baskerville’s difficulty not only at the Famous Writers School in Westport, Connecticut, but in every part of the world, is that he is slow. “That’s a slow boy, that one,” his first teacher said. “That boy is what you call real slow,” his second teacher said. “That’s a slow son of a bitch,” his third teacher said. And they were right, right, entirely correct, still I learned about Andrew Jackson and abortions, many of you walking the streets of Santa Ana, California, and all other cities know nothing about either. “In such cases the patient sees the doctor as a highly sophisticated consumer of outré material, a connoisseur of exotic behavior. Therefore, he tends to propose himself as more colorful, more eccentric (or more ill) than he really is; or he is witty, or he fantasticates.” You see? Isn’t that sensible? In the magazine we run many useful and sensible pieces of this kind, portages through the whirlpool-country of the mind. In the magazine I cannot openly advocate the use of Fleischmann’s Gin in tension reduction but I did run an article titled “Alcohol Reconsidered” written by a talented soak of my acquaintance which drew many approving if carefully worded letters from secret drinkers in psychology departments all over this vast, dry, and misunderstood country . . .

  “That’s a slow son of a bitch,” his third teacher remarked of him, at a meeting called to discuss the formation of a special program for Inferior Students, in which Baskerville’s name had so to speak rushed to the fore. The young Baskerville, shrinking along the beach brushing sand from his dreary Texas eyes, his sad fingers gripping $20 worth of pamphlets secured by post from Joe Weider, “Trainer of Terror Fighters” (are they, Baskerville wondered, like fire fighters? do they fight terror? or do they, rather, inspire it? the latter his, Baskerville’s, impossible goal), was eve
n then incubating plans for his novel The Children’s Army which he is attending the Famous Writers School to learn how to write. “You will do famously, Baskerville,” said the Registrar, the exciting results of Baskerville’s Talent Test lying unexamined before him. “Run along now to the Cashier’s Office.” “I am writing doctor an immense novel to be called The Children’s Army!” (Why do I think the colored doctor’s name, he with his brown hand on the red radishes, is Pamela Hansford Johnson? Why do I think?) Florence Green is a small fat girl eighty-one years old, old with blue legs and very rich. Rock pools deep in the earth, I salute the shrewdness of whoever filled you with Texaco! Texaco breaks my heart, Texaco is particularly poignant. Florence Green who was not always a small fat girl once made a voyage with her husband Mr. Green on the Graf Zeppelin. In the grand salon, she remembers, there was a grand piano, the great pianist Mandrake the Magician was also on board but could not be persuaded to play. The Zeppelins could not use helium; the government of this country refused to sell helium to the owners of the Zeppelins. The title of my second book will be I believe Hydrogen After Lakehurst. For the first half of the evening we heard about the problem of the upstairs bathroom: “I had a man come out and look at it, and he said it would be two hundred and twenty-five dollars for a new one. I said I didn’t want a new one, I just wanted this one fixed.” Shall I offer to obtain a new one for Florence, carved out of solid helium? would that be ingratiating? Does she worry about her life? “He said mine was old-fashioned and they didn’t make parts for that kind anymore.” Now she sleeps untidily at the head of the table, except for her single, mysterious statement, delivered with the soup (I want to go to some other country!), she has said nothing about her life whatsoever . . . The diameter of the world at the Poles is 7899.99 miles whereas the diameter of the world at the Equator is 7926.68 miles, mark it and strike it. I am sure the colored man across from me is a doctor, he has a doctor’s doctorly air of being needed and necessary. He leans into the conversation as if to say: Just make me Secretary of State and then you will see some action. “I’ll tell you one thing, there are a hell of a lot of Chinese over there.” Surely the very kidneys of wisdom, Florence Green has only one kidney, I have a kidney stone, Baskerville was stoned by the massed faculty of the Famous Writers School upon presentation of his first lesson: he was accused of formalism. It is well known that Florence adores doctors, why didn’t I announce myself, in the beginning, from the very first, as a doctor? Then I could say that the money was for a very important research project (use of radioactive tracers in reptiles) with very important ramifications in stomach cancer (the small intestine is very like a reptile). Then I would get the money with much less difficulty, cancer frightens Florence, the money would rain down like fallout in New Mexico. I am a young man but very brilliant, very ingratiating, I edit with my left hand a small magazine called . . . did I explain that? And you accepted my explanation? Her name is not really Kathleen, it is Joan Graham, when we were introduced she said, “Oh are you a native of Dallas Mr. Baskerville?” No Joan baby I am a native of Bengazi sent here by the UN to screw your beautiful ass right down into the ground, that is not what I said but what I should have said, it would have been brilliant. When she asked him what he did Baskerville identified himself as an American weightlifter and poet (that is to say: a man stronger and more eloquent than other men). “It moves,” Mandrake said, pointing to the piano, and although no one else could detect the slightest movement, the force of his personality was so magical that he was not contradicted (the instrument sat in the salon, Florence says, as solidly as Gibraltar in the sea).

