Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “The personal is political,” say feminists, and the slogan has implications that are not obvious, and have nothing to do with feminism. When “Dinner Party” first appeared in the 1984 anthology Light Years and Dark, Michael Bishop’s introduction alluded to the fact the story had been rejected by sf editors for some time as too controversial. Certainly we can see the story as a reaction to Kent State and social and political disruption of the Vietnam War, but Kent State happened fourteen years before this story saw print. What was so controversial about it in 1984?

  I think what may have put editors off is what makes the story live today: the cool eye Dozois casts on the motives of the actors surrounding the story’s horrifying central incident, and the bitter vision of human relationships it reveals.

  Dr. and Mrs. Wilkins take national guardsman Hassmann out to dinner at a four-star restaurant. Dr. Wilkins hates Hassmann. He hates his son for protesting against the government.

  Mrs. Wilkins also hates Hassmann. She hates her husband for forcing her to play through this farcical dinner. She undoubtedly also hates him for driving their son away.

  Hassmann hates the Army for making him play through this farcical dinner. He hates Dr. Wilkins for his privilege and power. He hates the son for his privilege and protest.

  What are these three people doing going out to dinner together? Dr. Wilkins the father made an extreme vow in an attempt to control his son. He didn’t expect to have to pay off on this vow. Now Dr. Wilkins the politician is acting phony out of principle. This is all about trying to keep control of his son, wife, family, and country.

  The personal story reflects the background situation of a balkanized U.S. about to enter a civil war. Think Bosnia. Think American militias. Civility has broken down. People think, “I don’t need you any more. The bond between us is not worth it; it is even a sign of oppression.” The Wilkins family’s civility has similarly broken, with the son taking a political position violently opposed to his father’s. Who knows whether the son actually is so committed to his political position or is acting out his resentments toward his overbearing dad.

  If you want to talk about control, you must talk about class. The people who run things are not the ones who are asked to do the dirty work. Working class kids like Hassmann, who grew up eating TV dinners and has never seen a four-star restaurant, resent being made to enforce the rules of a government that most of the time has no use for them. But Hassmann must suppress his rage. He’s asked to do his “duty” whether he likes it or not. The displaced rage comes out in startling ways. His pulling the trigger at a student protest was a sanctioned act, ostensibly in defense of the legitimate government. That’s the reason Wilkins wants to shake his hand. But in the end we can see Hassmann’s action as gesture of bitter resentment, striking out not just at a political protester, but at a privileged son of the upper class who has had advantages Hassmann will never see—and a rebuke of the decision makers who have put this rifle in his hands. His motive is not theirs.

  And this—not any recognition of Hassmann as an individual human being—is what perversely gets Hassmann invited out to dinner by a powerful politician.

  All these cross-currents—ego, duty, rage, class, love, resentment, hate, loyalty to family, loyalty to country, loyalty to self—surge below the surface of this simple story. In his merciless skewering of human weakness, Dozois, astute observer of the human animal, reminds me of C.M. Kornbluth at his most pitiless. “Dinner Party” opens the lid on the heart of darkness and leaves us to contemplate the consequences.

  John Kessel

  Dinner Party

  It had been cold all that afternoon. When they picked Hassmann up at the gate that evening, it was worse than cold—it was freezing.

  The gate guard let Hassmann wait inside the guard booth, although that was technically against regulations, and he might have caught hell for it if the Officer of the Day had come by. But it was colder than a witch’s tit outside, as the guard put it, and he knew Hassmann slightly, and liked him, even though he was RA and Hassmann was National Guard, and he thought that most NGs were chickenshit. But he liked Hassmann. Hassmann was a good kid.

  They huddled inside the guard booth, sharing a cigarette, talking desultorily about baseball and women, about a court-martial in the gate guard’s battalion, about the upcoming ATTs and MOS tests, about the scarcity of promotion slots for corporals and 5s. They carefully did not talk about the incident last weekend on the campus in Morgantown, although it had been all over the papers and the TV and had been talked about all over post. They also didn’t talk about where Hassmann was going tonight—allowed off base at a time when almost everyone else’s passes had been pulled—although rumors about that had spread through the grapevine with telegraphic speed since Hassmann’s interview with Captain Simes early that afternoon. Most especially, most emphatically, they did not talk about what everyone knew but hesitated to admit even in whispers: that by this time next month, they would probably be at war.

