Death Kit

by Susan Sontag

  “What’s your name, son?” said Jim, putting his hand on the chauffeur’s shoulder.

  “Chang,” said the man. Jim winked at the others, then settled back in his seat.

  Diddy claimed the jump seat. Not altogether comfortable. Because of an ache in his spine, it took time to search out the good position. Turning sideways, to face the rear door of the limousine. He couldn’t cross his long legs. But because his seat was different, almost an afterthought, Diddy felt himself to be under a different dispensation than the others. Exempted from tacking on to those indigestible strips of words being exchanged by the three men seated in a row to his left more strips of words; his words, which were bound to be sticky as taffy or tough like overchewed bubble gum. Allen, Katz, and What’s-his-name, sitting side by side, sunk deep in the gray felt upholstery. Jim not perceptibly different from and no more human than the rest of the trio; and Diddy no fonder of him than of the others. Nothing remained. Mr. Dalton Harron in the jump seat maintains, always has maintained, exacting standards for personal relations, though life has promised him nothing. Knows that idle conversation of one with three cannot be, fully, the word- and paper-clogged plenum of business, unswallowable but at least necessary or anyway justifiable. But is already too many for real talk. One with three is a middle condition, serving nobody. The number precludes genuine nourishment, which is possible, when it’s possible, with one. Only one other.

  On time. We left the city by the northwest. In a few minutes the car had cleared the disheveled downtown area, the streets scarred with trolley tracks and bloated with traffic; the views disfigured by clashing buildings and punctured with construction sites.

  Monday has bloomed into a sunny soft late October morning. (Now) we were cruising along the expensive smooth asphalt of quiet residential streets; no irregularities in the surface or unreasonable gaps in the views. Streets lined with long sloping lawns and widely spaced houses sixty to eighty years old, all well cared for and in pretty much the same pleasing style, but whose original symmetry had been violated with the addition to each house of a garage in which two cars were tucked away.

  “Here’s where the local Four Hundred hold the fort,” sneered Katz.

  “Wonder where the local Chinatown is,” said Jim in a stage whisper.

  Diddy, rendered almost nerveless by contradictory feelings, doesn’t mind Jim’s abrasive coarseness. And finds it easier (now) to stomach Katz, whom he made a point of having little to do with in the New York office. By sneering, Katz exposed himself, made himself understandable. But why did Katz move about restlessly in his third of the comfortable seat? Could all that fidgeting be provoked by the spectacle of such commonplace, modest luxury? Katz probably grew up in a Bronx slum apartment with nowhere to play except P. S. Number Something’s cement recreation yard, shut in by a high Cyclone fence. Or on the sidewalk of his dingy block where he’d had to worry about the ball shattering a window, calling down the curses of screaming tenement housewives, among them his own mother. Don’t be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable. Diddy will be generous. He had been lucky, sheltered. Enough space, green space, in which to play. For Diddy had grown up in just such a spacious house, entrammeled with ivy, as those they were passing (now), on such a mild tree-lined street, and in a smallish city not unlike this one. Before the war. Before all such prosperous old neighborhoods concealed, beneath their complacent regard, an anxious insecure look which came from learning what was to be their eventual destiny: demolition. And faceless apartment buildings and housing projects, filing cabinets for living away one’s life, put up in their stead.

  But maybe they wouldn’t be torn down. To Diddy today the bastions of the small-city bourgeois family looked virtually impregnable. The car glided along the wide, sparsely traveled asphalt that separated the facing houses. Houses that are quiet (now), emptied of father-breadwinner and school-age children. Being cared for and stocked with provisions by mother-wife and her domestics. It was five minutes to ten. In two hours, the children would rush, trudge, and dawdle home. Someone like Mary would have the table set and lunch ready. Some of the fathers probably came home, too.

  “Mind if I open the window,” said Diddy. Not a bad day. Rather warm. Diddy was accepting the ride, able to gaze out of the car window at the complacent houses and the livid red and brown foliage of autumn’s trees.

