Death Kit

by Susan Sontag

  Diddy, like any animal, has two eyes. Let’s suppose that one eye is diseased, or has been traumatized. That stands for Incardona’s death, and its attendant enigmas. The other eye is a perfectly healthy organ. That one stands for his tie with Hester, and their deepening connection with each other. With this condition, how could he have been such a fool? Foolish enough to expect one’s clear-sighted eye can remain uncontaminated by the diseased one. Man, a creature of binocular vision, uses both eyes to see; with both eyes moving conjointly, can perceive depth. But it is well known that if one eye has a severe inflammation or a serious infection, or even so grave a flaw as a detached retina, which comes about through a physical injury to that eye alone, the same condition eventually tends to appear in the other eye, the perfectly healthy one. A sympathetic reaction.

  That sympathy for the damaged part of him was what was blurring his relations with Hester. If he doesn’t take care, he will ruin everything. As he’s always known: the two, Hester and Incardona, go together. In him their destinies are linked. Good eye and bad eye, beautiful vision and recurrent nightmare. To feel properly about one he must decide, once and for all, how he feels about both.

  About the workman’s death. Does Diddy feel guilty or doesn’t he? Since he called on Myra Incardona last night—was it only last night? it seems ages behind him—he feels less. Less guilty. That’s as it should be. Those people are really animals. One shouldn’t waste emotion on their fate. It’s people like the Incardonas who make life a nightmare. Diddy won’t feel guilty. He can’t. No room in his life for guilt. For if Diddy so much as admits guilt through the door, front door or back door, of his house, be it the most spacious of dwellings, the puffing swelling monster will end by dispossessing him entirely.

  About the girl. What does he feel toward this delicate, troubled creature? Who’s strong, perhaps, where he is weak, but surely weak in some ways in which he’s strong. Here, his feelings are clearer. The stupidity of running away! (Now) Diddy believes he really loves her. And he longs for Hester to know of his love, if it will give her pleasure. To know before she’s wheeled into the operating room tomorrow morning.

  Footsore Diddy, his heart beating faster than usual, is nearing the downtown section of the city. (Now) is the time to acknowledge that he doesn’t want a taxi. Noticing that the clock on a bank façade says it’s already a quarter to six, he goes into a drugstore and asks the soda jerk if there’s a post office nearby. Yes. Arriving at five minutes to six, stands at the sloping counter carpeted with tan blotting paper to write out his telegram.

  Sharing the counter, to his left: an elderly Negro woman, wearing the clothes of the self-respecting poor, has crumpled up one yellow form with a sigh and started another. Probably a request for money. Or the announcement of a relative’s death.

  Diddy’s telegram should be delivered to the Warren Institute in less than an hour. Who will read it to Hester? Hopefully, Mrs. Nayburn won’t have returned yet. Then it would be the disagreeable Gertrude who brings the telegram to Hester’s room. But if it should be the crass meddling aunt who recites his declaration, so what? Diddy has nothing to hide.

  The woman on his left is still struggling to print the letters. That make up the words. That make up the news, probably bad; or the plea for assistance. Diddy, who always got A’s in Penmanship, has his own reasons for printing on his telegram form almost as slowly as she. For bearing down as hard as he can on the fatigued ballpoint pen, one of two attached by slender chains to the frame of the writing counter. Diddy digs the blunt point into the paper, as if he thought it was this piece of paper that would be delivered to Hester. And wanted to make something Braille-like that she could decipher herself, by moving her fingertips along the indentations. Of course, he knows perfectly well that this isn’t so. Telegrams come typed. And must be read aloud to the blind. Perhaps Diddy is writing in this heavy fashion because he wants to engrave the words on himself.

  I LOVE YOU. I AM WITH YOU TOMORROW MORNING. DALTON.

  * * *

  Diddy hasn’t returned to the Rushland. Leaving the post office, he continued on foot toward the center of town. After sending the telegram, easier to walk. Except for being hungry, feels he could walk forever. Stopped off at a small Chinese restaurant and ordered a cup of wonton soup and a plate of barbecued spareribs, but the soup was water and the ribs burnt meatless. Diddy plays with the inedible food a few moments, then pays up and leaves. Still hungry. Better not to be so fastidious. Second stop: a pizzeria, where he downs without complain a doughy triangle smeared with tasteless cheese and tomato sauce, then another, then a third, then a fourth.

  Since eight o’clock he’s been wandering up and down a brightly lit street about fifteen blocks from the Rushland.

  Diddy is looking. “Science has proved that 90% of all knowledge is acquired visually.” What about the other ten percent? Do those who have to make do on that small fraction discover the ninety percent to be a distraction? Seeing an adulteration of genuine knowledge?

  Or is seeing necessary? Is it like “Ninety percent of the eye is water”? The viscous medium needed to support and shelter the miniature organs, the bland sea needed to float the precious intricate devices of sight?

  Diddy looking. Is that necessary?

  On a brightly lit street on which are congregated a burlesque house, a movie theatre showing skin flicks, two penny arcades jammed with leather-jacketed motorcyclists and girls in miniskirts, and stores selling party records, scatological ashtrays, back-number magazines, devices for practical jokers, and sex books.

  Diddy is looking.

  Comparing the sizes of breasts in the stills displayed outside the Casino Burlesque with those outside the Victory Theatre. Browsing in old issues of National Geographic and Silver Screen in one bookstore; the latest issues of The Justice Weekly, The Spanker’s Monthly, and The Ladder in another. Diddy the Voyeur. What does he feel? Amused? Disgusted? Curious? Something, but not very much, of all three. Yet Diddy is trying to feel. Feels more in one of the novelty stores, examining rubber monster masks. When he tries on a limp cool mask of Frankenstein’s monster; and sees his rectangular, stitched, pathetic Boris Karloff face in the mirror. The harsh, sad joke of Diddy the Monster. Dreamed by Diddy the Good.… All the looking has made him vaguely restless in a sexual way. As he’s leaving the novelty store, Diddy stops before another mirror. Admired his de-Frankensteined profile. Turns to the mirror full-face, tenses his biceps, then approvingly feels the muscle he’s made in his left arm with his right hand.

  Diddy touring one of the arcades. (Now) dispensing quarters for the shooting gallery at the back. He’s already weighed himself: eighteen pounds underweight. And read the fortune which the machine ejected. “You are about to take an important trip.” Diddy laughs and sticks the white card into his wallet. Has already tested the strength of his handgrip. “Above average,” if the machine is to be believed. Which is not bad for a man who’s pale as the inmate of a maximum-security penitentiary, and lean as a mandrake root. He has also played six games on a pinball machine. And on another machine, tested his skill as a driver. “Good Insurance Risk.” (Now) Diddy has been sufficiently expert with the breech-lock rifle, scoring with every one of the last ten ducks that bobbed across the target area, to have won a prize. “The panda bear, the cigarette lighter, or the set of six wine glasses, mister?” Diddy chooses the stuffed panda, a foot-tall thick creature with big round ears and festoons of red ribbon about its neck; carries his prize onto the street. Into a taxi, and gives the driver the address of the television studio.

  Which turns out to be quite near, so Diddy finds he’s the first to have arrived. Quarter to nine. The Channel 10 executive who’d been at the company lunch today greets him, asking Diddy if he’d prefer to wait in the reception area and watch TV, or come in and observe what’s happening in the studios at this very moment.

  “I’ll come in,” says Diddy. “Where can I put this?” The panda. No explanation.

  “On the recept
ionist’s desk?” replies the producer doubtfully. “Okay? She’s gone home for the night.”

  Diddy wonders if he’s about to be asked where he got the panda, or why he’s carrying it. Puts down his prize. Then follows the man through a pair of swinging doors. “Silence.” Down a corridor, to what Diddy’s guide refers to as “our Studio A.” At one end of a very large room, whose ceiling is two floors high and crisscrossed with lighting equipment, the local community theatre is taping their biggest success last spring, Long Day’s Journey into Night, for NET; to be shown locally next month, says the man. Diddy peers through the huge window. Hard to get a good view of the actors or even of the set, because the cameramen are continually rolling their black machines in and out for close-ups. And since he’s on the other side of a glass wall, Diddy is experiencing the play only as a soundless pantomime. Nevertheless, having seen the play on Broadway as well as the movie, he recognizes the passage the actors are performing. Remembering not only the sense of the scene, but even some of the lines. The play had moved Diddy greatly; and this scene in particular. The talented younger son, a portrait of the playwright himself, finally indicts his debauched older brother; confronts him with the failure of his life. With love, with compassion, with loathing. But that’s almost simple, compared to the impasse between Diddy and his brother. Is it Diddy who should reproach Paul? Or Paul, Diddy?

