In Persuasion Nation

by George Saunders

  No problem, the polar bear thinks, in case the symbol is reading his mind at that moment, no problem, no problem at all, just going to work now.

  The polar bear walks for miles through the desert, mumbling encouragement to himself. Yes, okay, that moment when the axe goes in is bad. The moment immediately after, when the Eskimo says something in the Eskimo language, and the Eskimo kids laugh at him as he stumbles out of the igloo blinded by pain, and the subtitle appears (“Yo, Keep Yet Pawz Off My Cheetz”), not so great either. The long walk home, dripping blood into the fresh white snow, okay, also not the best.

  But what’s he supposed to do? Fight with GOD?

  He feels a chill. It starts to snow. Everything goes arctic. On his left is the familiar glacial cliff.

  The penguins he always passes nod gravely.

  The igloo comes into sight.

  Is anyone home? They are not. He begins madly salivating.

  Filled with dread, he enters the igloo, takes the usual single handful of Cheetos, waits.

  In rush the Eskimo children, fresh from sledding. Behind them comes their father, with axe, enraged. But for the first time the polar bear also notices, in the man’s eyes, a deep sadness. Of course, of course, it makes perfect sense! How much fun can it be, driving an axe into the head of a perfectly nice polar bear, day after day, in front of your kids? He’s heard through the grapevine that the Eskimo father drinks heavily and has lately started having violent nightmares in which he turns the axe on his own wife and children.

  The truth is, this stupid system causes suffering wherever you look. He’s seen the puppet-boy returning from work, sobbing from his excruciating leg bums. He’s watched Voltaire, blinded by the bright sun shining in his extremely wide-open eyes, struggling to find the store where he buys his French bread. He’s heard the wives of the headless working-class guys fall silent whenever one of the headless working-class guys insists he’s perfectly capable of driving the kids to school.

  And the crazy thing is, it’s not just the victims who suffer. He’s seen the T. rex moping around the quarry, asking passersby if the working-class guys are still mad at him. He’s seen the can of Raid absentmindedly spraying its contents around, even when there aren’t any bugs, because it feels so bad about what it did to Voltaire, whose work it actually admires.

  The polar bear looks directly into the Eskimo father’s face.

  I know you don’t want to do this, he tries to communicate with his eyes. I forgive you. And please forgive me for my part in this. I am, after all, breaking and entering.

  With his eyes the Eskimo father communicates: Same here, totally. This whole thing is just a big crock of shit as far as I’m concerned.

  The polar bear communicates: Better swing that axe, friend. It’s getting late.

  The Eskimo communicates: I know, I know it.

  And then he does it.

  As the polar bear stumbles out of the igloo, blinded by pain, he thinks about his mother, who, all through his childhood, again and again, while out gathering flowers, nearly collided with a guy in jodhpurs, who then shot her, and after being shot, she was made into a rug, which was then, in montage, sold and resold many times, until finally it was shown being cleaned, decades later, with RugBrite, by hippies, after a big hippie party. He thinks about his father, who, every day of his working life, was given a rectal exam by Santa Claus, in the middle of which Santa Claus, who had allergies, sneezed. That was the big joke: When Santa sneezed, Dad winced.

  Was selling what all that suffering was about? Selling? Selling RugBrite, selling AllerNase?

  Oh, how should he know? He’s just a polar bear, and half the time he’s got an axe in his head, which doesn’t exactly tend to maximize one’s analytical abilities, and usually is laying around his house with the icepack on, thinking basically nothing but Ouch Ouch Ouch.

  The polar bear leans against a Christmas tree, trying to catch his breath.

  It can’t be true. It simply can’t be.

  But it is true. He feels it in his heart.

  The polar bear stumbles past the penguins. Noting his agitation, and the fact that he goes right instead of left at the large tuft of tundra grass, the penguins waddle around excitedly, gossiping among themselves.

  All gossiping ceases when the polar bear steps to the edge of the huge glacial cliff.

  Then he throws himself off.

  Falling, his only fear is that the green symbol will appear and miraculously save him. But no. The green symbol, it would appear, is not truly omniscient after all.