  The man who has been settling the hash of the mainland Chinese searches the back of his neck, where there is what appears to be a sebaceous cyst (I can clear that up for you; my instrument will be a paper on the theory of games). What if Mandrake had played, though, what if he had seated himself before the instrument, raised his hands, and . . . what? The Principal Seas, do you want to hear about the Principal Seas? Florence has been prodded awake; people are beginning to ask questions. If not this country, then what country? Italy? “No,” Florence says smiling through her emeralds, “not Italy. I’ve been to Italy. Although Mr. Green was very fond of Italy.” “To bore the doctor is to become, for this patient, a case similar to other cases; the patient strives mightily to establish his uniqueness. This is also, of course, a tactic for evading the psychoanalytic issue.” The first thing the All-American Boy said to Florence Green at the very brink of their acquaintanceship was “It is closing time in the gardens of the West Cyril Connolly.” This remark pleased her, it was a pleasing remark, on the strength of this remark Baskerville was invited again, on the second occasion he made a second remark, which was “Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded Gertrude Stein.” Joan is like one of those marvelous Vogue girls, a tease in a half-slip on Mykonos, bare from the belly up on the rocks. “It moves,” Mandrake said, and the piano raised itself a few inches, magically, and swayed from side to side in a careful Baldwin dance. “It moves,” the other passengers agreed, under the spell of posthypnotic suggestion. “It moves,” Joan says, pointing at the gazpacho, which sways from side to side with a secret Heinz trembling movement. I give the soup a serious warning, couched in the strongest possible terms, and Joan grins gratefully not at me but at Pamela Hansford Johnson. The Virgin Islands maybe? “We were there in 1925, Mr. Green had indigestion, I sat up all night with his stomach and the flies, the flies were something you wouldn’t believe.” They are asking I think the wrong questions, the question is not where but why? “I was reading the other day that the average age of Chiang’s enlisted men is thirty-seven. You can’t do much with an outfit like that.” This is true, I myself am thirty-seven and if Chiang must rely on men of my sort then he might as well kiss the Mainland goodbye. Oh, there is nothing better than intelligent conversation except thrashing about in bed with a naked girl and Egmont Light Italic.

  Despite his slowness already remarked upon which perhaps inhibited his ingestion of the splendid curriculum that had been prepared for him, Baskerville never failed to be “promoted,” but on the contrary was always “promoted,” the reason for this being perhaps that his seat was needed for another child (Baskerville then being classified, in spite of his marked growth and gorgeous potential, as a child). There were some it was true who never thought he would extend himself to six feet, still he learned about Andrew Jackson, helium-hydrogen, and abortions, where are my mother and father now? answer me that. On a circular afternoon in June 1945 — it was raining, Florence says, hard enough to fill the Brazen Sea — she was sitting untidily on a chaise in the north bedroom (on the wall of the north bedroom there are twenty identically framed photographs of Florence from eighteen to eighty-one, she was a beauty at eighteen) reading a copy of Life. It was the issue containing the first pictures from Buchenwald, she could not look away, she read the text or a little of the text, then she vomited. When she recovered she read the article again, but without understanding it. What did exterminated mean? It meant nothing, an eyewitness account mentioned a little girl with one leg thrown alive on top of a truckload of corpses to be burned. Florence was sick. She went immediately to the Greenbrier, a resort in West Virginia. Later she permitted me to tell her about the Principal Seas, the South China, the Yellow, the Andaman, the Sea of Okhotsk. “I spotted you for a weightlifter,” Joan says. “But not for a poet,” Baskerville replies. “What have you written?” she asks. “Mostly I make remarks,” I say. “Remarks are not literature,” she says. “Then there’s my novel,” I say, “it will be twelve years old Tuesday.” “Published?” she asks. “Not finished,” I say, “however, it’s very violent and necessary. It has to do with this Army see, made up of children, young children but I mean really well armed with M-1’s, carbines, .30 and .50 caliber machine guns, 105 mortars, recoilless rifles, the whole works. The central figure is the General, who is fifteen. One day the Army appears in the city, in a park, and takes up positions. Then it
begins killing the people. Do you understand?” “I don’t think I’d like it,” Joan says. “I don’t like it either,” Baskerville says, “but it doesn’t make any difference that I don’t like it. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as though it were a painful duty Oscar Wilde.”