  On to our Studio B. A much smaller room. “We’re taping part of the eleven o’clock news. Most of that goes out live, except for where we use some newsreel footage. They’re timing that now.” Is it the same man?

  Yes. There in the spacious soundproofed cube, seated behind his desk, a map of the world at his left, a screen on his right, is the bland creature whose every word Diddy had strained to hear only four evenings ago. Last Sunday night that face was a blurred image on the glassy surface of the picture tube, its features built up out of tiny lines. (Now) it is the man’s own face, his flesh, which Diddy sees. Glass does intervene. As a large rectangular wall that separates them, keeping Diddy outside and the newscaster inside; but at least it isn’t the glass itself which renders the face.

  “Is it possible to hear what he’s saying?” Diddy whispers to the producer at his side.

  Certainly. The man presses a red button next to the entrance to the studio.

  Yes, there’s the unctuous, denatured voice. For all the naturalness of the sound, Diddy might as well be watching the television in his room at the Rushland, lying on his bed. But maybe the quality of the sound reproduction in the corridor isn’t to blame. Remember, this is the voice belonging to the man who reads the news who had no news, no information. Did he tonight? Not tonight, either. Just more about the unspeakable war, the one in which territory doesn’t change hands and the sole measure of each victory is how many small-boned yellow bodies, with flesh charred by napalm or shattered by metal, huddle and sprawl on the ground after the battle. Waiting to be counted. The newscaster deploys the usual senseless numbers; repeats the well-worn gruesome tautologies of self-righteousness. With a broadly serious set to his face. Lies, but terrible smiling lies.

  The producer has excused himself, and left Diddy lingering alone outside the viewing window of Studio B. Diddy presses his face against the glass; listening. If Diddy were given to tirades, he could deliver one (now). The words burning his throat. But against whom would it be aimed? There are so many targets for his revulsion, not least of which is himself. Diddy the Self-Denouncer. But he is scarcely the only thing that’s wrong in this world.

  The newscaster has stood up, and is jabbing a pointer against the map behind his desk.

  There’s no end to Diddy’s rage; little economy in it, either. How can one slake the rage for self-correction? Provoked by the lies and inanities being disseminated by the newscaster, Diddy will once more try to embark on the endless mission of correcting his feelings.

  The newscaster has some words to add to a still photograph, projected on a screen to his left, which shows an American soldier interrogating a kneeling, blindfolded, teenage enemy prisoner of war. But Diddy isn’t listening any more.

  Reminded of the behavior of his own country, currently engaged in the cumbersome, drawn-out murder of a small defenseless nation—this being only the latest of the century’s roll call of historical atrocities, of crimes that baffle the imagination—Diddy’s own agonizing during the last four days over the death of merely one person shrank (now) to humiliating size. Considered as an action performed on this planet and in this decade, what Diddy has done is barely visible. Set Diddy’s deed against the scale of reality, and it seems petty and amateurish. And his lacerating remorse little more than presumption, a kind of boastfulness; at best, the foolish endearing weakness of the overcivilized. Diddy the Demonic must learn the diminutive proportions of his misdeeds. By this, Diddy doesn’t mean to excuse or to condone his inadvertent slaying of Incardona. Murder remains murder, a sluggish and putrid stain upon the feelings. As a death is still a death.