  He did not refuse these houses. How could he? That would be to refuse himself. Nor did Diddy feel ironic about their inhabitants. The businessman and the businessman’s wife. The lawyer and his Wife. The minister and his wife. The doctor, who was like his father, and the doctor’s wife, who was like his mother. The principal of the local high school, like Uncle John, and his wife, like Aunt Alice. Nor did he, even in imagination, condescend to their pampered well-fed children; equipped with shiny English bicycles that moved on thin hard tires, tended by garrulous devoted Irish nursemaids, packed off for their weekly piano lessons. Why should Diddy mock himself?

  We paused at a railroad junction, then crossed over with a rude bump into the less prosperous belt of two- and three-story frame houses and narrow front yards, small grocery stores, used-car lots, and warehouses that girded the edge of the city. The surface of the streets became rutted and uneven; all the available curb space for parking was occupied. Diddy catches a glimpse of blue and gold profile, which vanishes after a moment. No vistas here. Besides cars, the street was crowded with slow-moving trucks; some, double parked in order to make deliveries, nearly blocked our passage through the street. The black limousine moves slower (now), but there’s less for Diddy to look at. The long low-lying factory was just ahead. Jim gave a mock groan. “Here we go! Ready or not.” The car went through the gate; without needing to stop, or anyway not stopping, to be cleared by the guard, who stands still as an effigy in his tiny booth. We go by too fast for Diddy to see his face. But time enough to notice that he wore a uniform different from our chauffeur’s. Wrinkled, less smart. Hadn’t the company driver who picked up Diddy at the Rushland on his last trip worn a tan uniform similar to the guard’s, rather than the navy blue worn by today’s chauffeur? Diddy would concede that about this his memory might be mistaken. But he’s positive the other chauffeur wasn’t an Oriental.

  Up the long landscaped driveway. We halted before the main door of the plant. No farther to go. “Thanks, Chang,” said Jim, still insisting on finding a joke in the man’s name or simply in his own effort to be familiar with him. No jokes for Diddy. There aren’t many Orientals who drive hearses, are there? But the man would be good at that job, too. An alert careful driver. One couldn’t imagine him running anyone over; or even, through no fault of his own, being involved in an accident.

  And stepped out of the limousine. Before a building that had not been a harmonious whole for three decades.

  Once there was one structure built of brick. A pungent, dusky red color. Four stories; perforated by high, narrow, deeply recessed windows with heavy wood frames. And surmounted by a sloping, gray-slate roof.

  In the late 1940’s, two long wings or annexes were added, over whose basic building material, reinforced concrete, a thin skin of stucco had been applied; and on that a relentless decoration of crescent lines had been incised. The stucco once white; a stained, coarse off-white (now), the color of a vanilla ice defiled by mud and urine. Three stories. A thin continuous belt of window glass on each floor. Flat-roofed.

  Diddy winced. The original edifice had been enclosed by two huge parentheses of ugliness. The building spoiled. But perhaps not entirely. All depends on the viewer. To see beauty under most circumstances, one had to look discreetly. Wasn’t it like that always? Narrowing the aperture of vision, bestowing the fraction of a look. The better to discriminate between beauty and ugliness, life and death.

  Diddy could narrow his look and see just the central portion of the building, a rather handsome example of Victorian factory architecture, where the firm’s offices, laboratories, and demonstrati
on rooms were located (now). The factory proper having been moved into the wings. The ugliest construction of all, a building dating from the 1950’s which served as warehouse and shipping office, is located in the rear and mercifully hidden from Diddy’s present view.

  Jim was greeting some men who were getting out of the limousine which had pulled up behind us. Diddy standing apart. Waiting for Jim, looking up. And not simply at the cloudless azure sky.

  The blue and gold dome which topped the old brick structure had been the founder’s pet idea. After the architect brought from Boston had drawn up his plans, Amos Watkins (1834–1909) had insisted on his redoing them in order to work in a chapel. At noon and in the late afternoon, all factory employees from the lowliest janitor to the heads of the firm were convoked for prayer meetings.

