by Gary Amdahl
They sat at the edge of the park’s central fountain and looked at the stone Indian boy poised like winged Mercury. Possessing such a weapon as he did, he thought, did indeed alter reality. There was no question but that he was in a different realm. He thought of Vera’s notion of bombs ripping holes in reality, that whatever it was one saw in that hole, it wasn’t real, and tried to reconcile it with his own belief that the earthquake and fire that had destroyed San Francisco had only destroyed illusion. Nothing, of course, made “sense” anymore, and he could not affect that reconciliation, but felt nevertheless that he understood something in a way he hadn’t been able to before. He had failed miserably to be the kind of hero he’d set out to be, when he lifted pen from notebook at Berkeley, and thought he would do civilization a favor. But now that he had squared with himself again—or, ha ha, did he mean rounded on himself?—admitted that he was not a hero but simply an agent of primitive unreasoning rage and fear, that all he wanted now was to kill someone he hated—because he was being honest again with himself, he felt something very like the undividedness he had earlier felt and found so calming and so invigorating—to kill an enemy and take Vera and their child to a safe place somewhere in the narcotic Levant. It was a mistaken feeling, to be sure, but he was convinced he felt it. He was in a realm that gave him magical powers, immense inhuman powers, but offered it in a place where there were no signs, no paths, no people wise enough or fearless enough to speak. No one ruled. There was no one to rule. Everybody had gone away, had died or fled. He was alone. No calculation is necessary when you are alone. You don’t have to play people against each other. You simply allow the hatred you feel to take you through an act. And then it’s over.
Vera, who had wandered off, rejoined him.
Their little bubble of anomic wrath burst.
“I wanted to run away with you and live a quiet life.”
“We can.”
“Do you want to go? Now?”
“What are you going to do with the bomb?”
“I don’t know.”
“We can’t go until you know.”
“I will pick an appropriate representative of our corrupt government and hurl it at him.”
“That’s fine.”
“It is?”
“Yes, but I won’t go with you under those circumstances.”
“You won’t?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“In what circumstances—”
“I DON’T KNOW, CHARLES!”
The people they were actually rubbing shoulders with were as remote as elves, just as Vera’s fabled friend Rosemary had believed so many years before, when she was a child and they had suffered a different kind of destruction. Provoked in this way, Charles and Vera looked across the park at the restaurant and were filled with grief at the thought of not being able to sit there, a little candlelit table between them.
“I want that,” Charles said. “I can’t help but want it. It’s my childhood.”
“I want it too. I want it so much I’m . . . I’m afraid of it.”
Snow began to appear in the air, single flakes dancing past hooded, expectant eyes. Men slapped their hands together, some gloved now, some still bare and chapped and cold, and agreed that here it was coming, at long last, everybody’s favorite weather event, a blizzard in May.
“Did you ever see a Christmas that wasn’t white?” a man asked me.
“Christmas!” Charles exclaimed. “That’s months away!”
“This is the beginning, the first snowfall. It will snow all summer. But did you ever—?”
“See a Christmas that wasn’t white?”
“That’s right.”
“Sure have,” Charles said.
“Where the hell was that?”
“Right here in River City.”
“Bullshit! Never happened!”
“I’m kidding. It was in San Francisco, where I’m from.”
“Oh man, San Francisco doesn’t count!”
A little later, they walked through the park, happy and content-seeming with their baby bomb, or pretending to be, acting almost as if it were a baby, and found a space on the marble steps of the library. Charles opened the lunchbox. On top of the grenade were several ham sandwiches, made by Winter’s cook, who’d said to save one for him, and a thermos of strong coffee. These things were temporarily and insanely delightful and they set it all out beside them on the cold stone. McGee was actually scheduled to offer a short exciting speech, then leave town to take up a new position in Washington, DC.
The bomb was not going to be exploded. Everyone knew that without speaking. They had been given a gift, a way to return to peace: dismantle the bomb. Speaking softly of dismantling the slumbering foetus, Charles said he wasn’t exactly sure how far he had gone when taking off his clothes the other day, for McGee and Winter. He said everything ran together if he let it, thought and action, beginning and end.
“You very likely did not strip naked,” said Vera. “I mean, really, Charles!”
A man near them glanced at them and Charles glanced back in a friendly, noncommittal way. The man glanced again and stepped over.
“Some coffee?” Vera asked, indicating the thermos.
“You one of Winter’s people?” the man asked.
Charles stopped smiling and looked toward the park. “Yes. I am.” Mother’s love of baroque music came to the fore: “I am the Cold Genius. ‘What power art thou, who from below, hast made me rise unwillingly and slow, from beds of everlasting snow? See’st thou not how stiff and wondrous old, far unfit to bear the bitter cold, I can scarcely move or draw my breath? Let me, let me freeze again, to death.’”
