Three Days Before the Shooting ... (22 page)

A visiting Fulbright singer broke into a soaring and quite florid rendition of “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead” which spurred the colonists to further extremes. The participants were jumping up and down now, and I watched a group lock hands and swing in a reeling square-dance circle around the modeling table on which the doll had been propped against a glass brick.

Others knocked them aside by ducking under the chain of arms to squirt the fetish with fountain pens, to jab it with needles, hairpins—anything with a point or cutting edge. I pushed one man away as he tried to smash it with a small hand axe, only to have him swing at me, miss, and go shooting head-long into a corner where he crashed against the bottom of an upright piano. He lay yelling, “Praise the Lord and pass the goddamn ammunition,” then, “Somebody give me a fucking drink….”

Now people were rushing into the room from other parts of the palace. Small, white-jacketed servants with bright eyes and gleaming hair, elderly scholars in bathrobes, fat ladies in wrappers and with hair done up in curlers. Someone slung a howling black cat into the room, and I saw it land atop the piano, where it stood arched-back and wild-eyed, spitting and striking the air with a wide-spread claw.

The tortured doll was now doused with brandy and set afire, raising a stench of burning hair, cloth, and Strega. And in a flash the fetish took on the look of an insane gollywog, and this raised the pressure all the more.

“That’s the ticket!” someone cried.

“That’ll fix the black-hearted bitch!”

“It’s just what she deserves!”

“I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you dirty slut,” the soprano sang:

“We’ll be glad when you’re dead, you dawg!
We’ll all yell, ‘Hooray!’ in Rome
When they ship your dead bones home
We’ll be stoned when you’re gone
You black bitch, you!”

“Wait! Hold it right there,” a voice commanded. It was a jolly-faced brown-skinned fellow, holding up his hand. “I want to remind you fellow members that that bitch ain’t black, she’s blue!”

“Come on, men,” someone yelled behind me, and suddenly four male members of the party plunged in, grabbing the doll, then whirled and crashed through the crowd and into the hall. I followed as they reeled down the long corridor and up a marble staircase as one man sang,
“On away awake, beelooooved,”
all the way to the offending woman’s door. Where, stumbling and cursing, they hung the doll to the knocker with a necktie. By now the party was reduced to a drunken and incoherent shouting, and in spite of my own drinking I was profoundly disturbed. What had begun as highly civilized and sophisticated play, a conscious sublimation of hostile emotions, had become a force which had swiftly swept the annoyed colonists into regions where I was sure they had never ventured before, regions where they would have been outraged had anyone suggested they might ever arrive—except, perhaps,
a psychoanalyist in slow, private sessions. And now I feared that should the woman show herself she would be attacked most brutally.

I watched as they hammered on the door, demanding that she appear, and when she failed to materialize they stood in a drunken row and, as by prearranged signal, relieved themselves thunderously against the oaken panels of her door.

I reminded myself that these were all refined, scholarly Americans, people with whom I was proud to be identified. Doubtless their opponent was vastly provocative, and there was the added circumstance that they were living far from home and the scenes of their childhood, apart from the landscapes of their dreams, the countries of their minds. Indeed, all were dangling out of the familiar ridges and grooves which would have guided them at home. There they would have found quite adequate forms for dealing with both their emotions and their trying stone measurer. At home they would have ignored her, snubbed her. So, I thought, perhaps M. Vannec’s leading man of letters is correct: Lose your supports, and go into a spin. Fall out of your well-worn groove, and you skate in chaos. Perhaps our little colony was pushed by irrepressible forces like those which I felt myself.

We’re all being subjected to strange forces these days
, I thought. Not only from abroad but right here at home. Only yesterday, a man of fifty, an early pioneer in the sexual revolution, a master of ideas, ancient and modern, a Ph.D. in anthropology, sociology, and English literature, was convicted of seducing an eleven-year-old babysitter while occupying a stool in an Orgone Box—which is, I understand, a scientific device designed to capture from the air an elusive element which is said to be the source of the life force. In fact, the man’s defense was that there was such a concentration of life force within the box that he was
compelled
to his sad action. He insisted that the force was irresistible; he had been bombarded to supersaturation with
orgone
, that substance of which the best and most metaphysical orgasms are made, to the point where, he insisted, he was no longer responsible for his actions. His indiscretion, he argued, was thus no more than the discharge of a natural force, like a flash of lightning.

