Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  At this time (2:45 P.M.) the demonstrators were approached by a group of youths between the ages I would say of sixteen and twenty-one. They were dressed in hood jackets, T-shirts, tight pants etc. and were very obviously delinquents from bad environments and broken homes where they had received no love. They ringed the pickets in a threatening manner. There were about seven of them. The leader (and Marie, he wasn’t the oldest; he was younger than some of them, tall, with a peculiar face, blank and intelligent at the same time) walked around looking at our signs with exaggerated curiosity. “What are you guys,” he said finally, “some kind of creeps or something?”

  Henry Mackie replied quietly that the pickets were American citizens pursuing their right to demonstrate peaceably under the Constitution.

  The leader looked at Henry Mackie. “You’re flits, you guys, huh?” he said. He then snatched a handful of leaflets out of Edward Asher’s hands, and when Edward Asher attempted to recover them, danced away out of reach while two others stood in Asher’s way. “What do you flits think you’re doin’?” he said. “What is this shit?”

  “You haven’t got any right . . .” Henry Mackie started to say, but the leader of the youths moved very close to him then.

  “What do you mean, you don’t believe in God?” he said. The other ones moved in closer too.

  “That is not the question,” Henry Mackie said. “Belief or nonbelief is not at issue. The situation remains the same whether you believe or not. The human condition is . . .”

  “Listen,” the leader said, “I thought all you guys went to church every day. Now you tell me that flits don’t believe in God. You putting me on?”

  Henry Mackie repeated that belief was not involved, and said that it was, rather, a question of man helpless in the grip of a definition of himself that he had not drawn, that could not be altered by human action, and that was in fundamental conflict with every human notion of what should obtain. The pickets were simply subjecting this state of affairs to a radical questioning, he said.

  “You’re putting me on,” the youth said, and attempted to kick Henry Mackie in the groin, but Mackie turned away in time. However the other youths then jumped the pickets, right in the middle of Rockefeller Center. Henry Mackie was thrown to the pavement and kicked repeatedly in the head, Edward Asher’s coat was ripped off his back and he sustained many blows in the kidneys and elsewhere, and Howard Ettle was given a broken rib by a youth called “Cutter” who shoved him against a wall and smashed him viciously even though bystanders tried to interfere (a few of them). All this happened in a very short space of time. The pickets’ signs were broken and smashed and their leaflets scattered everywhere. A policeman summoned by bystanders tried to catch the youths but they got away through the lobby of the Associated Press building and he returned empty-handed. Medical aid was summoned for the pickets. Photos were taken.

  “Senseless violence,” Edward Asher said later. “They didn’t understand that . . .”

  “On the contrary,” Henry Mackie said, “they understand everything better than anybody.”

  The next evening, at 8 P.M. Henry Mackie delivered his lecture in the upstairs meeting room at the Playmor Lanes, as had been announced in the leaflet. The crowd was very small but attentive and interested. Henry Mackie had his head bandaged in a white bandage. He delivered his lecture titled “What Is To Be Done?” with good diction and enunciation and in a strong voice. He was very eloquent. And eloquence, Henry Mackie says, is really all any of us can hope for.

  Up, Aloft in the Air

  BUCK SAW now that the situation between Nancy and himself was considerably more serious than he had imagined. She exhibited unmistakable signs of a leaning in his direction. The leaning was acute, sometimes he thought she would fall, sometimes he thought she would not fall, sometimes he didn’t care, and in every way tried to prove himself the man that he was. It meant dressing in unusual clothes and the breaking of old habits. But how could he shatter her dreams after all they had endured together? after all they had jointly seen and done since first identifying Cleveland as Cleveland? “Nancy,” he said, “I’m too old. I’m not nice. There is my son to consider, Peter.” Her hand touched the area between her breasts where hung a decoration, dating he estimated from the World War I period—that famous period!