  The gate guard was telling some long, rambling anecdote about breaking up a fight down behind the Armor mess hall when he looked out beyond Hassmann’s shoulder and fell silent, his face changing. “This looks like your ride heah, Jackson,” he said, quietly, after a pause.

  Hassmann watched the car sweep in off the road and stop before the gate; it was a big black Caddy, the post floodlights gleaming from a crust of ice over polished steel and chrome. “Yeah,” Hassmann said. His throat had suddenly turned dry, and his tongue bulked enormously in his mouth. He ground the cigarette butt out against the wall. The guard opened the door of the booth to let him out. The cold seized him with his first step outside, seized him and shook him like a dog shaking a rat. “Cover your ass,” the gate guard said suddenly from the booth behind him. “Remember—cover your own ass, you heah?” Hassmann nodded, without looking around, without much conviction. The guard grunted, and slid the booth door closed.

  Hassmann was alone.

  He began to trot toward the car, slipping on a patch of ice, recovering easily. Hoarfrost glistened everywhere, over everything, and the stars were out in their chill armies, like the million icy eyes of God. The cold air was like ice in his lungs, and his breath steamed in white tatters around him. The driver of the car had the right front door half open, waiting for him, but Hassmann—seeing that the man had a woman with him, and feeling a surge of revulsion at the thought of sitting pressed close to the couple in the front—opened the rear door instead and slipped into the back seat. After a moment, the driver shrugged and closed the front door. Hassmann closed the rear door too, automatically pushing down the little button that locked it, instantly embarrassed that he had done so. After the double thunk of the doors closing and the sharp click of the lock, there was nothing but a smothering silence.

  The driver turned around in his seat, resting his arm on the top of the seatback, staring at Hassmann. In the dark, it was hard to make out his features, but he was a big, beefy man, and Hassmann could see the reptilian glint of light from thick, black, horn-rimmed glasses. The woman was still facing forward, only casting a quick, furtive glance back at him, and then turning her head away again. Even in this half-light, Hassmann could see the stiffness of her shoulders, the taut way she held her neck. When the silence had become more than uncomfortable, Hassmann stammered, “Sir, I’m—sir, PFC Hassmann, sir . . .”

  The driver shifted his weight in the front seat. Leather creaked and moaned. “Glad to meet you, son,” he said. “Yes, very glad—a pleasure, yes, a pleasure.” There was a forced joviality in his voice, a note of strained, dangerous cordiality that Hassmann decided he had better not try to argue with.

  “Glad to meet you, too, sir,” Hassmann croaked.

  “Thank you, son,” the man said. Leather groaned again as he extended his hand into the back seat; Hassmann shook it briefly, released it—the man’s hand had been damp and flabby, like a rubber glove full of oatmeal. “I’m Dr. Wilkins,” the man said. “And this is my wife, Fra
n.” His wife did not acknowledge the introduction, continuing to stare stonily straight ahead. “Manners,” Dr. Wilkins said in a soft, cottony voice, almost a whisper. “Manners!” Mrs. Wilkins jerked, as if she had been slapped, and then dully muttered, “Charmed,” still not turning to look at Hassmann.

  Dr. Wilkins stared at his wife for a moment, then turned to look at Hassmann again; his glasses were dully gleaming blank circles, as opaque as portholes. “What’s your Christian name, son?”

  Hassmann shifted uneasily in his seat. After a moment’s hesitation—as though to speak his name would be to give the other man power over him—he said “James, sir. James Hassmann.”

  “I’ll call you Jim, then,” Dr. Wilkins said. It was a statement of fact—he was not asking permission; nor was there any question that Hassmann would be expected to continue to call him “Dr. Wilkins,” however free the older man made himself with Hassmann’s “Christian name.” Or “sir,” Hassmann thought with a quick flash of resentment, you could hardly go wrong calling him “sir.” Hassmann had been in the Army long enough to know that it was impossible to say “sir” too many times when you were talking to a man like this; work it in a hundred times per sentence, they’d like it just fine.

  Dr. Wilkins was still staring reflectively at him, as if he expected some sort of response, an expression of gratitude for the fine democratic spirit he was showing, perhaps . . . but Hassmann said nothing. Dr. Wilkins grunted. “Well, then—Jim,” he said. “You like Continental cuisine?”