  Which means, the polar bear realizes with a start, that the green symbol may not actually be GOD at alt. That is, the symbol may not be the real actual GOD. He may just be a very powerful faker. He may have a touch of GOD, which he has distorted. He may be, in other words, a kind of secondary GOD, a being so powerful, relative to him, the polar bear, that he appears to be a GOD. The real actual GOD may not even know about the way His universe is being run roughshod over by this twisted, false GOD! The real actual GOD, the polar bear realizes in his last instant of life, has been heretofore entirely unknown to him! And yet this true GOD must exist, and be knowable, since the idea of this perfect and merciful GOD is emanating, fully formed, from within him, the polar bear! He has, in fact, already taken his first step toward knowledge of the true GOD, via his rejection of the false GOD!

  Shoot, dang it, if only he could live!

  The polar bear hits the ground and, because no one in this sub-universe can die without the express consent of certain important parties, does not die, but bounces.

  As the penguins stand on the edge of the cliff, looking cautiously down, he rockets up past them.

  “GOD is real!” he shouts. “And we may know Him!”

  The penguins watch him reach the apex of his bounce and start back down.

  “The green symbol is a false GOD!” he shouts. “A false GOD, obsessed with violence and domination! Reject him! Let us begin anew! Free your minds! Free your minds and live! There is a gentler and more generous GOD within us, if only we will look!”

  The penguins, always easily embarrassed, are especially embarrassed by this, and, looking around to verify that the tundra’s vast emptiness precludes anyone having witnessed them actually listening to this heretical subversive nonsense, waddle away to sit on their large ugly eggs and gossip about the fact that the polar bear, about whom they’ve always had their doubts, has finally gone completely insane.

  “Talk about crazy,” one of them finally says, in what they all instantaneously recognize as the sacred first utterance of an entirely new blessed vignette. “I myself am completely crazy for Skittles.”

  Then they all stand. As in a beautiful dream, their eggs have been miraculously transformed beneath them into large colorful Skittles. The penguins look heavenward in deep gratitude, then manically begin dancing the mindless penguin dance of joy.

  IV.

  When they come to destroy us, they will not use force, but will turn our words against us; therefore we must not be slaves to what we have previously said, or claimed to be true, or know to be true, but instead must choose our words and our truths such that these will yield the most effective and desirable results. Because, in the end, what is more honest than preserving one’s preferred way of life? What is truth, if not an ongoing faith in, and continuing hope for, that which one feels and knows in one’s heart to be right, all temporary and ephemeral contraindications notwithstanding?

  – Bernard “Ed” Alton,

  Taskbook for the New Nation,

  Chapter 9. “Shortfalls of the Honesty Paradigm”

  bohemians

  In a lovely urban coincidence, the last two houses on our block were both occupied by widows who had lost their husbands in Eastern European pogroms. Dad called them the Bohemians. He called anyone white with an accent a Bohemian. Whenever he saw one of the Bohemians, he greeted her by mispronouncing the Czech word for “door.” Neither Bohemian was Czech, but both were polite, so w
hen Dad said “door” to them they answered cordially, as if he weren’t perennially schlockered.

  Mrs. Poltoi, the stouter Bohemian, had spent the war in a crawl space, splitting a daily potato with five cousins. Consequently she was bitter and claustrophobic and loved food. If you ate something while standing near her, she stared at it going into your mouth. She wore only black. She said the Catholic Church was a jewelled harlot drinking the blood of the poor. She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief. When our ball rolled onto her property, she seized it and waddled into her back yard and pitched it into the quarry.

  Mrs. Hopanlitski, on the other hand, was thin, and joyfully made pipe-cleaner animals. When I brought home one of her crude dogs in top hats, Mom said, “Take over your Mold-A-Hero. To her, it will seem like the toy of a king.” To Mom, the camps, massacres, and railroad sidings of twenty years before were as unreal as covered wagons. When Mrs. H. claimed her family had once owned serfs, Mom’s attention wandered. She had a tract house in mind. No way was she getting one. We were renting a remodelled garage behind the Giancarlos, and Dad was basically drinking up the sporting-goods store. His N.F.L. helmets were years out of date. I’d stop by after school and find the store closed and Dad getting sloshed among the fake legs with Bennie Delmonico at Prosthetics World.