  The turbojet, their “ship,” landed on its wheels. Buck wondered about the wheels. Why didn’t they shear off when the aircraft landed so hard with a sound like thunder? Many had wondered before him. Wondering was part of the history of lighter-than-air-ness, you fool. It was Nancy herself, standing behind him in the exit line, who had suggested that they dance on the landing strip. “To establish rapport with the terrain,” she said with her distant coolness, made more intense by the hot glare of the Edward pie vendors and customs trees. They danced the comb, the meringue, the dolce far niente. It was glorious there on the strip, amid air rich with the incredible vitality of jet fuel and the sensate music of exhaust. Twilight was lowered onto the landing pattern, a twilight such as has never graced Cleveland before, or since. Then broken, heartless laughter and the hurried trip to the hotel.

  “I understand,” Nancy said. And looking at her dispassionately, Buck conjectured that she did understand, unscrupulous as that may sound. Probably, he considered, I convinced her against my will. The man from Southern Rhodesia cornered him in the dangerous hotel elevator. “Do you think you have the right to hold opinions which differ from those of President Kennedy?” he asked. “The President of your land?” But the party made up for all that, or most of it, in a curious way. The baby on the floor, Saul, seemed enjoyable, perhaps more than his wont. Or my wont, Buck thought, who knows? A Ray Charles record spun in the gigantic salad bowl. Buck danced the frisson with the painter’s wife Perpetua (although Nancy was alone, back at the hotel). “I am named,” Perpetua said, “after the famous typeface designed by the famous English designer, Eric Gill, in an earlier part of our century.” “Yes,” Buck said calmly, “I know that face.” She told him softly the history of her affair with her husband, Saul Senior. Sensuously, they covered the ground. And then two ruly police gentlemen entered the room, with the guests blanching, and lettuce and romaine and radishes too flying for the exits, which were choked with grass.

  Bravery was everywhere, but not here tonight, for the gods were whistling up their mandarin sleeves in the yellow realms where such matters are decided, for good or ill. Pathetic in his servile graciousness, Saul explained what he could while the guests played telephone games in crimson anterooms. The policemen, the flower of the Cleveland Force, accepted a drink and danced ancient police dances of custody and enforcement. Magically the music crept back under the perforated Guam doors; it was a scene to make your heart cry. “That Perpetua,” Saul complained, “why is she treating me like this? Why are the lamps turned low and why have the notes I sent her been returned unopened, covered with red Postage Due stamps?” But Buck had, in all seriousness, hurried away.

  The aircraft were calling him, their indelible flight plans whispered his name. He laid his cheek against the riveted flank of a bold 707. “In case of orange and blue flames,” he wrote on a wing, “disengage yourself from the aircraft by chopping a hole in its bottom if necessary. Do not be swayed by the carpet; it is camel and very thin. I suggest that you be alarmed, because the situation is very alarming. You are up in the air perhaps 35,000 feet, with orange and blue flames on the outside and a ragged hole in the floorboards. What will you do?” And now, Nancy. He held out his arms. She came to him.

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Not to you. But to me . . .”

  “I’m wasting our time.”

  “The others?”

  “I felt ashamed.”

  “It’s being here, in Cleveland.”

  They returned together in a hired aut
omobile. Three parking lots were filled with overflow crowds in an ugly mood. I am tired, so very tired. The man from Southern Rhodesia addressed the bellmen, who listened to his hateful words and thought of other things. “But, then,” Buck said, but then Nancy laid a finger on his lips.

  “You appear to me so superior, so elevated above all other men,” she said, “I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, revenge, love and pride that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being.”

  “Yes,” Buck said, for a foreign sculptor, a Bavarian doubtless, was singing “You Can Take Your Love and Shove It Up Your Heart,” covered though he was with stone dust and grog. The crowd roared at the accompanists plying the exotic instruments of Cleveland, the dolor, the mangle, the bim. Strum swiftly, fingers! The butlers did not hesitate for a minute. “History will absolve me,” Buck reflected, and he took the hand offered him with its enormous sapphires glowing like a garage. Then Perpetua danced up to him, her great amazing brown eyelashes beckoning. “Where is Nancy?” she asked, and before he could reply, continued her account of the great love of her existence, her relationship with her husband, Saul. “He’s funny and fine,” she said, “and good and evil. In fact there is so much of him to tell you about, I can hardly get it all out before curfew. Do you mind?”