Unfortunately, it was brought out by the prosecutor that he had given in to this irrepressible force on other occasions and with other babysitters, frumpy cooks and rump-sprung matrons in suburbia. When I read of this case, I had dismissed it as a special instance, but now I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps the uncommon is far more real than we like to suspect. And perhaps, I thought, this
is
a country for shooting the bearer of bad news after all. Perhaps Sunraider had become for too many people the bearer of bad news….

CHAPTER 9

T
HEY SWEPT AROUND THE
far corner of the corridor in double-quick time, four dark-suited men hurrying toward me with submachine guns at the ready, followed by two men in white pulling and pushing a sheet-covered form on a smoothly rolling table. Two tense nurses, flanking the table, steadied a blood-plasma apparatus, their quick-thudding heels the dominant sound as they came on, followed by the two familiar security men, Tolliver and McKnight, armed with pistols. They moved on so swiftly that I could see old Hickman’s head snap around at their approach, and then he was pulling quickly to his feet. I plunged the letter into my jacket pocket then and started forward—only to be motioned back by the hard-faced advance guards. They were swinging the table in a wide arc before the Senator’s room now, opening the door and starting inside, and I got a glimpse of old Hickman’s anxious eyes as they swept over the Senator’s prone, white-faced form; then the door snapped shut, the security men were taking positions to either side, and old Hickman was asking,

“How is he?”

“Just stand aside,” Tolliver said.

“I asked you how is he doing?” Hickman said.

“Just sit down and wait!” Tolliver said.

Hickman gave him a long, slow look, then turned abruptly back to his chair, his face a mask.

My attempt to question the security men bringing no better results, I hurried downstairs and telephoned Scoggins my information. Then, after making a vain attempt to locate the operating surgeon for a statement, I hurried back to the seventh floor. Where, I wondered, are the members of the Senator’s staff?

I was relieved to see that old Hickman hadn’t been called into the Senator’s room while I was downstairs, but sat as before, huge in his chair. The
corridor was hot and silent and I nodded to the security men, Tolliver and Bates, and threw myself back onto the bench, thinking to study Vannec’s letter while I waited. I must have dozed off immediately, for suddenly the red image of plasma which I had seen sloshing in the blood-transfusion apparatus when the Senator was rolled past, burned in my mind. I could see the operating table with the Senator’s chest cavity laid open, the flesh rolled back, clamps, lights; an atmosphere of tense concentration, the perspiring precision of nurse and surgeon, the labored diastole and systole of the struggling heart as they balanced his life on the tip of needle and suture, scalpel and sheer professional skill. The click and slap of instruments sounded in my mind, the rasp and pause of anesthetized breathing—I came to with a start, hearing the interrupted gasp which came with my own snoring.

I looked around. Hickman was still there. How was the Senator faring? Surely the very best surgeons had been called in, but what of his luck? What if he were on the fading edge of life? What if he possessed some rare blood type and old Hickman should actually have to be called in to supply it? Though aware that I was in the grip of an irrational force, a superstition, I shuddered at the thought but was unable to throw it off even while realizing that the main thing was to save the Senator’s life.

Damn Hickman anyway; if he wasn’t an accomplice, why was he here in the first place? Could the Senator be laughing at the confusion which his presence was causing—even while deep in anesthetic slumber? Hickman was under arrest, of course, but why had he been so obscenely
willing
to come here? Was it that he’d gladly surrender his pride in order to be near an important man? But what did he expect would come from his standing by an archenemy of his people? A headline? He called himself a minister; was he opting for some sort of sainthood? Did he think that he’d be considered the spokesman for a higher morality? The embodiment of some higher Christianity, some black fundamentalist agape? Was something like this behind his confounding conundrum of a forgiveness and charity surpassing earthly understanding? If so, he was politically naive, for no one in his right mind would accept the intrusion of such a kooky religious motive into the world of Sunraider politics, certainly not from anyone like Hickman.

I closed my eyes, seeing once more the Senator reeling under the impact of the bullets, the stain blooming through his shirt, Hickman crying out with upraised arms. Politics and blood, blood and religion, I thought, what a confusion has been released. And now, remembering that during the war I had written one of the first articles on blood-bank techniques, my irritation intensified. I realized that my upset over Hickman’s offer of a transfusion was concealing something else, something painful and vile which I feared to face. But even as I snatched out Vannec’s letter to try to switch my train of thought, I looked up to see old Hickman staring at me and shaking his head
mysteriously.
What does he mean? I
thought.
Is he reading my mind? It
was something in his expression which started it, something abstractly accusatory and evocative of a buried time and a repressed defeat, all there on the broad dark face. Then I could hear McGowan’s voice as it had sounded last night at the club, and something seemed to crash in my head and I was on my feet, propelled by a surge of pain which, like a long-suppressed sob, tore through me accompanied by an excruciating sense of shame.

I could see Hickman there as though illuminated by a spotlight, his face seeming to draw out that which I knew and did not know to lie behind my pain, and I could hear the sound, the rumble of an elevated train, could see the blue of sparks shooting from its wheels onto a dark day of slanting snow illumined by flashing lights, and I sensed where the speeding phantom train would stop, and to prevent its doing so, to block it, wreck it, I felt a compulsion to swift physical action, any relieving action, and Hickman was its target. I could feel my face flaming, and I wanted to tear him apart, but even as I willed myself to move forward I was overwhelmed and stood there, before my bench, staring through him in a paralysis of pain and lucid memory, pleasant now but then, oh, the pain.

Shortly before the war, back when I still thought of myself as a champion of “social significance”—
Oh, sing ah-me/ ah-song/ ah-so/ ah-glad
—I met while attending a dance held in a famous Harlem hall now destroyed, a young girl, a Negro (she taught me to capitalize the
N
and to never say “Negress”) with whom I had an affair. It was intense, it was passionate, it was brief. But during the first blush of what we both regarded as love, I considered it as the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. For beyond the normal explosion of youthful emotion, there was a daring about it, a thrill arising from the socially forbidden made acceptable by the approbation of our friends, and rendered titillating by the hostility of those who automatically disapproved. Personally, I lived in a state of high delight. I felt that Laura endowed me with a special potency, thus I considered myself the possessor of a mysterious knowledge which gave me a touch of swagger whenever we strolled the easily challenged streets arm in arm, eye to eye, mentally hypnotized by our daring. And all this was given further sanction by our group zeal to improve, redeem, and, if need be, revolutionize society. But basically we were in love, and in our circles it was agreed that Laura and I represented, if not the future, at least a good
earnest
of that time when the old conflicts left unresolved by the great war between the states (and we were nothing if not historical-minded) and the wounds, outrages, and inequities which haunted contemporary society would be resolved by transcendent love. I spent hours in Harlem. I visited clubs, attended dances, absorbed the slang, the music, the turns of phrase, made great efforts to identify with all of Laura.

“Democracy is love, love is democracy,” we often said, and our friends agreed. And this became, for a time, my personal slogan. Laura was lovely, eager, and brave, and there was much about the world which she didn’t know, and I was delighted and proud to teach her of the many things which lay beyond the arbitrary boundaries placed around her freedom, and mine. We were dedicated to love and society, thus we looked to the future but, as it turned out, not quite far enough ahead.

Our affair went on for a year of glory that began in the spring and reached wild heights of passion, discovery, and delight during the holidays which ended the fall. Then during the winter, nature caught up with us, and what with our dream of a socially ideal alliance become a matter of parturition, we were suddenly faced with the hostile realities of both society and state, and I with my own astonished self.