I pressed my face into the sand. I found myself posing foolish questions. Why were my eyelids twitching? Foolish, but why?
Later, when I looked up, Rafferty was gone.
I lay flat and hugged my rifle. It was all I could do, hug and twitch. Gunfire swept the beach. This, I deduced, was how it was and had to be. If you’re sane, if you’re in command of the present tense, you dispense with scruples. You recognize the squirrel in your genes. You sprawl there and twitch and commit biology.
The night whined with high velocities.
Lazily, I got to my hands and knees. It occurred to me that the danger here was mortal. A tracer round ricocheted somewhere behind me—blue sparks, a burning smell—then a succession of flares lit up the sky, yellow and red and gold, and for a moment I seemed to slide back to the year 1958, a balmy night in May when I jerked up in bed and waited for the world to rebalance itself. I was a child. A Soviet SS-4 whizzed over my head. Far off, the earth’s crust buckled and there was the sizzle of a lighted fuse. The sky was full of pigeons. Millions of them, every pigeon on earth. I watched the moon float away. There was horror, of course, but it was seductive horror, even beautiful, pastels bleeding into primaries, the radioactive ions twinkling blue and purple, the pink and silver flashes, charm mixing with childhood.
If you’re sane, I thought, you come to respect only those scruples which wire to the nervous system.
I surprised myself by crawling forward.
It was a crabbing kind of movement, without dignity. I heard myself saying, “Sorry,” then saying, “Stop it!” Squirrel chatter. I was thinking squirrel thoughts: There is nothing worth dying for. Nothing. Not dignity, not politics. Nothing. There is nothing worth dying for.
I reached a miniature dune and stretched flat. The guns kept firing, raking the beach, swiveling left to right and back again.
Nothing, I thought.
A tracer round corkscrewed over my head. I was twitching, but the twitches were strictly amoral. I was lucid. I understood the physics: If there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for.
I blinked and looked up and swallowed sand. There were no ethical patterns. Ahead was another tangle of barbed wire, and beyond the wire was more wire, then flat beach, then the two droning machine guns. There was fog, too, and tear gas, and familiar voices. In the distance, Ebenezer Keezer was shouting through a bullhorn, “Life after Lenin! Revolution, people! Ollie-Ollie in free!”
Then amplified laughter.
Briefly, near the tower, a human form rose and took shape against a yellow flare. Sarah, I thought, and I scrambled forward. Gunfire snapped close by. “Please,” I said, and lunged into the wire. The pain surprised me. I was bleeding from the nose and lips. The tear gas was heavy now, and the tremors took hold, but I clawed through the wire and rolled along the beach and whimpered and thought: Nothing. The thought was perfectly symmetrical, because if there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for.
I sobbed and listened to Ebenezer Keezer’s bullhorn laughter. He was engaged in philosophy.
“Terrorism,” he shouted, “is a state of mind! A state of mind is a state of bliss! Extremism in the pursuit of bliss is no bummer!”
There was a harsh electronic squeal. A lavender flare exploded without sound. The guns were on automatic and the night shimmied in bright greens and reds.
Odd, but I also heard music.
Out on the margins, Buffalo Springfield was singing… a man with a gun over there… tellin’ me I got to beware.
The bullhorn buzzed and Ebenezer cried, “States of mind! States of bliss! Down with the states!”
With effort, I detached myself.
It all seemed fanciful, the mix of guns and rhetoric, the Beatles now insisting on revolution. Belly-down, I crawled toward the sea.
“Ain’ no mountain high,” Ebenezer sang.
I bled from the lips and nostrils. Numerous clichés came to mind. Missing in action, I thought. Lost in space. My gyro had gone, I couldn’t locate the scheme of things, but I kept moving until chance brought me to the fringe of the sea.
It was the maximum reach. This far, no farther.
I composed myself in a respectable posture, faceup, heels seaward, hands folded at my belly, and I lay back and watched the lights.
“Day-O, Day-O,” Ebenezer sang, “dee daylight come an’ I want to go home.”
A dud flare fizzled overhead.
Tracers skipped across the Caribbean, toward Miami, and the sound track had become sentimental. Mellow music, smooth and wistful… Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.
“In time of terror,” Ebenezer declared, “there is no objection by means of conscience. There is no alternative service.”
I didn’t budge.
I watched the sky do sleight of hand. Awesome, I decided, miracles of form and color. Dangling from its parachute, a nearby flare sailed upward against gravity. The twin machine guns kept firing their steady fire, and Mary Hopkin sang persuasively in the dark, achingly, we’d fight and never lose, those were the days, oh yes …
The bullhorn crackled.
“Hide an’ go seek,” Ebenezer cried. “You’re it, shitpot. Peekaboo! I see you!”
His inflection carried mockery, but it wasn’t enough to make me move. I had strong convictions. There was nothing worth dying for. Not for this, not for that. If you’re sane, you resign yourself to the tacky pleasures of not dying when there is nothing worth dying for.
I knew my limits. I also knew my heart.
Up the beach there were battle cries. I heard Sarah shouting out commands. She had the knack, I didn’t.
“Too bad,” I said, but I didn’t move.
Again there was that time-space slippage. I was back under my Ping-Pong table, under layers of charcoal and soft-lead pencils, and all around me, inside me, there were those powdery neural flashes lashing out like heat lightning. I watched it happen. The equator shifted. New species evolved and perished in split seconds. Every egg on the planet hatched. And then my father was there, holding me, saying, “Easy now, take it slow, tiger.” He rocked me and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I could smell the heat of his armpits. “It’s okay,” he said, “just a dream,” but it wasn’t a dream, and even then, even now, there was still the glowing afterimage, the indelible imprint of things to come.
I am not crazy, I told myself. I am sane.
Gunfire swept the beach. The music now was martial, piccolos and snare drums. Ebenezer Keezer was doing impressions.
He did Groucho and Martin Luther King.
“Shane!” he cried. “Shane! Shane!”
It was coming up on a finale. A dozen quick flares made the sky tumble, and the machine guns kept firing and firing.
I pressed low into the sand.
“The darkest hour,” Ebenezer intoned solemnly, “is just about now. But bear in mind, people, you’ll find a jive light show at the end of the tunnel.”
He did Woody Woodpecker and LBJ and Porky Pig.
“This is your life,” he said. “Terror tends to terrorize, absolute terror terrorizes absolutely. Th-th-that’s all, folks!”
A dull explosion turned me over.
When I looked up, the wooden tower seemed to be reconstituting itself. A second explosion blew away the tower’s foundation. The structure stood legless for an instant, then toppled sideways and burned. “Fire in the hole!” Ollie Winkler shouted. Fine, clean work, I thought. And in the future, no doubt, there would be other such operations, the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty.