The Dick Gibson Show (18 page)

Dick remembered how good he’d been, how he had thought even at the time that he was in a state of grace. His chest heaved, and he felt tears coming. Whatever the general might tell him now, he knew that it was over; his apprenticeship was truly finished, the last of all bases in the myth had been rounded, his was a special life, even a great life—a life, that is, touched and changed by cliché, by corn and archetype and the oldest principles of drama. In ignorance and absent- minded goodness of heart he had taken a burr from the general’s paw. And the general had turned out to be
the
general and would now repay him. This was no place for it, but he began openly to cry, simultaneously congratulating and commiserating with himself. Good work, Dick Gibson, he thought. Poor Dick Gibson, he thought. You paid your dues and put in your time and did what you had to. You struggled and fought and contended and strove, and many’s the time your back was against the wall, but you never let up, you never said die, even when the night was darkest and it seemed the dawn would hold back forever. You showed them. You, Dick Gibson, you showed the dirty motherfucking fartshits and prickasses. You showed them good. Poor Dick Gibson.

The officers, embarrassed by his weeping, looked away. Only the famous general watched him. He’s letting me cry, Dick Gibson thought. He’s letting me get it all out. Poor Dick Gibson, he blubbered silently.

The general waited a few moments, then stepped forward. There was a war on. “Feeling better?” he asked gently.

“Yes sir,” Dick said, his nose filling.

“Calmed down?”

“Sir, I am,” he managed forcefully.

“Talk business?”

“Business as usual,” Dick said, and took out a handkerchief and emptied his sinuses.

“That’s the spirit,” the general said when Dick, his nose clear once more and his eyes dry again, looked at him brightly.

“What’s up, sir?” Dick asked.

“We’ve been playing the transcription,” the general said. “Remarkable. You were hysterical. Fear brings things out in you.” Dick blushed. “No, you don’t understand. We want you to do the same for us.”

“We want to hear the war,” one of the other officers said.

“Yes,” the general said, “this place—” He indicated their surroundings with his arm. For all the fullness of his emotion, Dick understood exactly what the general’s gesture meant. It took in the false floors and new walls, the elevator and desks and typewriters and secret pockets of the secret service. But more than anything else Dick understood his gesture as an indictment of the
chairs.

For all the precision of his understanding of the moods in the room, it was a long time before he could concentrate on what they were actually trying to tell him, however. Only a certain sharpness and impatience in the general’s tone impelled him to put it all together.

He was to be sent to the most terrible war zones of all, and from these incendiary landscapes he was to send back reports, transmitting them the thousands of miles to headquarters over special equipment. They were interested not in military information as such, but in the
feel
of the campaigns. He was, in short, to do the color on World War II. Lieutenant Collins was to be sent along with him as his engineer. Except for the incident during the air raid, they worked well together.

Dick asked if the enemy wouldn’t be able to pick up his broadcasts.

“Negative,” a naval commander from research and development said. “We’ve perfected this transmitter and receiver that work on a band below three kilocycles. Your standard broadcast band begins at 550.”

He was given to understand that the assignment would be dangerous. He expected to be told this. They would understand if he turned it down and chose instead to be court-martialed. He expected to be told this. His infraction wasn’t
actually
treasonous. The Judge Advocate representative told him that his punishment wouldn’t amount to more than an eleven-year sentence and a reduction in rank. He expected this.
They
wouldn’t force him. This wasn’t unexpected. No man would look askance if he didn’t “volunteer,” and of course there was some good-natured laughter at the use of the word “volunteer.” Did he understand, then, what was required and that they weren’t trying to push him into a corner? He expected to be asked.

“Affirmative.”

Did they understand, then, that knowing the risks he was still willing to go through with it?

He anticipated that one too. “Affirmative,
sir.”

