The Henderson Equation
Page 41
“The Skins, of course,” the Chief Justice said. “You can’t drink the man’s booze and do otherwise.”
“Now there’s an unbiased judge,” Myra said, laughing, as the group proceeded into the box. He felt a tug on his arm, turned and saw Jennie.
“It’s not who wins or loses, but how you play the game, right, Nick?” she said, then whispering, “Besides, who gives a shit?”
It seemed a clue to his own resolve. What did it matter, after all? Nothing would change. If not Henderson, it would be someone exactly like him, someone tinsel thin, media-created, able to rationalize the most bestial act in the name of country, or flag, or ideology, or some other self-conceived concept of morality.
Someone has got to become the watchdog of the public conscience, Mr. Parker had said that day, long ago. But who will watch the watchdog? he asked himself.
He who owns words owns the world, he repeated to himself as he filed into the box, the Imperial Box. The crowd cheered, a single mindless plaint from the immensity of the stadium. Each of them surely could feel the sense of their own specialness, as if the crowd were cheering for each of them. They, who had the power to control the callous inert crowd mind. In the antiseptic isolation of his glass cage, he had to imagine the sense of power, to create it in his brain, but here in this immensity of humanness, he could see it, feel it, smell it. We have no right to play with their innocence, he told himself, watching Myra’s confident profile, her chin lifted proudly. He caught another glimpse of Henderson’s blue eyes, sparkling with the moisture of the cold.
Then he felt the urge begin, seeing the distance between himself and the field, the low railing of the box, easily scaled, as Charlie might have seen the trigger of the hanging shotgun. Muscles tightened as they signaled for energy from the brain, but, at that moment the stadium became quiet, the humanity frozen as one voice rose above the rest in the rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the ritualized words stilted and irrelevant.
A wrenching shiver seized him as he viewed the standing crowd, an amorphous indistinguishable mass, singing with innocent expectation. He could sense something expiring in this environment, a terminality in himself as well. Who will be left to watch the watchdogs? he asked again, wondering if his lips had moved soundlessly. Or will the watchdogs become the guardians, the threatened? Suddenly Myra’s eye caught his, winked, a sign of her benign possession of him.
As he heard the last echoing strains of the National Anthem, the resurgence of the crowd’s mindless babble, he knew he was misplaced in space, a straggler in an untracked jungle. He who kept the word must never leave the glass cage, never feel or touch or taste the humaness that could corrupt objectivity, destroy perfection.
Sounds of the crowd rang in his ears as he ran from the box, passing the black waiters who were clearing the imperial buffet. Outside in the glaring sun he flagged a cab and directed the driver to take him to the Chronicle.
The story, the word, in the end, was all, the only meaning. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the sheaf of paper, making mental notes of an appropriate headline, cursing Gunderstein as he read. The man was constantly splitting infinitives.