Five realms, five separate realities, but each one was connected to the others, which meant that when something happened in the outer circle (the war), its effects could be felt throughout America, New York, Columbia, and every last dot in the inner circle of private, individual lives. When the war escalated in the spring of 1967, for example, half a million people marched in the streets of New York on April fifteenth to condemn the war and call for the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. Five days after that, on the Columbia campus uptown, three hundred members of SDS showed up at John Jay Hall “to ask some questions” of the marine recruiters who had set up their tables in the lobby and were attacked by a charging gang of fifty jocks and NROTC boys, which led to a bloody scuffle of flying fists and bashed-in noses that had to be broken up by the police. The following afternoon, the largest demonstration at Columbia in over thirty years was held in the Van Am quadrangle between John Jay and Hamilton Halls as eight hundred members and supporters of SDS protested marine recruiting on campus and five hundred pro-marine jock hecklers threw eggs at them from the other side of the fence on South Field in their own counterdemonstration. Ferguson and Amy had both been involved in that hectic scene, she as a participant and he as a witness-reporter, and when he told her about his concentric circles theory that night at the West End, she smiled at him and said, But of course, my dear Holmes, how clever of you.
The point was that no one was happy on either side. The pro-war people were becoming more and more frustrated by Johnson’s failure to win the war, and the anti-war people were becoming more and more frustrated by their failure to force Johnson to end the war. Meanwhile, the war continued to grow, five hundred thousand troops, five hundred and fifty thousand troops, and the bigger it became the more the outer circle pressed in on the other circles, squeezing them ever more tightly together, and before long the spaces between them had shrunk to the merest slivers of air, which was making it hard for the lone ones trapped in the center to breathe, and when a person can’t breathe he starts to panic, and panic is something close to craziness, a feeling that you have lost your mind and are about to die, and by early 1968 Ferguson was beginning to feel that everyone had gone crazy, as crazy as the crazy people who talked out loud to themselves on Broadway, and bit by bit he had become as crazy as everyone else.
Then, in those early months of the new year, everything began to snap. The shock attacks by Vietcong sapper-commandos on more than a hundred South Vietnamese cities and towns during the Tet Offensive of January thirtieth proved that America could never win the war, even though American troops fought back and overwhelmed the enemy in every battle of the offensive, killing thirty-seven thousand Vietcong compared to the two thousand lost by the U.S., with tens of thousands of other Vietcong fighters either wounded or captured and half a million South Vietnamese civilians turned into homeless refugees. The message to the American public was that the North Vietnamese would never give up, that they would go on fighting until the last person in their country was dead, and how many more American soldiers would it take to destroy that country, would the five hundred thousand already there have to be increased to a million, to two million, to three million, and if so, would the destruction of North Vietnam not also mean the destruction of America? Two months later, Johnson appeared on television and announced that he would not be running for reelection in the fall. It was an admission of failure, an acknowledgment that public support for the war had eroded to such a point that his policies had been rejected, and Ferguson, who had admired the good Johnson of the War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and had loathed the bad Johnson of Vietnam, found himself in the uncomfortable position of feeling sorry for the president of the United States, at least for a minute or two as he tried to put himself in the head of Lyndon Johnson and experience the anguish he must have felt in deciding to abdicate his throne, and then Ferguson felt glad, both glad and relieved that LBJ would soon be gone.
Five days after that, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Another bullet fired by an American nobody, another blow to the collective nervous system, and then hundreds of thousands of people ran out into the streets and started smashing windows and setting buildings on fire.
One hundred and twenty-eight Newarks.
The five concentric circles had merged into a single black disk.
It was an L.P. record now, and the song it kept playing was an old blues number called Can’t Take It No More, Sugar, ’Cause My Heart Hurts So Bad.