Indeed, after the general’s speech, he expected
everything,
all of it. He understood that the exceptional life—the one he had been vouchsafed to live—was magnificent yes, but familiar too, unconventional but riddled with conventions of a different, higher order. The full force of it descended on him; he could almost plot it. There would be— success. And lurking in the success, danger, suffering different from that he’d already endured, which was merely niggling loneliness and his apprentice’s uncertainty. Now the loneliness—God, the women he’d have—would exist inside power. Poor Dick Gibson, he thought; poor little rich boy. Now there would be tantrum and flaw, which he would try to guard against, learning to take advice from trusted advisers. And at the apogee there would probably be betrayal and slowish death. (Unless his end came suddenly, stylishly, à la mode—in a private plane he flew himself, perhaps.) But for now he was safe, snug as a bug in their lousy war zones (though he was a little nervous for Lieutenant Collins).

So, he thought, pledging himself, I am ready for things to happen to me. Let the clichés come. I open myself to the great platitudes.

The generals indicated he could leave. They would be in touch with him soon.

He paused at the door and looked at the famous general.

“What is it, son?”

“You saved me too,” he told him. “I don’t mean the court-martial. I thought I belonged with the brutes. But I feel pride. A brute doesn’t feel pride.” He saluted, and the general returned it, and Dick left.

“Ah,” said the famous general when Dick had closed the door behind him, “but he’s the only one who does.”

4

FROM THE ARCHIVES: TRANSCRIPTS OF DICK GIBSON’S BROADCASTS OF
Fabulous Battles of World War II: Mauritius.

“Dick Gibson talking low on the low band.

“We’re on Mauritius. Formerly Ile de France. Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Breasting the twentieth parallel like a runner breaking the tape. Sister isles, all volcanic—Réunion (a French possession), Rodrigues and the St. Brandon group. Who’s St. Brandon, patron of what? Sounds English to me. How did he get those spic brothers Réunion and Rodrigues for sister isles? What miscegenous, nigger-in- the-woodpile history went on here, anyway? Who, wanting something for nothing, looking for what trade routes, asking the way east from the way west like those other old junkmen of science, the alchemists, found this place? Who charted it on maps, informing the old cartographers so they could erase their ancient lame finesse,
Hic sunt leones?
It is the world, real as Paris.

“The light is terrible, and I have no smoked glasses, though Collins, an officer, does. There’s not much here. Lieutenant Collins agrees. Wait, I have my map. Hmn. Well. Hmn. Oh. Mnh hmn. Say, let’s try that. Here’s how I read it. I see from the Miller Cylindrical Projection that we are the last island cluster of democracy in the Tropic of Cancer, a short hop from the Tropic of Capricorn border. We are the Gateway to the Antarctic, a key cog in the bitter battle to control the glaciers. Am I getting warm?

“When I was a boy I imagined war as a cataclysm, an extended chaos. I puzzled where soldiers slept, when they ate. After a while I came to believe that wars had no silences save those of ambush. War seemed to be some eternal fire, sourceless and undying like a nasty miracle. Just a hint of the undisrupted was more exotic than the fiercest massacre. What, the mail goes through? The lottery isn’t stopped? The restaurants are full? Imagine. Now I perceive something of the thinness of cataclysm and know that more bombs fall in the sea than on the city, but a piece of my terror hangs on. In neutral Lisbon, where uniformed Germans and uniformed Americans walk side by side and buy papers at the same newsstands and ask the same questions of the hotel porter, and wait behind each other at the gas pumps, and no one draws his gun and there is less skulduggery than in Cleveland, my flesh crawled and I had bad dreams. Collins flew in first class and I in economy on our commercial flight here, and sitting beside me was a Japanese soldier who helped me recline my seat because the button was stuck. Neutrality is the miracle. I do not understand how forces can swirl and swarm and elude each other.

“Unless Collins has secret orders—he swears he hasn’t: our proximity has made
us
neutral; already he swears to me—I don’t understand what’s happening here, or why we came. There’s nothing to report. There’s a garrison of British soldiers, here since before the war. These men, never rotated or reinforced, seem residents of the place, as much its citizens as the Chinese, Dutch, Indians, French and Africans who live here. Occasionally there are reports that the Japanese have put troops ashore on one of the nearby islands, and then there is a flurry of military activity as the men go out on patrol. There’s some evidence that there
are
Japanese around, a few but at no greater than patrol strength, and as they make no move to threaten the garrison at Port Lewis, the island’s principal city, the British don’t try to engage them.

“It’s pretty much a planter culture here—no industry and a rattan feel to life. I guess at its essences. Mauritius would use its barks and leaves and boles. Commerce blooms from its rangy stalks and thorny brush. There are goods in its grasses. I smell high-grade hemps and queer cocoas. I sniff deck tars, caulking syrups and narcotics in the island’s fibers—hashish and bhang and cannabin. And there is something brackish and briny in the tangled mat of the growth, as though the vegetation were merely the dried top of the sea.

“As per our orders, Collins and I protect the equipment. One of us is at the transmitter at all times. Off duty I either drink with the British or roam about the place, sometimes climbing the grassy slopes of the volcanoes that acne the landscape. I’ve exhausted Port Lewis, seen its single museum—a curious place which in addition to its limited collection of paintings, mostly by the planters themselves, holds the largest collection in the world of the skeletons and reconstructed bodies of the extinct dodo bird which, for some curious reason, once thrived on Mauritius and Réunion isles.

“Is this the sort of thing you want?”

“A tip of the Dick Gibson cap to the High Command. You knew what you were doing, all right. Increased activities among the Japanese. A few small landing parties spotted by some of the planters. They disappear quickly into the jungle. No real alarm at the British garrison yet, as there is no evidence that they are bringing any heavy equipment with them.”

“Still more landings reported. They seem to be concentrated on Réunion, though one or two have been seen on the beaches of Mauritius itself. Yesterday a cache of armament, though of a strange sort. Primitive. Perhaps for jungle warfare. The British colonel here says the stuff looks almost like traps. One interesting sidelight: some of the Japanese accompanying the soldiers are dressed in civilian clothes.”

“A Japanese task force has been spotted steaming toward Mauritius, about two days off. Vichy France has sent troops to Réunion. The garrison here has been placed on alert. All Asians are under strict scrutiny. The buildup on both sides is terrific now.”

“By now there seem to be as many Japanese as British about, though both forces have thus far managed to stay out of each other’s way.”

“The Royal Air Force is here.”

“It’s a collision course, all right, though no major engagements yet. One of the Japanese civilians attached to the Jap army was captured and interrogated. He turns out to be a scientist—an ornithologist.”

“The report has come back. It’s official. HIC SUNT DODOS!”

“The dodo is an extinct species of ungainly, flightless bird of the genus Raphus or Didus. Its incubation ground and later its world was the island of Mauritius. It was closely related in habit and aspect to a smaller bird, the solitaire, also extinct but once indigenous to the island of Réunion. It has long been held by ornithologists that the dodo—both the dodo proper and the solitaire henceforward will be subsumed under the pseudo-generic term ‘dodo’—was related to the pigeon, but this is only an hypothesis since the bird has not been available for study since 1680, the year that the last known dodo died. Although the dodo was sent to European museums, no complete specimen exists, and today only the foot and leg of one specimen are preserved at Oxford. The representations one sees, even in the Mauritius Museum of Art itself, are merely restorations, little more than cunning dolls constructed on skeletal frames. Nevertheless, the skeletons, the scattered bones of which are to be found abundantly even today in the Mauritian fens and swamps, have been painstakingly reassembled by Mauritian dodo artisans—the best in the world—and give an accurate picture of what the bird was like.

“He was large, slightly bigger than the American turkey whom he in no mean way resembles. In silhouette the dodo is not unlike a great scrunched question mark. For detail we may refer to the paintings from life that have been made of the bird, many of the best of which are still here in the Mauritius Museum of Art and Dodo Reconstruction. Most of the artists seem to be in agreement that the animal possessed an enormous blackish bill which, together with the huge horny hook in which it terminates, constituted the shepherd’s crook of the question mark. Its cheeks, partially bare, seem oddly weather- beaten and muscular, like the toothless cheeks of old men who have worked out in the open all their lives. Black except for some whitish plumage on his breast and tail and some yellowish white the tint of old piano keys on his tail, the dodo was somewhat formal in appearance, if a trifle stupid looking. This formal aspect is attributable also to his wing, foreshortened as a birth defect, which in repose flops out and down from his body like an unstarched pocket handkerchief.