  Using the Mold-A-Hero, I cast Mrs. H. a plastic Lafayette, and she said she’d keep it forever on her sill. Within a week, she’d given it to Elizabeth the Raccoon. I didn’t mind. Raccoon, an only child like me, had nothing. The Kletz brothers called her Raccoon for the bags she had under her eyes from never sleeping. Her parents fought non-stop. They fought over breakfast. They fought in the yard in their underwear. At dusk they stood on their porch whacking each other with lengths of weather stripping. Raccoon practically had spinal curvature from spending so much time slumped over with misery. When the Kletz brothers called her Raccoon, she indulged them by rubbing her hands together ferally. The nickname was the most attention she’d ever had. Sometimes she’d wish to be hit by a car so she could come back as a true raccoon and track down the Kletzes and give them rabies.

  “Never wish harm on yourself or others,” Mrs. H. said. “You are a lovely child.” Her English was flat and clear, almost like ours.

  “Raccoon, you mean,” Raccoon said. “A lovely raccoon.”

  “A lovely child of God,” Mrs. H. said.

  “Yeah, right,” Raccoon said. “Tell again about the prince.”

  So Mrs. H. told again how she’d stood rapt in her yard watching an actual prince powder his birthmark to invisibility. She remembered the smell of burning compost from the fields, and men in colorful leggings dragging a gutted boar across a wooden bridge. This was before she was forced to become a human pack animal in the Carpathians, carrying the personal belongings of cruel officers. At night, they chained her to a tree. Sometimes they burned her calves with a machine-gun barrel for fun. Which was why she always wore kneesocks. After three years, she’d come home to find her babies in tiny graves. They were, she would say, short-lived but wonderful gifts. She did not now begrudge God for taking them. A falling star is brief, but isn’t one nonetheless glad to have seen it? Her grace made us hate Mrs. Poltoi all the more. What was eating a sixth of a potato every day compared to being chained to a tree? What was being crammed in with a bunch of your cousins compared to having your kids killed?

  The summer I was ten, Raccoon and I, already borderline rejects due to our mutually unravelling households, were joined by Art Siminiak, who had recently made the mistake of inviting the Kletzes in for lemonade. There was no lemonade. Instead, there was Art’s mom and a sailor from Great Lakes passed out naked across the paper-drive stacks on the Siminiaks’ sunporch.

  This new, three-way friendship consisted of slumping in gangways, playing gloveless catch with a Wiffle, trailing hopefully behind kids whose homes could be entered without fear of fiasco.

  Over on Mozart lived Eddie the Vacant. Eddie was seventeen, huge and simple. He could crush a walnut in his bare hand, but first you had to put it there and tell him to do it. Once he’d pinned a “Vacant” sign to his shirt and walked around the neighborhood that way, and the name had stuck. Eddie claimed to see birds. Different birds appeared on different days of the week. Also, there was a Halloween bird and a Christmas bird.

  One day, as Eddie hobbled by, we asked what kind of birds he was seeing.

  “Party birds,” he said. “They got big streamers coming out they butts.”

  “You having a party?” said Art. “You having a homo party?”

  “I gone have a birthday party,” said Eddie, blinking shyly.

  “Your dad know?” Raccoon said.

  “No, he don’t yet,” said Eddie.

  His plans for the party were private and illogical. We peppered him with questions, hoping to get him to further embarrass himself. The party would be held in his garage. As far as the junk car in there, he would push it out by hand. As far as the oil on the floor, he would soak it up using Handi Wipes. As far as music, he would play a trumpet.

  “What are you going to play the trumpet with?” said Art. “Your asshole?”

  “No, I not gone play it with that,” Eddie said. “I just gone use my lips, O.K.?”

  As far as girls, there would be girls; he knew many girls, from his job managing the Drake Hotel, he said. As far as food, there would be food, including pudding dumplings.

  “You’re the manager of the Drake Hotel,” Raccoon said.

  “Hey, I know how to get the money for pudding dumplings!” Eddie said.