“I’ll take a sip, if you don’t mind,” said the man, giving Charles a look. “You all set?” He appeared to relax. When both Charles and Vera nodded subtly, knowingly, the man shifted his gaze and looked at Vera over his steaming cup. “Don’t hide your lights under a bushel basket, sister.”
He was much older than he had first looked, and certainly not a ruffian. Vera didn’t mind being called “sister” by such a man as she now thought she was looking at: a rough-and-ready veteran of labor wars. And Charles thought of Father, even though the man looked nothing like him. He was quite sure that Father, who after all had been as ruthless as any ten ordinary men, would understand what he was about to do, and why.
Charles smiled. Vera caught it and smiled too.
“I mean,” said the man, “don’t just find a secluded cozy little nook and blow it there. We don’t want to hurt a lot of people, but the word is, and this is final, we don’t want anybody to, you know, to miss it.”
“Grandfather,” Vera said, “don’t you worry about us.”
And just like that, she was afraid again. She was afraid they were about to take the bomb away from her and that people would be killed after all. She felt panic twisting her stomach. Should she simply run, run away right now, run fast? Throw it in the river? She saw it drifting toward a little toy boat full of children slapping at the water with toy oars. She remained where she was, her arm locked in Charles’s arm, from which dangled the big unwieldy lunchbox. He was not shivering: he was shaking.
The man shook his head in a kindly way and left, setting the cap back on the thermos and screwing it down firmly, patting it when he was done.
The temperature had dropped enough to make them feel quite remarkably colder. A wind had risen too, a hard and steady wind that made their eyes tear and the men around them turn their backs to it. The snow thickened in the air and dustings of it appeared on caps and shoulders and on the grass but not on the sidewalks.
Two trucks arrived simultaneously, one on the hotel side to their right and one on the theater side to their left. From these trucks came sections of speaker platforms and podia. Crowds began to form near the platforms as they were assembled, and the general feeling seemed to be that the weather was calling for some speeches th
at would be frank and revealing and come swiftly to their points. The carmen seemed more cold now than indignant, and the rally looked like it might in fact fizzle.
It was at this point, Charles learned later, that the Ramsey County Sheriff was getting himself in trouble by refusing the streetcar company’s request for substantially more policemen, to protect themselves and to ensure the continued operation of streetcars in the vicinity. Outraged, the company appealed to the governor, who dispatched Home Guard units. The civilian auxiliary was also apprised of the company’s need, and this paramilitary force converged on the park as well. When the strikers saw men with Krag-Jørgensen rifles held at the ready across their chests ringing the park, they began to shout and curse. The light was now almost impenetrably murky, nearly full dark, and torches were being lit, and then several fires burning in barrels could be seen as well. With the flames angling this way, then that way, snapping and flaring in the moaning wind, with the men shouting articulate words near them, and simply roaring farther off, with the snow accumulating and the temperature continuing its swift and steady plunge, the park became a frightening place, as if it were a zoo where the cages had been suddenly sprung, with hunters strung out around the perimeter. Speakers on both sides of the park began to speak and Charles asked Vera if she remembered the marchers in San Francisco marching in opposite directions and playing rival tunes. Had that been before her time there? He could hardly speak he was shaking so hard. He said, “No, no, don’t worry, just a little cold. I want to compose music. I’m going to start as soon as I leave this terrible place. There will be American music, hymns and folk songs and marches and so on, and then underneath there will be something else, and then above it there will be something else, all of it verging on silence. My God! What has sound got to do with music? Think for a moment of Reverend Emerson’s ‘The Sphinx’: ‘The perception of identity unites all things and explains one by another . . . and the most rare and strange is equally facile as the most common. But if the mind live only in particulars, and see only differences (wanting the power to see the whole—all in each) then the world addresses to this mind a question it cannot answer, and each new fact tears it to pieces, and it is vanquished by the distracting variety.’ And Reverend Thoreau: ‘The falling dew seemed to strain and purify the air and I was soothed with an infinite stillness . . . . Vast hollows of silence stretched away in every side, and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them. Then first I could appreciate sound, and find it musical.’”
The first speakers at the company podium were three highly respected and actually irreproachable men who comprised an investigatory committee: the president of a fine local college, an attorney from Minneapolis, and a businessman from Saint Paul. All of them happened to own stock in the Twin Cities Rapid Transit Company, but that was not at issue. What was at issue was the trouble that the yellow union buttons were causing. Fights were breaking out in cars and at stops, rider rates were slipping, and the consensus was that the yellow buttons had to go bye-bye. The committee was going to issue recommendations, they said, that went something like this: the buttons come off immediately, and in return, the company will reinstate those who have lost their jobs because of the button. Did the good people of Minnesota follow them so far? Recommendation was the key word. The committee recommended, and the company and the union agreed: no buttons, no union solicitation for the duration of the war. Right now the understanding was that the union was going along with it, and they had put it to a vote, to make it look all right with the membership, who were very attached, as anyone could plainly see, despite the heavy snowfall, to their buttons.
