Drinks Before Dinner

by E. L. Doctorow

  ALAN Except tonight, apparently.

  JOAN Yes, Edgar can be understood, I think, as a person always trying to regain the state of drama. He is really very old-fashioned, my Edgar.

  ALAN I wish, however, I did not have to be punished twice for the same thing. I wish your old-fashioned Edgar, if he is going to kill me, would do so without lecturing me first.

  EDGAR Are you not comfortable, Mr. Secretary? The idea of this is not to inflict physical abuse. It is a symbolic act in intention. The abuse is of your power and eminence. Since, in fact, it is your person tied to the chair, you may suffer some confusion.

  ALAN That must be it.

  EDGAR This apartment has been hijacked. It is by the rights conveyed from piracy an area of space no longer part of the nation. This apartment is a new territory, a region of light in which the truth of our situation is acknowledged. That is revolutionary!

  (EDGAR goes out on the balcony and looks down at the street)

  CLAUDETTE Oh, Alan, I am so sorry. I am so terribly terribly sorry.

  ALAN Please, Claudette, you must not reproach yourself.

  GRACE I had been looking forward to meeting you, sir, under more civilized circumstances.

  JOEL I’m going to make a run for the phone.

  MICHAEL Don’t do it.

  (EDGAR returns)

  EDGAR The moon is out. The moon is lighting the lake in Central Park, and at the entrance to this building I can see it reflected in the shiny tops of two black cars. Why do you need two cars, Mr. Secretary?

  ALAN The second car carries my security.

  CLAUDETTE Oh, Alan—

  ALAN They wanted to come up here to look around, but I told them it wasn’t necessary. The joke’s on me. Actually, I’ve always been embarrassed by them. I sometimes have the impression I exist for their sake, and that rather than doing me a service they derive tremendous and enviable satisfaction from a sense of the necessity of guarding me. I feel I am their illusion, and that I must pretend to be important and valuable to sustain it. That is why it is interesting to find a fellow like you echoing my most private feelings. You are obsessed with numbers: Consider someone in my position for whom the smallest comprehensible unit of concern is the nation. How do you think I feel? How can one maintain one’s sense of self making decisions presumably on behalf of two hundred and fifty-odd million people? I have always felt my own character to be a fictional creation. It is quite arbitrary that I am who I am, doing what I do. I derive no personal satisfaction at all. What amazes me about finding myself sitting tied up in this chair and facing your handgun is why it has taken this long to happen. I regard it as a kindness of fate that I’m permitted to undergo this experience among dear old friends. It is people like Joel and Claudette who are my real security. They recall to me who I was when we all believed in our selfhood. I come back to them like a patient for an injection.

  EDGAR What a charming and sympathetic man. How dangerous. You hear behind his charming and sympathetic voice the computer clicks of missiles calculating their trajectory.

  ALAN The system you describe by which we accommodate our perception of the world’s end is, however, an imperfect system. Look at the other side of the world to be destroyed. Have you ever been to China? There are eight hundred million people in China. The peasants march in step to their work in the fields. No one in China is alone. No one in China has ever been alone. One doesn’t live alone, or travel alone, or think of oneself alone or think of oneself as an individual competing with others, or present oneself to others to the disadvantage of others. None of that is done. The children’s blocks in China are made too heavy for one child. The self in China is too heavy for one person. The person in China can only be lifted by China. I should say they are much further along in their preparation for the end of the world than we are. They march in step painlessly to the end. Over here we’re still protesting. We’re still in the thrall of our expectations. We have these stray romantics and malcontents like yourself, stubbornly clinging to the pitiful ideals of humanism and doing foolish things.

  EDGAR Ahh. You do believe the world is ending. I thought you might.

  ALAN Well, after all, it’s the only reasonable position to take.

  (Pause)

  MICHAEL Just a moment, Mr. Secretary. I wonder if you appreciate how disturbing it is to hear that view from someone in your position.

  ALAN Oh, I quite appreciate it. I’m used to having people give weight to what I say. But why should this surprise you? If you’re beginning to perceive the truth, hearing it from children, surely you must realize I would have known it for some time. Of course this is all off the record.

  ANDREA I feel a chill. As Edgar proposed the world’s end I thought I had the courage to meet it. Now I’m not sure. Why is that?

  ALAN Perhaps the idea had a certain chic? Perhaps that has worn off.

  ANDREA I beg your pardon, Mr. Secretary, but that’s not it. Somehow your words are ruining the end of the world for me! I supposed the idea of ending the world contained the idea of replacing it with something better. But I don’t get that feeling from you. I get the feeling of the dead end from you. I hope you will forgive my saying so.

  ALAN You give me too much credit. I didn’t make the world. I’m merely of it—like you, like everyone in this room. As individuals we are pitiful, as groups we’re inhuman. That is our anguish, our cross. Nobody can do anything about that.

  MICHAEL Sir, I don’t wish to appear rude or contentious, given the position you’re in. But please reconsider what you’re saying. If as individuals we’re pitiful and as groups we’re inhuman, if our mind can’t find a place for itself—neither as something separate in each of us, nor something altogether in all of us—why, that truly portends the end of the world and we were finished before we began!

  ALAN So it appears.

  MICHAEL But can you say that? I mean, Edgar here sustains hope! All his despair for the way things are assumes there is something more. Everything he says expresses a longing for something more. Don’t you, in your position, have the responsibility to want more—more than anyone?

  ALAN I’m sorry to disappoint you. If it is possible to save the world from ending in nuclear disaster, which I doubt, or from any of the ice-age things we may be bringing about, it will end some other way. It is inevitable. It will end by simply going on as it is and irresolutely turning past the point when it can be what it is and still continue. Our destructiveness is not specific. We are suicidal in the fullness of our being. The world will therefore end from the fullness of our creation of it. It is already ending in every possible way in which it can end. It is ending in all directions. Whatever we do inevitably brings it closer to its ending because everything around us which we have made for ourselves express the idea of its ending. It will end of the failure of the human mind to locate itself in any category it can imagine. It will end of the failure of human beings to be sufficiently human. If your friend has reason to find hope from that, then he is a fool.

  EDGAR Children—there is the answer! Look, look how this gun pulls me forward. It moves, it is magnetized! This was the reason it was given me, to hold it, homing in along the last few irresistible inches of its momentous journey.

  CLAUDETTE Oh God in heaven—

  EDGAR Think, Claudette, of the enormous distance it has come! From the street to your dinner party. We make death. We make death. In the fullness of our being we design it and engineer it and mine it and cast, it and build it and assemble it and test it and aim it and make careers in it.

  JOAN For God’s sake, Edgar! Somebody stop him!

  EDGAR This is nothing personal. It can’t be stopped. It’s the world coming to an end. Not brain matter but an arms cache will explode when I fire. This small shot will fuse the armament of the earth. Think of all the handguns, rifles, machine guns, grenades, torpedoes, shells, mines, firebombs, frag bombs, ground-to-ground missiles, ground-to-air missiles, heat-sensing bombs, self-propelling smart bombs, proton bombs, ne
utron bombs, nuclear warheads, multiple nuclear warheads—in this head. This warhead. It is plated in steel and rooted in concrete. This head is the world’s unholy armory waiting to be lit by my tinder.

  ANDREA Edgar, it’s not right! I dissociate myself from this!

  (He points the gun at ALAN’s head)

  EDGAR A child gave it to me to end the world!

  MICHAEL Edgar, wait!

  EDGAR Why should we wait? Why should we want to wait? One shot will take it all out. Let’s get to it. Let’s get on with it! Let’s see what’s on the other side.

  MICHAEL But he’s lying! He knows something he’s not telling us! Why should he believe in the end of the world? He has no right to believe in the end of the world! What does he know that he’s not telling us? Are there plans? They have them for everything—wouldn’t they have to have planned for the end of the world?

  (EDGAR lowers the gun)

  EDGAR Give him some whiskey someone. He’s trembling.

  (JOEL does this. He crouches next to ALAN and holds the glass)

  ALAN Either shoot me or let me go. I know of no plan. If it exists, I know nothing about it.

  MICHAEL It could exist. Edgar, it has to exist! And if it does, that is not quite the end of the world, is it? Something would go on, something would be left! He knows! If the government had to plan for the end of the world, what would they think of? What would they try to do?

  (CLAUDETTE pulls her children close to her, kneels between them)

  CLAUDETTE Children. They would try to save children. They would hope to save a few children.

  JOEL Is that it, Alan? They would do that even if there was no hope, wouldn’t they?

  ANDREA Think, Mr. Secretary! Who would be called upon for the sake of the children!

  ALAN They would not have to be called upon. They would respond on their own. There would be no plan. They would react instinctively … People who come into their own under states of extreme disaster … People who become very interested and efficient in the teeth of disaster … Not your sort … Not people who go to dinner parties. Unfashionable people. You’d be bored by their conversation. But they know things. They know how to survive. It would be some instinctive effort of these people who would have the brutal, insensitive strength to survive. It would be a conspiracy of survivors who would save the children. They would attempt to save their own children, but if their children didn’t come up to the mark, they would find other children.

  (Pause)

  EDGAR Go on.

