He collapsed back against the pillow, bong. “Good. Save you from that. But not me.”
I felt so awful I tried to change the subject. “But I guess it didn’t harm you, not in the long run. Here you are all these years later.”
“Neutron bombs. Short term radiation. So I guess, but I don’t know. Something like that, though. The earth will revenge us, but it’s no solace. Revenge is no solace. Their suffering won’t pay off ours, nothing will ever, we were murdered.” He squeezed my hand so hard my knuckles hurt. He sucked in air. “The ones of us left were so hungry, so hungry, we fought each other and finished the murder off for them, ah, that was the worst of it. So crazy. In the year after more people died than had been killed by the bombs, I’m sure, and more and more until it looked like every last one of us would die. Stupid Americans so far from the earth by then that we couldn’t figure out how to live off it, or those who could were swamped by those who couldn’t. It got so’s a friend you could trust was worth more than the world to you. Until there were so few left there was no need to fight anymore, no one to fight. All dead. I saw Death walking down the road more times than you’d care to imagine. Old man in a black coat, axe over his shoulder. Got so I waved to him and walked on by. Then out of the sky the storms, weather turned bad and the storms came. There was a winter that lasted ten years, good limerick. But the suffering was too much to bear. I live to show what a person can bear and die not, good poem, remember it? Did I give you that one? It got so when you saw a living human face that wasn’t insane you wanted to hug the person right then and there. So that when we settled here… it was a start. New. Weren’t more than a dozen of us. Every day a struggle. Food, we’re slaves to it, boy, I learned that: Grew up and didn’t learn a thing about it, not really. In that America was evil. The world was starving and we ate like pigs, people died of hunger and we ate their dead bodies and licked our chops. It’s true what I say to Ernest and George, we were a monster and we were eating up the world and they had reasons to do it to us, but still, still we didn’t deserve it. We were a good country.”
“Please, Tom. You’re going to hurt your voice going on so, you can’t!” He was sweating and his voice was so strained and torn up I really did think he would hurt it. I was scared, trembling. But now he was wound up; he took a few deep breaths, and went on again, squeezing my hand and ordering me with his eyes to let him talk, to let him speak at last:
“We were free then. Not perfectly so, you understand, but it was the best we could do, we were trying, it was the best so far. Nobody else had ever done it better, we… it was the best country in history,” he whispered, like he had to convince me or die. “I tell you true now, no baiting George or babbling, with all the flaws and stupidities we were still the leader, the focus of the world, and they killed us for it. Killed the best country the earth ever had, it was genocide boy do you know that word? Genocide, the murder of a whole people. Oh it had happened before, we did it ourselves to the Indians. Maybe that’s why this happened to us. I keep coming on reasons but they’re not enough. We were wrong in a million ways and had flaws big as our strengths but we didn’t deserve this.”
“Calm down, Tom, please calm down.”
“They’ll suffer for it,” he whispered. “Tornadoes, yes, and earthquakes and floods and droughts and fires, and murder for no good reason. See I went back to see. I had to see. And it was all smoking and blasted flat. Home. And just a few blocks away it still stood, blasted flat all around it but not it, ground zero is that still spot. It really was the magic kingdom when I was a child.” Now his whispering got so rapid and desperate I could barely hear him, and what he said made no sense, and I held his forearm with both hands as he went on. “Main Street was all full of trash, dead people here and there, ruins, the smell of death. Around the corner the steamboat used to come, one time when I was a little boy my folks took me and as the steamboat rounded the corner we could hear that horn cutting across the water like Gabriel’s last call and the whole crowd knew it was him in an instant, Satchmo it was, Henry, Satchmo playing louder than the steamboat whistle, but now the lake was chock with corpses. I went to talk with Abraham Lincoln, leaned my head in his lap looked in his sad eyes and told him they killed his country like they killed him but he knew already and I cried on his shoulder. Went through the castle to the giant teacups, big blowsy woman and two men in the dead silence laughing drunk and trying to get the teacups to spin, she let a big green bottle go smash it went over the concrete and that instant I knew it was all true, and the man—the man he took his knife, oh—oh—”
“Please, Tom!”
“But I survived! I survived. Ran from evil I don’t know where or how, came to in the valley like I said. I ran all the way and learned what I had to survive. Didn’t learn a damned thing in the old time. Schoolbook rubbish, nothing more. Idiot America. Roger’s the model of reason next to it, I nearly died learning what I had to know, nearly died twenty times and more, Jesus I was lucky to live, he fell in the torrent and maybe I could have—or the time they took her, no Troy for us… harsh, harsh, harsh. Tiger justice, we’re Greek now boy, it’s as hard for us as it was for them, and if we can make something beautiful out of it it’ll be like what they made, that fine carved line pure and simple just to describe it the way it is. And Death’s fine curve sitting there always, skull under flesh in the sun, no wonder the tragedies, the harshness, verse rituals the vase, the curved line, they were just a way of talking about what’s real then and now, real as hunger, sometimes I can’t bear to think of it. We were the last of those plays, great pride a great flaw, the two the same and they killed us for it, blasted us to desolation struggling in the dirt to scratch out thirty years and die like Greeks, oh, Henry, can you see why I did it, why I lied to you, it was to keep you knowing it, to make us Greek ghosts on the land and make that something pure and simple so we can say we’re still people, Henry, Henry—”
“Yes, Tom. Tom! Calm down, please.” I was standing, holding him by the shoulders, leaning over him, shaking at his delirium. Twisting he started to speak again and I put my hand over his mouth, clamped it there. He struggled to breathe and I let my hand off him. “You’re not making any sense,” I told him. The lamp sputtered, our shadows wavered against the black circles of the wall, the wind shrieked around the corner. “You’re working yourself up too much, talking wild. Listen to me now, lie down here. Please. Doc would be furious at us if he came in. You haven’t got the strength for such carrying on.”
“Do too,” he whispered.
“Good, good. Simmer down some though, simmer down, simmer down.”
He seemed to hear me, finally. He leaned back. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, and sat down again. I felt like I had been running for miles. “Jesus, Tom.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll keep it down. But you got to know.”
“I know you survived. Now we’re past that and that’s all I need to know. I don’t want to know any more,” I said, and I meant it.
He shook his head. “You got to.” He relaxed back into the pillow. Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.
“Stop that, Tom.”
He stopped. The wind picked up again, filling the silence. Whoooo, whooooo, whooooooooooo.