He stands when he’s able, and, leaning to the left, brushing the wall with his shoulder so as not to fall back into the crowd again, moves on down the street. He assumes a very serious and meditative expression so that people will not think him drunk, and does his best to walk along like any normal self-confident American, while still keeping contact with the buildings by way of his left shoulder. Thumping along like that, shredding the padding from the shoulder of his New Look sport jacket and thinking about the heroine in the movie out on the foggy streets, pursued by the artist-monster, he stumbles upon a shop selling fresh fruit and vegetables. Since he seems to be inside the shop, he buys six golden oranges, remarking in a friendly manner that they are as big as grapefruit. The fruiterer stares at him curiously, perhaps in part because he now seems to be standing in a box of ripe tomatoes, and says: “Those are grapefruit, Mac!” People stare at him as though his brow were branded with marks of guilt. He is reminded of the guillotine in House of Wax—CRASH! — and concludes, as he pays for the grapefruit and tomatoes, I must be the nice guy who always finishes last.
He’s about to exit by way of a plate-glass window when the fruiterer collars him and pushes him brusquely out what is probably the door, plunging him reeling back into the heart of the maelstrom, past a newsstand where, grasping for support, he acquires some newspapers and magazines, and then, though this is not exactly his intention, on into a subway entrance. He tumbles, clutching newspapers and grapefruit, down the stairs, one lens showing him an advertisement of Dangerous When Wet with Esther Williams in a swimsuit, a moustache under her nose and a Ulysses S. Grant beard between her legs, the other a time-lapse overview of traffic patterns on the subway platform. At the bottom, pausing to wonder if “the Balance of Terror” is a communicable disease which he’s somehow caught, he tries to locate himself — without success — in a gum-machine mirror. All he sees there is Abraham Lincoln with his beard on fire. A train pulls in, arriving from separate directions in the two lenses, and he allows himself to be swept aboard by the crowd. Or perhaps he wishes to take the train, he can’t be sure. He finds an empty seat, but when he sits down it isn’t there. The bottom of his paper bag splits open and the grapefruit roll about on the floor. He tries to pick them up but they’re never just where or what they seem to be. Sometimes they change color before his very eyes, turn into people’s feet which kick him or step on his hands, roll out opening doors at one stop and back in the next. What am I doing down here on the floor of this subway train, he asks himself, chasing grapefruit? I don’t even like grapefruit! He stands and proceeds nonchalantly to read his newspapers and magazines, disowning the grapefruit, as the train rocks along. Through one eye he learns that President Eisenhower has encouraged the reading of Marx and Stalin and a mad artist-professor in Rome has discovered the tomb of Saint Peter, and through the other reads about a plot to liquidate Senator McCarthy. Liquidate! Perhaps they hoped to use his body as a model for Joan of Arc. There are articles, severally, about electrocutions, creeping socialism, frozen bull semen, and “The Night Love Turned to Error.” “Terror,” rather. He cannot seem to focus on the atom-spy news, but keeps getting a composite picture of the two spies: a small dark woman with gold-rimmed spectacles, moustache, and fake fur collar, who for some odd reason reminds him of Marie Antoinette in a black string tie, going up in oily smoke. It must be the circles around the eyes, the gold rims. The coat, he observes, is a good Republican cloth coat, the Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt underneath notwithstanding.
The doors slide open, he gets shoved out of the subway car, slips on a revenging grapefruit, slams into an I-beam that bears the legend TRACK 3, and then staggers on up the stairs into what turns out to be the exercise yard of a federal prison, if his left eye is to be trusted, or else the New Jerusalem. Police are protecting some construction or other from the souvenir-hunting zeal of summer tourists. What is it? It appears to be a stage with an electric chair. Or else a movie lobby with sawdust on the floor. Above him, a billboard seems to read I TELL YOU, FOLKS, ALL POLITICS IS APPLESAUCE, but he no longer trusts what his eyes tell him. I’ve walked through that 3-D movie, he thinks, and I’ve come out the other side. He doesn’t really believe this, it’s just a joke to lighten a little his sinking heart. Sinking because it’s all coming together — the stampeding masses, the creeping socialism and exploding waxworks, the tracks of history and time-lapse overviews — into the one image that has been pursuing him through all his sleepless nights, the billowing succubus he’s been nurturing for nine months now, ever since the new hydrogen-bomb tests at Eniwetok: yes, the final spectacle, the one and only atomic holocaust, he’s giving birth to it at last. Like the mad artist, we’re all going to die horrible fiery deaths, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, nothing we can do to stop ourselves, it’s in the script, in the frozen semen, the waxen MOTHER LOVE. What does it mean that Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar or that Edison invented the light bulb? Nothing, it’s all over, the human race is shutting itself off, it has a craving for emptiness and futility, we’ve grown too much brains and we can’t cope, it’s all wasted, my life is wasted! Thus, he laments the waste of his life and Shakespeare’s. The theater marquee above him reads A GOOD MANY THINGS GO AROUND IN THE DARK BESIDES SANTA CLAUS.
In the lobby, he feels safer. It’s not as bright in here, things are not so clear. He finds display blow-ups of what he takes to be pages from the Books of Knowledge but turn out to be transcripts of the record of the Easter Trial. He concentrates on them, thinking: At last I’m going to do something with my life! On page 493, someone called THE WITNESS is saying: “He said there was fissionable material at one end of a cube and at the other end of the cube there was a sliding member that was also of fissionable material and when they brought these two together under great pressure, that would be…” He cannot find page 494. But he knows, he knows; he feels his body full of cubes and sliding members. THE COURT is asking about Jell-0 boxes. Imitation raspberry! There is testimony about smallpox inoculations, implosion lenses, and flushing money down the toilet. The statue of Columbus. Stop Me If You Have Heard This. Doris Day is singing “I Didn’t Slip, I Wasn’t Pushed, I Fell.” Somehow, this all makes sense, THE COURT says: “It is so difficult to make people realize that this country is engaged in a life and death struggle with a completely different system!” He blinks. He realizes he has come upon some radical truth. In one eye, anyway. But then THE COURT says: “Yet they made a choice of devoting themselves to the Russian ideology of denial of God, denial of the sanctity of the individual and aggression against free men everywhere instead of serving the cause of liberty and freedom.” This he doesn’t understand at all. The fault of the cubes and sliding members maybe. He is feeling lightheaded. The walls seem to be full of groundhog holes. The theater air-conditioning is off and the lobby is stuffy. He staggers out into the street again, gulping for air, pursued by a recurring note of impending doooom.