A union speaker on the other side of the little park, however, shouted that on the twenty-sixth of the month, the company, which had already posted signs ordering the removal of the buttons and the ceasing of union organizing efforts—implying, citizens, implying a legal binding they actually lacked—on the day before it went to the vote, the company went around and immediately booted every bastard with a yellow button. The committee and the commission will back up the company, saying that the union has failed to bargain in good faith by allowing their men to keep on wearing their buttons when they were asked not to. It’s flimsy as hell, as we are sure you can see, but they don’t need much!
Charles and Vera watched from the library steps through curtains of snow. Unable to make out features, they saw arms raised, hands waving and shaking, a little white face turned their way, then a black back as the speaker turned toward another part of his audience. There was a steady flow of torches from one side of the park to the other, great brilliant masses of them now, like bonfires, before the platforms, and dark masses of men floating like islands in a polar sea. A number of men had materialized around them. They stood with their hands shoved deep in their pockets, their faces tucked into collars like nesting birds.
“What a lot of shit this is.”
“Filthy cowards.”
“Lying, cheating, stealing, murdering sonsabitches. I guess they’ll murder us too, if they feel like it.”
The steps were slippery with snow. They held the lunchbox closed and made their way across the park to the company platform. Speakers and company officials sat huddled around coal braziers while speaker after speaker said things like, “Now, you men, you listen to me because you know I’m talking sense. This country is at war and we’re asking you to set aside your grievances for the duration and pitch in like the good goddamn men we know you to be.”
And there was McGee, in the middle of one of the semicircles. His face looked dark and raw and red, bulging out from a fur cap, the flaps of which covered his ears and were tied under his chin, so that his side-whiskers curled out girlishly. But for the dark hatred on his chapped face, he might have been some strange overgrown baby girl. He was standing with the Ramsey County Sheriff. Charles and Vera drew near: “Do not buckle under!” McGee was shouting. “We do not want the extra policemen here!”
Charles had no idea if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Was McGee trying to defuse a disaster? Or was he trying to make a bigger one.
Better to be a good man than to darken the hills with your ponies, he thought. That was what Crazy Horse’s father had said, or was said to have said—according to Father, who revered the wisdom almost as much as he did Montaigne’s. Well, Charles thought, but what was a good man? How did one describe him, what did he do? Truth excludes the use of violence because man is not capable of knowing the absolute truth and is therefore not competent to punish in its name. Someone else had said that. According to Father. I am all wrong, wrong wrong wrong, I am a dangerous fool, I have no idea what I am doing but I am flying into it like I am walking onto a stage. OH YES! I WAS BORN TO ACT! But no: If I attempt to punish McGee, then, as a proxy for other bad men, I will have to consider myself a bad man. Can I live with such a consideration? Very likely I can; many men evidently do. It was perhaps a basic human condition, badness. But more practically, could I withstand the counter-punishment of the state? Did it not make more sense, as some revolutionaries held, to do the deed and then escape, to “lie close and keep yourself for another go”? To surrender when there was no other way out, claim the act and pay the price? Violence was innate to human nature: ACT! One could see it in the daily lives of the calmest, most reasonable people. One could see it in the happiest and most secure children. It came from having one part or feature or function of a person, character, mind, opposed to another part or feature or function. It was there and that was all there was to it. It was the source of drama; the only question was one of expression, of art. The undivided self was the illusion! The undivided self—was shouting this aloud now? Vera was looking at him like she was listening and growing afraid of what she was hearing—the undivided self is the Pure Form, the Pure Idea, a Platonic Ideal, which is the source of our desire for it. We can only look back to it, worship it, and hold fast to our current stage of degeneration lest we degenerate further. It came from God and is steadily degenerating: soon we wi
ll no longer be able to recognize ourselves as human, and the world will end. These things go in cycles! Charles shouted to Vera. This isn’t reality! This world! Our bodies! That’s what Plato took from Pythagoras! You see? And from Parmenides he understood that REALITY, REAL REALITY, IS ETERNAL! ALL THE LITTLE CHANGES WE IGNITE AND ENDURE: PURE ILLUSION! STRONGER AND STRONGER ILLUSION THE LONGER WE SURVIVE! AND THEN THERE’S HERACLITUS! CAN YOU GUESS? THE SENSES ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED! INTELLECT, DIVINE EDUCATION, ALONE CAN KEEP US SAFE FROM OUR ENEMIES AND WELL FED!