  Then he rang Poltoi’s bell and asked for a contribution. She said for what. He said for him. She said to what end. He looked at her blankly and asked for a contribution. She asked him to leave the porch. He asked for a contribution. Somewhere, he’d got the idea that, when asking for a contribution, one angled to sit on the couch. He started in, and she pushed him back with a thick forearm. Down the front steps he went, ringing the iron bannister with his massive head.

  He got up and staggered away, a little blood on his scalp.

  “Learn to leave people be!” Poltoi shouted after him.

  Ten minutes later, Eddie, Sr. stood on Poltoi’s porch, a hulking effeminate tailor too cowed to use his bulk for anything but butting open the jamming door at his shop.

  “Since when has it become the sport to knock unfortunates down stairs?” he asked.

  “He was not listen,” she said. “I tell him no. He try to come inside.”

  “With all respect,” he said, “it is in my son’s nature to perhaps be not so responsive.”

  “Someone so unresponse, keep him indoors,” she said. “He is big as a man. And I am old lady.”

  “Never has Eddie presented a danger to anyone,” Eddie, Sr., said.

  “I know my rights,” she said. “Next time, I call police.”

  But, having been pushed down the stairs, Eddie the Vacant couldn’t seem to stay away.

  “Off this porch,” Poltoi said through the screen when he showed up the next day, offering her an empty cold-cream jar for three dollars.

  “We gone have so many snacks,” he said. “And if I drink a alcohol drink, then watch out. Because I ain’t allowed. I dance too fast.”

  He was trying the doorknob now, showing how fast he would dance if alcohol was served.

  “Please, off this porch!” she shouted.

  “Please, off this porch!” he shouted back, doubling at the waist in wacky laughter.

  Poltoi called the cops. Normally, Lieutenant Brusci would have asked Eddie what bird was in effect that day and given him a ride home in his squad. But this was during the OneCity fiasco. To cut graft, cops were being yanked off their regular beats and replaced by cops from other parts of town. A couple of Armenians from South Shore showed up and dragged Eddie off the porch in a club lock so tight he claimed the birds he was seeing were beakless.

  “I’ll give you a beak, Frankenstein,” said one of the Armenians, tightening the
choke hold.

  Eddie entered the squad with all the fluidity of a hatrack. Art and Raccoon and I ran over to Eddie, Sr.’s tailor shop, above the Marquee, which had sunk to porn. When Eddie, Sr. saw us, he stopped his Singer by kicking out the plug. From downstairs came a series of erotic moans.

  Eddie, Sr. rushed to the hospital with his Purple Heart and some photos of Eddie as a grinning, wet-chinned kid on a pony. He found Eddie handcuffed to a bed, with an I.V. drip and a smashed face. Apparently, he’d bitten one of the Armenians. Bail was set at three hundred. The tailor shop made zilch. Eddie, Sr.’s fabrics were a lexicon of yesteryear. Dust coated a bright-yellow sign that read “Zippers Repaired in Jiffy.”

  “Jail for that kid, I admit, don’t make total sense,” the judge said. “Three months in the Anston. Best I can do.”

  The Anston Center for Youth was a red brick former forge now yarded in barbed wire. After their shifts, the guards held loud, hooting orgies kitty-corner at Zem’s Lamplighter. Skinny immigrant women arrived at Zem’s in station wagons and emerged hours later adjusting their stockings. From all over Chicago kids were sent to the Anston, kids who’d only ever been praised for the level of beatings they gave and received and their willingness to carve themselves up. One Anston kid had famously hired another kid to run over his foot. Another had killed his mother’s lover with a can opener. A third had sliced open his own eyelid with a pop-top on a dare.

  Eddie the Vacant disappeared into the Anston in January and came out in March.

  To welcome him home, Eddie, Sr., had the neighborhood kids over. Eddie the Vacant looked so bad even the Kletzes didn’t joke about how bad he looked. His nose was off center and a scald mark ran from ear to chin. When you got too close, his hands shot up. When the cake was served, he dropped his plate, shouting, “Leave a guy alone!”

  Our natural meanness now found a purpose. Led by the Kletzes, we cut through Poltoi’s hose, bashed out her basement windows with ball-peens, pushed her little shopping cart over the edge of the quarry and watched it end-over-end into the former Slag Ravine.