The area is full of people who shove and push. Perhaps they are actors pretending to be prisoners in the prison yard. Peddlers are hawking Cherry-Oonilla ice cream and miniature A-bombs that produce edible mushroom clouds. He samples the ice cream, but as he bites into it, his right eye tells him it’s Marie Antoinette’s left pap from the wax museum — no telling which eye to trust, it tastes milky and waxy at the same time. People are carrying signs that his right eye tells him read SAVE THE ROSENBERGS! and HEIL EISENHOWER! his left BOMB CHINA NOW! and ETHEL ROSENBERG BEWITCHED MY BABY! He is no longer surprised by these ocular reversals, in fact he is very clear-headed, which is the main cause of his panic. It strikes him that he is perhaps the only sane man left on the face of the earth. The faces of the earth, because he still sees two of them. He plunges forward through the Community of God, crawls over a barrier that says DIG WE MUST FOR A GROWING NEW YORK, is struck down by the Preamble to the United States Constitution. “I did it!” he cries, rearing up, his face smeared with the bloody remains of his Cherry-Oonilla ice cream cone. “A crime worse than murder! I’ve altered the course of history!” He knows this is true, knows he’s done it, because he has imagined it: sanity is murder. “I’ve brought on the holocaust!” He staggers to his feet, slams into the stage, clambers up on it. One eye shows him a distant policeman, his limbs outflung, caught in a web of concentric circles, intersected by pointer lines indicating the relationship of the planets to the human microcosmos; in the other eye, the electric chair, identified by a small brass National Parks sign as THE LIBERTY TREE, comes bounding toward him, then recedes, like a ball strung to a bat with elastic. He realizes he has grown a moustache and a fake-fur collar, a pair of spectacles. “Don’t be afraid!” he shouts, staggering about, searching for the chair. “The Court is innocent! Doris Day is innocent! Go home to your children!” For all his bravado, he feels like a dreaded outcast, the last pariah, a scabbed sheep, the target of a punitive expedition, the victim of Martian theory, chapfallen, weary to an extreme, his human decency violated, his human dignity trampled on — only Beauty sends him reeling so earnestly around the rocking Death House. “I shall do my duty, distasteful as it may be! I will save you all!” The chair hits him behind the knees and he falls into it as into a vat of boiling wax, a miracle of fit and flattery. I am the coward who dies many deaths, he weeps, as police with flailing nightsticks crash forward on melting ankles, trailing stars and planets like small balloons. “The President said it: ‘The one capital offense is a lack of staunch faith!’ THROW THE SWITCH!”
But they drag him out of there, whacking and prodding with their sticks, push him into a long white car. “BEWARE THE MAD ARTIST!” he wails, but they’re all laughing.
“Jesus, that’s the thirty-second nut we’ve had in the chair today,” a policeman is saying, tipping his cap back.
“Hope we don’t see no more. That’s the last loony wagon we’ll be able to get in here through that pack-up!”
“They’re cleaning out the Whale’s belly for us, and once the show starts, we can stow ’em there.”
“Whew! Didja check those weird cardboard specs, Chief?” says another. “He looks like that silly little character with the big glasses who’s always turning up in those Herblock cartoons, asking stupid questions!”
“Yeah, I know. He probably thinks he’s Albert Einstein. The last one claimed to be John Wilkes Booth in drag and wanted to set himself on fire, and the one before that had horns, a tail, and the face of Leon Trotsky painted on his ass. Okay, boys, take him away!”
They punch him in the arm with a needle and he passes out, thinking: Well, that does it. I’ve done everything I can, and what’s come of it? A few bruises. A few laughs for the condemned. A misspent Friday, a curious episode on the way to Armageddon, nothing more.
17. The Eye in the Sky
I had to stop in a washroom on my way to the office to clean up, couldn’t let my staff see me like this. I slapped through the swinging doors, still keyed up, ready for battle, but the place was empty. Those goddamn organ grinders out there pissed me off, Pearson especially — Winchell wasn’t so bad, he’d never got past the sixth grade, after all, never read a book, probably couldn’t, you had to make allowances. Understood his role, too: an entertainer; you could work with that. Apparently we were in the same class of reserve Lieutenant Commanders, he also was up for promotion. Shit, maybe I ought to quit politics and go back in, the Korean War’s nearly over, shouldn’t be too dangerous, and it sure as hell would be easier than this. I recalled those days in the Navy with a lot of affection, I’d grown up there, tried everything I’d been scared to try till then — I hated to think how square I’d been before, a silly little Sunday-school bigot, ranting about the disgusting evils of tobacco and alcohol and gambling, never saying anything worse than “hell” or “damn,” shying from women, hadn’t even gone with a whore — well, all that’d be different now. Commander Nixon of the USN. I was still young enough to cut the mustard, so why not? Well, for one thing, the seasickness…and having to kill all that time, kiss the asses of a lot of clowns who kissed mine now — no, it was a drop in rank, I was better off here, in the thick of it, no matter how rough it got: once you get used to the fast track, once you’ve hit the big leagues like I have, you can’t resign yourself to just puttering around. Anyway, I’m at my best when the going is hardest — that’s when you find out who has what it takes. I once wrote a note to myself, I made it up myself, I still have it somewhere: “Live so that you can look any man in the face and tell him to go to hell!” I looked up at myself in the mirror. “Go to hell!” I shouted.
I realized I was still very wrought up. Something of a mess, too. My shirt was limp with sweat, face and hands streaked with horseshit, some on my suit, my jacket shoulder scuffed and splitting at the seam, jowls already darkening with bristle, hair mussed, face bruised, Jesus. I’ve always been very particular about my physical appearance, even as a little boy. Something deep in my character. I used to get up at least half an hour early on school mornings so I’d have plenty of time, my mother always remarked on this. I brushed each tooth, using all the right motions, gargled ritually, made Mom smell my breath to make sure I wouldn’t offend anybody on the bus. I was always afraid this might be part of my problem with girls. I never could get used to kissing them on the mouth — I thought I could smell my own and worried that they did, too. Even at Duke, where we had no running water in our cramped room, and where a certain unkemptness was fashionable, presumably bespeaking a student too involved in his studies to take proper care of himself, I maintained my tidiness. The other guys thought, when I snuck out of bed early every morning, lit their fire for them, and disappeared, that I was off cracking the books somewhere, but in reality I was in the gym using the showers. Had the whole place to myself then, I liked the feeling of it, stalking around in the dawn light like a wild animal, it set me up for my day in the law library. In fact it was in there, in front of the gymnasium mirrors in the morning grayness, where I first tested out some of the great trial-lawyer gestures that became my hallmark as a politician.