  His son Hubert (d. 1931) had dismantled the chapel at the turn of the century. After ripping out the pews and the altar, but leaving the stained-glass windows depicting an allegory of the Triumph of Industry, Amos’ son installed desks and files and personnel, mostly women, of the expanding firm’s bookkeeping department. In 1928, someone convinced Hubert that the huge vaulted space could be used still more wisely. Bookkeeping cleared out, the main laboratory of the company’s department of research and technological development moved in. But the dome remained, forever hinting at, while quite properly lacking, a cross. Presiding over the chapel that (now) no longer existed.

  The present Watkins, Hubert’s son (1914– ), knew only the laboratory. His grandfather’s chapel was a quaint ancestral folly. Not real at all. The old flooring still exposed in the narrow aisles, between the squarish bulky machines and the long worktables of the technicians, was worn quite smooth; holes made by the bolts that fastened down the pews had long been filled in. The stained-glass windows were taped on the inside and then covered by heavy tan drapes, to prepare for the advent of reliable, uniform, artificial light.

  Diddy, alongside his three New York colleagues, crossing the carpeted lobby of the old building. Waving to some men he knows from the Los Angeles office, nodding to the resident personnel. The four men identify themselves to the receptionist, receive a smile in return, and head for the elevators. To the left of the elevators are the high wide wooden doors that once admitted all employees to the old chapel. More restricted (now). “Research and Development.” Later, Diddy will step in, as usual, for a look.

  We are standing in front of the elevator, which Diddy thinks of as a vertical bore through the center of the building. A bore which might exit into the dome itself. Could one go up there (now)? In all these years Diddy had never inquired about that. It’s about time. Here’s a tiny idea, a pretext. Diddy will propose that a visit to the dome be added to the tour of the plant offered to the public each Wednesday at eleven o’clock. Entirely suitable. For this is what the dome had become: an asset for public relations. This third-generation Watkins, noting that the dome was (now) just a head missing a body, an idle, spiritually pretentious ornament atop a busy profane building, was unwilling to leave it at that. The wrong head for this body. Hubert’s son considered decapitating the building, then decided upon a reprieve. Invested the useless dome with a new function, one that was strictly secular. The dome, re-gilded for the first time in forty years, was designated as the company’s emblem. Henceforth, a colored image of the dome was stamped on all microscopes turned out by Watkins & Company, inscribed at the top of the company’s stationery and business forms, painted on the side of all vehicles owned by the company, stenciled on retail packaging and on the crates in which the instruments were shipped to dealers, and featured prominently in advertising. Look, the woman elevator operator has the outline of the dome sewn on her blouse pocket. And on the Oriental chauffeur’s uniform? Diddy hadn’t noticed.

  The elevator doors close. Moving up. The conference room is on the third floor.

  But maybe it was an insult to revive the dome on these terms? Let the dead rest, leave what is superseded to its natural repose. The adoption of the dome as the firm’s insignia took place in the mid-1940’s, when wartime government contracts had tripled the company’s profits. Just before a portion of these soaring profits was allocated for constructing the outsized wings that (now) flanked the old building; whose bulk and ugliness had the effect of making the dome seem so much smaller and less imposing than it had been. A miniature dome (now), shrunken vestige of its former glory. A kind of toy.

  Even though its colors were, by constant repainting, kept brilliant. Visible at a considerable distance.

  But for Diddy, the tiny figure on the letterhead, on the microscopes, and on full-page ads was one thing; the massive original, with its curious history, quite another. During the ten years he’d been with the company, Diddy, a chronic if erratic connoisseur of spiritual independence, had developed his own view of the dome.

  It was the fantasy expressed in Amos Watkins’ addition to the architect’s original plan that Diddy appreciated. Like the fantasy that produced the original sketch of what became the Micro-Recorderscope.

  To think of uniting two such different devices in one compact, high-powered, easily manipulable tool. A bold thought when Amos Watkins had it, around 1900. Cameras then were large, cumbersome, bulky, relatively new contraptions: hoisted and precariously maintained aloft on tripods. While microscopes, in existence since the late sixteenth century, were, had always been, small and delicate: ready for use as soon as they were set down, secure on their horse-shoe base, upon any table, or even a window ledge. Watkins had insisted that it was feasible to combine the aristocrat and the upstart. The big and the small. A bizarre marriage was being planned.

  That sparkling playful dome that incongruously topped the austere brick building was the embodiment of old Amos’ energies. More than the compulsive godliness of a typical old-style Protestant. In Diddy’s imagination, Watkins was a truly pious man. Not the piety that’s illustrated by his having been a pillar of the church who never defaulted on his tithes, who contributed generously to the mission in China, who wanted all his employees to pray as well as work. Not even the inane but convenient piety which persuades greedy men that becoming rich is a duty, gratifying to the deity; for which God must be thanked, on the very site of one’s labor. Pious in a larger sense. Old Amos must have been pious about himself. Must have felt lucky, fortunate, blessed. That’s what the dome proclaimed. Obstinate, shameless pleasure in making useful machines and in raking in profits. Pleasure in being himself: not only shrewd Yankee businessman, ardent Methodist and Republican, but also successful eccentric. One who had had his way.

  It was that energy of self-approval commemorated in the sturdy dome which had always charmed Diddy. Who didn’t find it easy to love himself. And felt no greater admiration than for those who could. Those who could affirm their lives. Diddy, not pious toward himself, revered the relics and clues of innocent well-being. The vision of a man who does not inhabit, but simply is, his life. Amos Watkins the Pious had his acolyte. In this mediated sense: Diddy the Pious.

  There are six people in the crowded elevator, (now) passing the second floor. For someone from the Chicago office has gotten on with Harron and Allen and Katz and What’s-his-name. We’re chatting loudly, but Diddy is silent. Reassuring and yet also numbing to Diddy’s mind: to be cooped up in a small space. Without alternatives. Focused mainly on the task of maintaining himself in an upright position, without getting in the way of the other bodies or allowing them to get in the way of his.

  Diddy wishes the elevator could go straight up, into the dome. And nestle there. He could get out first, then rudely close the others in. Less rudely, he could simply send the elevator down to the third floor, without him. Another possibility: the elevator might stall between floors. The lights go out, and there’s no explanation. Some of his fellow passengers are bound to panic, but Diddy will remain calm. Offering to go for help, he will get a boost from Jim and force open the trap door in the roof of the elevator cage. Climbing up the cable, hand over hand, is messy
work; cables in elevator shafts are covered with thick grease. But, if necessary, Diddy the Clean would do it. Until he reaches the top. Leaving below him in the shaft the small dark cube of the elevator, immobile, filled with nervous passengers … Any of these situations would do, as long as he can gain the dome by himself.

  Once left to explore the dome alone, who knows what Diddy might find? Is it a great cool place, heavily timbered and sheathed with planks? Or claustrophobically hot, humid, soaking up the sun through its thin outer shell?

  Perhaps Diddy will find he is not alone. Perhaps he’ll come across a workman repairing the inner face of the dome; removing broken planks and decaying timbers, nailing up fresh supports. Or the workman may not be visible at first. Diddy will think he has the whole dome to himself. Until he notices a small exit, hardly big enough for a large man to squeeze through; and, peering out of the dome, sees the workman precariously stationed on a flimsy scaffold, buckets and brushes at his feet, applying to the outer face the necessary fresh coats of blue and gold. Diddy just wants to see what he’s doing, to watch him work. He wouldn’t intrude, or ask questions, or make any sudden movement that might startle the workman and cause him to lose his balance and fall. A long fall, the equivalent of six stories. Certain death. The body of the workman sprawled on the grass below. Limp, broken, bleeding.

  Diddy knows what’s possessing him. And that these are not the right thoughts for him to be entertaining while on the job. While sharing this small space with four other delegates to the conference; in an elevator that’s stopping (now) at the third floor. Diddy has promised himself not to dwell on the gory anecdote about the railroad worker. Not here.

  Time for us to get out. “Here we are.”

  But suppose Diddy can’t keep his mind reined in tightly? Suppose, having vowed not to resurrect Incardona in his mind, he does do just that? Diddy knows a remedy. There’s something else, rather someone else, to think about. When the spectre looms up before his retrograde vision, she comes to caress his face and to kiss his eyes. To banish the workman, to heal Diddy.