  Does Florence worry about her life? “He said mine was old-fashioned and they didn’t make parts for that kind any more.” Last year Florence tried to join the Peace Corps and when she was refused, telephoned the President to complain. “I have always admired the work of the Andrews Sisters,” Joan says. I feel feverish; will you take my temperature doctor? Baskerville that simple preliterate soaks up all the Taylor’s New York State malmsey in reach meanwhile wondering about his Grand Design. France? Japan? “Not Japan dear, we had a lovely time there but I wouldn’t want to go back now. France is where my little niece is, they have twenty-two acres near Versailles, he’s a count and a biochemist, isn’t that wonderful?” The others nod, they know what is wonderful. The Principal Seas are wonderful, the Important Lakes of the World are wonderful, the Metric System is wonderful, let us measure something together Florence Green baby. I will trade you a walleyed hectometer for a single golden micron. The table is hushed, like a crowd admiring 300 million dollars. Did I say that Florence has 300 million dollars? Florence Green is eighty-one with blue legs and has 300 million dollars and in 1932 was in love, airily, with a radio announcer named Norman Brokenshire, with his voice. “Meanwhile Edna Cather’s husband who takes me to church, he’s got a very good job with the Port, I think he does very well, he’s her second husband, the first was Pete Duff who got into all that trouble, where was I? Oh yes when Paul called up and said he wouldn’t come because of his hernia — you heard about his hernia — John said he’d come over and look at it. Mind you I’ve been using the downstairs bathroom all this time.” In fact the whole history of Florence’s radio listenership is of interest. In fact I have decided to write a paper called “The Whole History of Florence Green’s Radio Listenership.” Or perhaps, in the seventeenth-century style, “The Whole and True History of Florence Green’s Radio Listenership.” Or perhaps . . . But I am boring you, I sense it, let me say only that she can still elicit, from her ancient larynx, the special thrilling sound used to introduce Cap-tain Midnight . . . The table is hushed, then, we are all involved in a furious pause, a grand parenthesis (here I will insert a description of Florence’s canes. Florence’s canes line a special room, the room in which her cane collection is kept. There are hundreds of them: smooth black Fred Astaire canes and rough chewed alpenstocks, blackthorns and quarterstaffs, cudgels and swagger sticks, bamboo and ironwood, maple and slippery elm, canes from Tangier, Maine, Zurich, Panama City, Quebec, Togoland, the Dakotas and Borneo, resting in notched compartments that resemble arm racks in an armory. Everywhere Florence goes, she purchases one or more canes. Some she has made herself, stripping the bark from the green unseasoned wood, drying them carefully, applying layer on layer of a special varnish, then polishing them, endlessly, in the evenings, after dark and dinner) as vast as the Sea of Okhotsk, 590,000 square miles. I was sitting, I remember, in a German restaurant on Lexington, blowing bubbles in my seidel, at the next table there were six Germans, young Germans, they were laughing and talking. At Florence Green’s here-and-now table there is a poet named Onward Christian or something whose spectacles have wide silver sidepieces rather than the dull brown horn sidepieces of true poets and weightlifters, and whose poems invariably begin: “Through all my clangorous hours . . .” I am worried about his remarks, are his remarks better than my remarks? We are elected after all on the strength of our glamorous remarks, what is he saying to her? to Joan? what sort of eyewash is he pouring in her ear? I am tempted to walk briskly over and ask to see his honorable discharge from the Famous Writers School. What could be more glamorous or necessary than The Children’s Army, “An army of youth bearing the standard of truth” as we used to sing in my fourth-grade classroom at Our Lady of the Sorrows under the unforgiving eye of Sister Scholastica who knew how many angels could dance on the head of a pin . . .