  The din of dancing in Cleveland was now such that many people who did not know the plan were affronted. “This is an affront to Cleveland, this damn din!” one man said; and grog flowed ever more fiercely. The Secretary of State for Erotic Affairs flew in from Washington, the nation’s capital, to see for himself at first hand, and the man from Southern Rhodesia had no recourse. He lurked into the Cleveland Air Terminal. “Can I have a ticket for Miami?” he asked the dancing ticket clerk at the Delta Airlines counter hopelessly. “Nothing to Miami this year,” the clerk countered. “How can I talk to him in this madness?” Nancy asked herself. “How can the white bird of hope bless our clouded past and future with all this noise? How? How? How? How? How?”

  But Saul waved in time, from the porch of Parking Lot Two. He was wearing his belt dangerously low on his hips. “There is copulation everywhere,” he shouted, fanning his neck, “because of the dancing! Yes, it’s true!” And so it was, incredibly enough. Affection was running riot under the reprehensible scarlet sky. We were all afraid. “Incredible, incredible,” Buck said to himself. “Even by those of whom you would not have expected it!” Perpetua glimmered at his ear. “Even by those,” she insinuated, “of whom you would have expected . . . nothing.” For a moment . . .

  “Nancy,” Buck exclaimed, “you are just about the nicest damn girl in Cleveland!”

  “What about your wife in Texas?” Nancy asked.

  “She is very nice too,” Buck said, “as a matter of fact the more I think of it, the more I believe that nice girls like you and Hérodiade are what make life worth living. I wish there were more of them in America so that every man could have at least five.”

  “Five?”

  “Yes, five.”

  “We will never agree on this figure,” Nancy said.

  2

  The rubbery smell of Akron, sister city of Lahore, Pakistan, lay like the flameout of all our hopes over the plateau that evening.

  When his aircraft was forced down at the Akron Airpark by the lapse of the port engines, which of course he had been expecting, Buck said: “But this, this . . . is Akron!” And it was Akron, sultry, molecular, crowded with inhabitants who held tiny transistor radios next to their tiny ears. A wave of ingratitude overcame him. “Bum, bum,” he said. He plumbed its heart. The citizens of Akron, after their hours at the plant, wrapped themselves in ill-designed love triangles which never contained less than four persons of varying degrees of birth, high and low and mediocre. Beautiful Ohio! with your transistorized citizens and contempt for geometry, we loved you in the evening by the fireside waiting for our wife to nap so we could slip out and see our two girls, Manfred and Bella!

  The first telephone call he received in his rum raisin hotel room, Charles, was from the Akron Welcome Service.

  “Welcome! new human being! to Akron! Hello?”

  “Hello.”

  “Are you in love with any of the inhabitants of Akron yet?”

  “I just came from the airport.”

  “If not, or even if so, we want to invite you to the big get-acquainted party of the College Graduates’ Club tonight at 8:30 P.M.”

  “Do I have to be a college graduate?”

  “No but you have to wear a coat and tie. Of course they are available at the door. What color pants are you wearing?”

  Buck walked the resilient streets of Akron. His head was aflame with conflicting ideas. Suddenly he was arrested by a shrill cry. From the top of the Zimmer Building, one of the noblest buildings in Akron, a group of Akron lovers consummated a four-handed suicide leap. The air! Buck thought as he watched the tiny figures falling, this is certainly an air-minded country, America! But I must make myself useful. He entered a bunshop and purchased a sweet green bun, and dallied with the sweet green girl there, calling her “poppet” and “funicular.” Then out into the street again to lean against the warm green façade of the Zimmer Building and watch the workmen scrubbing the crimson sidewalk.

  “Can you point me the way to the Akron slums, workman?”

  “My name is not ‘workman.’ My name is ‘Pat.’”

  “Well ‘Pat’ which way?”

  “I would be most happy to orient you, slumwise, were it not for the fact that slumlife in Akron has been dealt away with by municipal progressiveness. The municipality has caused to be erected, where slumlife once flourished, immense quadratic inventions which now house former slumwife and former slumspouse alike. These incredibly beautiful structures are over that way.”