  Dalton Harron is no longer Diddy the Good, if indeed he ever was. That may be conceded. Still, it’s right to consider those far more vicious and ample murders being committed, ceaselessly, all over the world. With the assassins scarcely ever suffering the slightest ache of guilt. Why would they? When it’s done for one’s country, one is cheered for slaying a hundred Incardonas every hour: not only bashing in the skulls of the husbands, who may in some cases be able to defend themselves, but disemboweling the wives and throwing the children out of the window, too. It’s the rare spirit, the exceptional murderer, who knows enough to feel guilty anyway—even though he’s praised for his deed, and congratulated for doing his job. And the others, like Diddy, who haven’t been licensed, who’ve stayed out of the arenas where killing is the respectable business of the day, have their corresponding, equally gullible role to enact. Diddy, too. Though he should know better.

  For the questionable reward of being at peace with his neighbors, Diddy has swallowed the rotten bait. Taken for his own truth the old lies about what makes an act good or bad.

  It’s not for an act of violence, resulting in a death, that Diddy flogs himself; and would, if he were caught by the law, be executed or at least shut away in prison. It’s for not having the relevant job or identity, that of a hero or a professional killer. For not having a cause. For lacking a sanctifying public goal. For only killing, not overkilling.

  Diddy, looking through the window at the bland newscaster, is glad to be reminded of the world. His own crime last Sunday appears in a saner perspective. And, which is more important, so does his ordeal of guilt.

  Hadn’t Diddy the Educated known all this for years? That the extravagant self-punishing moralism of essentially peaceful folk like himself serves no one but the mighty, consecrated killers of entire peoples. Confirming their authority. Making them more secure, more inviolate. Today no one has the right to be innocent about these matters, and Diddy is ashamed of his innocence. Over Incardona, what a waste of agony. Over Hester, what a risk of love.

  A squeak of door hinges; enter heavy feet in a parody of tiptoeing across the carpet. James Watkins, Hubert’s burly son, approaches. “Hello, Harron. See you got here early.” Diddy shifted his legs mechanically, turned away from the smiling herald of absent-minded genocide on the far side of the large glass pane. Holding out his hand. “Hello, Mr. Watkins.” Out into the reception area. Comensky had arrived, too, and was sprawled on a couch; thumbing through a tattered issue of Life. “The others will be along any moment, I guess,” said Watkins, rubbing his dry reddish hands together. An old mannerism.

  Diddy took out a cigarette and sat down. “Can I have one, too?” said Comensky. “I’m trying to stop, so I don’t buy them any more.” Diddy nodded, held out the pack. “Say, Harron, did you see my latest thing in the Transactions of the American Microscopical Society?” Diddy said he hadn’t. “Hell, I’m glad I thought to bring a few offprints along with me tonight.” Holding the unlit cigarette in his left hand and matches in hi
s right. Comensky stuck the cigarette in his mouth; began to dig one-handed into his inside jacket pocket. The wrong hand. Didn’t Comensky remember he was, as he evidently was, right-handed? Eventually he has to put the matches somewhere, too, before he could pull out an offprint and shove it into Diddy’s hand. “Thanks,” said Diddy.

  A few minutes later, Reager and Michaelson came through the door. (Now) we were ready, the group complete. Diddy guessed from the high spirits of the latecomers that they had both come from Reager’s house; to which Michaelson had been invited for dinner, where he had put away one of those lavish meals with too many sauces, and himself been served up as the evening’s morsel for Reager’s ever less attractive, still unmarried daughter. They seemed to be talking about Evie as they entered. “Hey, Alex,” Comensky called to Michaelson, “you didn’t happen to see my piece in the summer issue of Transactions, did you?” Michaelson shook his head. “Wait, I brought you one. Just a minute. Don’t go away. I have it here in my pocket.”

  Without giving the least encouragement to this gift, Michaelson slumped down on the left side of the long couch. Diddy (now) in the middle. Trying to keep clear of Comensky’s elbow flailing out to his right. For again, Comensky has to dismiss, temporarily, the useful objects that seem naturally to encumber his hands. A paper cup of water drawn from the cooler in the hallway must be balanced on the narrow armrest of the couch, a copy of the Courier-Gazette set down on one knee, a barely smoked cigarette stubbed out in the free-standing metal ashtray next to the couch. Comensky plunges one hand inside his jacket, pulling at something. Almost as if he were, very awkwardly, trying to undress himself. Like a man with an urgent need to piss who discovers his pants have an unfamiliar button fly instead of the usual zipper.