  “I—I’m not sure, sir,” Hassmann said. He could feel his face flushing with embarrassment in the close darkness of the cab. “I’m not sure I know what it is.”

  Dr. Wilkins made a noise that was not quite a snort—a long, slow, resigned exhaling of air through the nose. “What kind of food do you like to eat at home?”

  “Well, sir, the usual kind of thing, I guess. Nothing special.”

  “What kind of things?” Dr. Wilkins said with heavy, elaborated patience.

  “Oh—spaghetti, meat loaf. Sometimes fried chicken, or cold cuts. We had TV dinners a lot.” Dr. Wilkins was staring at him; it was too dark to make out his expression with any kind of certainty, but he seemed to be staring blankly, incredulously, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Sometimes my mother’d make, you know, a roast for Sunday or something, but she didn’t much like to cook anything fancy like that.”

  This time Dr. Wilkins did snort, a sharp, impatient sound. “Adeo in teneris consuescere multum est,” he said in a loud, portentous voice, and shook his head. Hassmann felt his face burning again; he had no idea what Dr. Wilkins had said, but there was no mistaking the scorn behind the words. “That’s Virgil,” Dr. Wilkins said contemptuously, peering significantly at Hassmann. “You know Virgil?”

  “Sir?” Hassmann said.

  “Never mind,” Dr. Wilkins muttered. After a heavy pause, he said, “This restaurant we’re taking you to tonight has a three-star Michelin rating, one of the few places east of the Mississippi River that does, outside of New York City. I don’t suppose that means anything to you, either, does it?”

  “No, sir,” Hassmann said stiffly. “I’m afraid it doesn’t, sir.”

  Dr. Wilkins snorted again. Hassmann saw that Mrs. Wilkins was watching him in the rearview mirror, but as soon as their eyes met, she turned her face away.

  “Well, son,” Dr. Wilkins was saying, “I’ll tell you one thing those three Michelin stars mean: they mean that tonight you’re going to get the best damn meal you ever had.” He sniffed derisively. “Maybe the best damn meal you’ll ever have. Do you understand that . . . Jim?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hassmann said. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Mrs. Wilkins was watching him in the rearview mirror again. Every time she thought that his attention was elsewhere, she would stare at him with terrible fixed intensity; she would look away when he met her eyes in the mirror, but a moment later, as soon as he glanced away, she would be staring at him again, as though she couldn’t keep her eyes off him, as though he were something loathsome and at the same time almost hypnotically fascinating, like a snake or a venomous insect.

  “I don’t expect you to appreciate the finer points,” Dr. Wilkins said, “we can thank the way kids are brought up today for that, but I do expect you to appreciate that what you’re getting tonight is a very fine meal, one of the finest meals money can buy, not some slop from McDonald’s.”

  “Yes, sir, I do, sir,” Hassmann said. Dr. Wilkins made a humpfing noise, not sounding entirely mollified, so Hassmann added, “It sounds great, sir. I’m really looking forward to it. Thank you, sir.” He kept his face blank and his voice level, but his jaw ached with tension. He hated being dressed down like this, he hated it. His fingers were turning white where they were biting into the edge of the seat.

  Dr. Wilkins stared at him for a moment longer, then sighed and turned back to the wheel; they slid away into the darkness with a smooth surge of acceleration.

  They ghosted back down the hill, turned right. Here the road ran parallel to the tall Cyclone fence that surrounded the base; behind the iron mesh, behind the winter-stripped skeletons of trees, Hassmann could see the high, cinder-bed roofs of the Infantry barracks, a huge water tower—it had the slogan RE-UP ARMY stenciled on its sides, visible for miles in the daytime—and the gaunt silhouette of a derrick, peeking up over the fence from the Engineer motor pool like the neck of some fantastic metal giraffe. The base dwindled behind them to a tabletop miniature, to a scene the size of a landscape inside a tiny glass snowball, and then it was gone, and there was nothing but the stuffy interior of the car, the pale glow of the instruments on the dashboard, dark masses of trees rushing by on either side. Hassmann was sweating heavily, in spite of the cold, and the upholstery was sticky under his hands.