SPRING 1968 (I). Amy was seldom around anymore. It was her last semester at Barnard, and because she had already fulfilled her academic requirements and had nearly enough points to graduate, her course load was exceptionally light that spring, which allowed her to spend most of her time doing political work with SDS. Until then, Ferguson’s greatest worry had been Berkeley Law (which accepted her in early April, a few days after King was murdered in Memphis), but now he was afraid he would lose her before the summer began. Her positions had hardened during the crazy-making months of early sixty-eight, pushing her deeper into a stance of radical militancy and anti-capitalist fervor, and she could no longer laugh off their small differences of opinion, no longer understand why he didn’t agree with her on all her points.
If you accept my analysis, she said to him one day, then you necessarily have to accept my conclusions.
No, I don’t, Ferguson replied. Just because capitalism is the problem doesn’t mean that SDS is going to make capitalism disappear. I’m trying to live in the real world, Amy, and you’re dreaming about things that are never going to happen.
One example: Now that Johnson had withdrawn, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy were both running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Ferguson was distinctly unexcited and didn’t support either one of them, but he paid close attention to their campaigns — especially to Kennedy’s, since it was clear to him that McCarthy had no chance — for even if he was lukewarm about the New York senator, he felt that RFK was a better choice than discredited Humphrey, and any Democrat was preferable to Nixon or, even more troubling, Ronald Reagan, the governor of Amy’s future state, who was even farther to the right than Goldwater. It wasn’t that Ferguson felt any enthusiasm for the Democrats, but it was important to make distinctions, he told himself, important to recognize that there were bad things in this flawed world but also even worse things, and when it came to voting in an election, better to go for the bad over the worse. Amy refused to make those kinds of distinctions anymore. As far as she was concerned, the Democrats were all the same, each one a sell-out liberal, and she wanted no part of them, they were the ones who were responsible for Vietnam and all the other horrors America had visited upon the world, and a pox on them and everything they stood for, and if the Republicans happened to win, well, maybe that would be better for the country in the long run, because America would be turned into a fascist police state, and eventually the people would rise up against it, as if the people who had just elected the Republicans would want to overthrow them once they came to power, as if the people might not prefer to live in a fascist police state if it would lock up anti-American radicals like her.
The girl who had wept over the murder of John Kennedy in 1963 now saw his brother Robert as a tool of capitalist oppression. Ferguson was willing to shrug off such remarks as an excess of ideological enthusiasm, but by early April he too was coming under attack, and the political had suddenly become personal, too personal, too much about them rather than the ideas they were discussing. Ferguson wondered if Amy wasn’t carrying on a secret dalliance with one of her SDS brethren, or if she and her Barnard pal Patsy Dugan weren’t exploring the mysteries of Sapphic love together (she talked about Patsy a lot these days), or if she wasn’t still irritated with him for not having gone to California with her last summer. No, not possible, he realized, none of those possibilities was even dimly possible, for it wasn’t in Amy’s nature to do things behind his back, and if she had fallen for someone else she would have told him about it, and if she still resented him for last summer it couldn’t have been a conscious resentment, since that had been over and done with for months, and in the months after that there had been countless good times together, not to mention how glorious she had been in the sad days after his grandmother’s death, taking up the slack from his nearly immobilized mother and orchestrating the apartment cleanout with the speed and precision of a Sandy Koufax fastball. Something had happened since then, however, and if it hadn’t been caused by any of the usual causes, it also seemed impossible that it had been caused by a stupid disagreement about politics. He and Amy had always disagreed. One of the pleasures of living with her was the extent to which they disagreed and yet continued to love each other in spite of that. Their battles had always been fought about ideas, never about themselves, but now Amy had started going after him because his ideas didn’t mesh with hers, because he was reluctant to jump into the revolutionary volcano with her, and therefore he had become a backward-thinking reactionary liberal, a pessimist, an ironist, an agenbite-of-inwit boy (meaning, he supposed, that he was too fond of Joyce and all things literary), a bystander, a dilettante, an old fogey, and a lump of shit.