  “Thanks, ‘Pat.’”

  At the housing development, which was gauche and grand, Buck came upon a man urinating in the elevator, next to a man breaking windows in the broom closet. “What are you fellows doing there!” Buck cried aloud. “We are expressing our rage at this fine new building!” the men exclaimed. “Oh that this day had never formulated! We are going to call it Ruesday, that’s how we feel about it, by gar!” Buck stood in a wash of incomprehension and doubt. “You mean there is rage in Akron, the home of quadratic love?” “There is quadratic rage also,” the men said, “Akron is rage from a certain point of view.” Angel food covered the floor in neat squares. And what could be wrong with that? Everything?

  “What is that point of view there, to which you refer?” Buck asked dumbly. “The point of view of the poor people of Akron,” those honest yeomen chanted, “or, as the city fathers prefer it, the underdeveloped people of Akron.” And in their eyes, there was a strange light. “Do you know what the name of this housing development is?” “What?” Buck asked. “Sherwood Forest,” the men said, “isn’t that disgusting?”

  The men invited Buck to sup with their girls, Heidi, Eleanor, George, Purple, Ann-Marie, and Los. In the tree, starlings fretted and died, but below everything was glass. Harold poured the wine of the region, a light Cheer, into the forgotten napery. And the great horse of evening trod over the immense scene once and for all. We examined our consciences. Many a tiny sin was rooted out that night, to make room for a greater one. It was “hello” and “yes” and “yes, yes” through the sacerdotal hours, from one to eight. Heidi held a pencil between her teeth. “Do you like pencil games?” she asked. Something lurked behind the veil of her eyes. “Not . . . especially,” Buck said, “I . . .”

  But a parade headed by a battalion of warm and lovely girls from the Akron Welcome Service elected this tense moment to come dancing by, with bands blazing and hideous floats in praise of rubber goods expanding in every direction. The rubber batons of the girls bent in the afterglow of events. “It is impossible to discuss serious ideas during
a parade,” the Akron Communists said to Buck, and they slipped away to continue expressing their rage in another part of the Forest.

  “Goodbye!” Buck said. “Goodbye! I won’t forget . . .”

  The Welcome Service girls looked very bravura in their brief white-and-gold Welcome Service uniforms which displayed a fine amount of “leg.” Look at all that “leg” glittering there! Buck said to himself, and followed the parade all the way to Toledo.

  3

  “Ingarden dear,” Buck said to the pretty wife of the mayor of Toledo, who was reading a copy of Infrequent Love magazine, “where are the poets of Toledo? Where do they hang out?” He showered her with gifts. She rose and moved mysteriously into the bedroom, to see if Henry were sleeping. “There is only one,” she said, “the old poet of the city Constantine Cavity.” A frost of emotion clouded her fuzz-colored lenses. “He operates a juju drugstore in the oldest section of the city and never goes anywhere except to make one of his rare and beautiful appearances.” “Constantine Cavity!” Buck exclaimed, “even in Texas where I come from we have heard of this fine poet. You must take me to see him at once.” Abandoning Henry to his fate (and it was a bitter one!) Buck and Ingarden rushed off hysterically to the drugstore of Constantine Cavity, Buck inventing as they rolled something graceful to say to this old poet, the forerunner so to speak of poetry in America.

  Was there fondness in our eyes? We could not tell. Cadenzas of documents stained the Western Alliance, already, perhaps, prejudiced beyond the power of prayer to redeem it. “Do you think there is too much hair on my neck? here?” Ingarden asked Buck. But before he could answer she said: “Oh shut up!” She knew that Mrs. Lutch, whose interest in the pastor was only feigned, would find the American way if anyone could.

  At Constantine Cavity’s drugstore a meeting of the Toledo Medical Society was being held, in consequence of which Buck did not get to utter his opening words which were to have been: “Cavity, we are here!” A pity, but call the roll! See, or rather hear, who is present, and who is not! Present were