  There was a persistent scent of patchouli in the car—cutting across the new-car smell of the upholstery and the tobacco-and-English Leather smell of Dr. Wilkins—that must be Mrs. Wilkins’ perfume; it was a heavy, oversweet smell that reminded Hassmann of the room in the cancer hospital where his aunt had died. He longed to roll down the window, let the cold night air into the stuffy car, but he didn’t quite dare to do it without asking Dr. Wilkins’ permission, and that was something he wouldn’t do. He was beginning to get a headache, a bright needle of pain that probed in alongside his eyeball like a stiff wire, and his stomach was sick and knotted with tension. Abruptly it was too much for him, and he found himself blinking back sudden tears of frustration and rage, all the resentment and chagrin he felt rising up in his throat like bile. Why did he have to do this? Why did they have to pick on him? Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? He had said as much in Captain Simes’ office this afternoon, blurting out, “I don’t want to do it! Do I have to go, sir?” And Captain Simes had studied him jaundicedly for a moment before replying, “Officially, no. The regulations say we can’t make you. Unofficially, though, I can tell you that Dr. Wilkins is a very important man in this state, and with things as tense as they are politically, you can expect some very serious smoke to be brought down on your ass if you don’t do everything you can to keep him happy, short of dropping your drawers and bending over.” And then Simes had leered at him with his eroded, prematurely old face and said, “And, hell, soldier, comes right down to it, maybe you even ought to take that under advisement . . .”

  They drifted past a weathered wooden barn that was covered with faded old Clabber Girl and Jesus Saves signs, past a dilapidated farmhouse where one light was burning in an upstairs window. There was an automobile up on blocks in the snow-covered front yard, its engine hanging suspended from a rope thrown over a tree branch. Scattered automobile parts made hummocks in the snow, as if small dead animals were buried there. They turned past a bullet-riddled highway sign and onto an old state road that wound down out of the foothill country. The car began to pick up speed, swaying slightly on its suspension.

  “You come from around here, Jim?” Dr
. Wilkins said.

  “No, sir,” Hassmann said. Thank God! he added silently to himself. Evidently he had been unable to keep his feelings out of his voice, because Dr. Wilkins glanced quizzically at him in the rearview mirror. Quickly, Hassmann added, “I was born in Massachusetts, sir. A small town near Springfield.”

  “That so?” Dr. Wilkins said, without interest. “Gets pretty cold up there too in the winter, doesn’t it? So at least you’re used to this kind of weather, right?”

  “That’s right, sir,” Hassmann said leadenly. “It gets pretty cold there, too.”

  Dr. Wilkins grunted. Even he seemed to realize that his attempt at small talk had been a dismal failure, for he lapsed into a sodden silence. He pressed down harder on the accelerator, and the dark winter countryside began to blur by outside the windows. Now that they had stopped talking, there was no sound except for the whine of the tires on macadam or their snare-drum rattle on patches of gravel.

  Hassmann rubbed his sweating palms against the slick upholstery. Somehow he knew that Mrs. Wilkins was watching him again, although it was too dark to see her eyes in the mirror anymore. Occasionally the lights of an oncoming car would turn the inside of the windshield into a reflective surface, and he would be able to see her plainly for a second, a thin-faced woman with tightly pursed lips, her hands clenched together in her lap, staring rigidly straight ahead of her. Then the light would fade and her image would disappear, and only then, in the darkness, would he begin to feel her eyes watching him again, as though she were only able to see him in the dark . . .

  They were going faster and faster now, careening down the old state road like a moonshiner on a delivery run with the Alcohol Tax agents on his tail, and Hassmann was beginning to be afraid, although he did his best to sit still and look imperturbable. The old roadbed was only indifferently maintained, and every bump rattled their teeth in spite of the Caddy’s heavy-duty shocks; once Hassmann was bounced high enough to bang his head on the roof, and the car was beginning to sway ominously from side to side. Fortunately, they were on a level stretch of road with no oncoming traffic when they hit the patch of ice. For a moment or two the Caddy was all over the road, skidding and fishtailing wildly, its brakes screaming and its tires throwing up clouds of black smoke, and then slowly, painfully, Dr. Wilkins brought the big car back under control. They never came to a complete stop, but they had slowed down to about fifteen miles per hour by the time Dr. Wilkins could wrestle them back into their own lane, and you could smell burned rubber even inside the closed cab.