  ALAN They would make some astounding selfless effort of organization to save some children. There would be help from the government, but it would be secret and unofficial. Officially the world would not be ending. Rockets and space launches would be under heavy guard in various places in the country. These would be for the purpose of venting the torment of the masses who, despite all assurances, would know that the world was ending. There would be nothing painless about it. Enormous mobs of tormented, mourning, enraged masses would periodically rush the heavily guarded gantries of rockets officially denied to be for the launching of survivors into space. They would be massacred. An ethic of genocide will justify the killing of these enraged masses. It will be seen as a form of mercy to save people the experience of the world’s end. And of course the rockets and space launches will be dummies. The space vehicles will be dummies. The conspiracy of survivors will have decided that nature is not secure in space, that life is not natural in space. They will have designed something for the earth, some completely self sustaining ecosystem, a terrarium deep in the sea, perhaps, where the selected specimens of humanity can begin again. Yes. This would be a venture of scientists and military men with government technology at their disposal. Revolutionary groups protesting its elitism would try to sabotage it. Morally they would be right, but they would fail. Millions would die in protest. But our computers would secretly be scanning the traits of every child in the country just reaching breeding age. And at the moment the ecosystem was ready, the moment the ark was complete, the computers would designate the children who were to survive. All the weak and deformed would be eliminated, of course, all the congenitally deformed children with twisted spines or macrocephalic heads or arms attached to their shoulders. All the physically normal but ordinary, sensitive children would be eliminated too. Only champions would be chosen, champions of survival, champions of selfishness, cunning, muscular strength, sexual vigor, children with the ability to kill, and a complete lack of concern for the horrors of their own consciousness. Helicopters will come out of the night and land in the streets and on lawns and kidnap these children designated for survival. And while the world erupts, on some back road somewhere an ordinary yellow school bus will make its way unremarked and ignored through the chaos. In the yellow school bus will be the chosen children. Not many. Perhaps ten of them. Perhaps twenty or thirty. And the bus will turn a corner somewhere, in some mining town somewhere on a river. The light in the sky will be amber, and the old school bus will have turned in that light a darkened yellow, like an egg yolk. And it will go around a corner and be gone, and a few hours or days after it has disappeared, the last unprotected person on earth will be dead. The conspiracy of survivors will be dead. But the ark will be under way.

  MICHAEL My God.

  ALAN It’s more than a plan, it’s an inevitability. The same flaw in the human race that destroys it provides the conspiracy of survivors with the responses that save it. The same insufficient humanity that brings doom provides a few people with the insensitive strength to plan beyond the doom.

  EDGAR Yes. And we survive the fire as we survived the flood. Clouds of radiant poison will fall through the trees on the mountaintops and drift down the mountainsides into valleys. And while men in the night drum the earth with their running feet and people run in terror over the corpses of the deformed and mobs tear down the gantries of empty rockets and while people choke on their blackened tongues and cattle go down on their knees and cities explode and the seas boil—the children on the school bus will see this. They will have the vision of the world’s end imprinted on their brains. And in numbers of generations and individuals to come, those memories will erupt at night in terrible dreams. And one day again in the universe these dreams will come true. The dreams will again come true because the children of the survivors will be made in their image and will build a new earth with the genius of the conspiracy of survival. Everything that has happened will happen again. The ark will be built to resemble a lavish apartment overlooking a ruined city. The ark will look like this room. We are on the ark now. The world has already ended.

  (EDGAR unties ALAN. He points the gun at the floor and squeezes the trigger. Click)

  ANDREA It wasn’t loaded!

  EDGAR No.

  ANDREA You were never going to shoot anyone.

  EDGAR (Pausing) No.

  (ALAN rises from his chair, arranges his tie, his vest, buttons his jacket, shoots his cuffs. Recovers his eyeglasses from the coffee table)

  ALAN You led me to believe I was at the point of death. What do you think you accomplished?

  EDGAR Nothing. I accomplished nothing. You were already dead. I was looking into the eyes of a ghost born of ghosts. I heard it speaking the words of life. Maybe that’s something. At least I know who I am.

  ALAN I could have told you who you are. I’ve known from the beginning who you are. You’re one of the beneficiaries of a society that has provided more to its own than any other in the history of civilization. You’re one of those useless beneficiaries who is given everything but respects nothing—one of those hypocrites of privilege who condemns everything but relinquishes nothing. You are a whining, pulullating psychopath. You are one of the wretches of ingratitude who has risen to the top as scum rises to the top. You are scum. You’re a hero of the precious sensibility whose genius is to say in a thousand clever ways how humanity disappoints you, but who if left to yourself would not survive a day. You wouldn’t be able to feed yourself or cl
othe yourself or keep yourself warm. You wouldn’t even know how to wipe your ass. You are one of those traitorous malcontents, one of those spiritual vandals who would like to be a revolutionary but hasn’t the balls of a flea.

  (He takes the gun from EDGAR’s hand)

  EDGAR God bless our class.

  ALAN It will give me great pleasure to decide what you deserve for this little entertainment. Yes, I will think of something. It will have all the trappings of justice that we’ve come to expect. But it will be well conceived, I can assure you. (He walks to the doorway, stands and looks at them all) I’ll know I can reach you through your friends here. I hold you all responsible! To think the work I do protects and preserves your treacherous souls. (To the MAID) May I have my coat, please?

  (ALAN exits, followed by the MAID. There is a long silence. The MAID returns, CLAUDETTE goes to her, comforts her)

  CLAUDETTE (Looking toward the door) Very well. (Looking around the room) Very well! First these children must go to bed. (To the children) Say good night to everyone. Go on.

  (The children proceed to be kissed and hugged by everyone. This is done solemnly or fervently but in silence. JOAN weeps. The children linger for an extra moment beside EDGAR. Then they are hugged tightly by CLAUDETTE and exit with JOEL and the MAID)

  EDGAR. So. It’s turned out to be not a bad evening, after all.

  JOAN Even memorable.

  CLAUDETTE And now we’ll go in to dinner.

  Curtain