End Zone

10

Hours later, after we had both missed dinner, Bloomberg rolled over on his back. He managed this without taking his hands from their position behind his neck. He used his elbows as levers and brakes, as landing gear. It seemed some kind of test-to move one's body 180 degrees without changing the relationship among its parts. Finally he settled himself and stared into the ceiling. I was sitting on my own bed, my back against the wall. This placing of bodies may seem inconsequential. But I believed it mattered terribly where we were situated and which way we were facing. Words move the body into position. In time the position itself dictates events. As the sun went down I tried to explain this concept to Bloomberg.

"History is guilt," he said.

"It's also the placement of bodies. What men say is relevant only to the point at which language moves masses of people or a few momentous objects into significant juxtaposition. After that it becomes almost mathematical. The placements take over. It becomes some sort of historical calculus. What you and I say this evening won't add up to much. We'll remember only where we sat, which way our feet pointed, at what angle our realities met. Whatever importance this evening might have is based on placements, relative positions, things like that. A million pilgrims face Mecca. Think of the power behind that fact. All turning now. And bending. And praying. History is the angle at which realities meet."

"History is guilt. It's mostly guilt."

"What are you doing here, Anatole?"

"I'm unjewing myself."

"I had a hunch. I thought to myself Anatole's being here has some spiritual import. It must be a hard thing to do. No wonder you're so tense."

"I'm not tense."

"You didn't even go down to dinner tonight. You're too tense to eat. It's quite obvious."

"I'm trying to lose weight," he said. "I'm like a bridge. I expand in hot weather. Creed wants to get me down to two seventyfive."

"Where are you now?"

"An even three."

"Don't you sweat it off in the grass drills or when we scrimmage?"

"I expand in this weather."

"Anatole, how do you unjew yourself?"

"You go to a place where there aren't any Jews. After that you revise your way of speaking. You take out the urbanisms. The question marks. All that folk wisdom. The melodies in your speech. The inverted sentences. You use a completely different set of words and phrases. Then you transform your mind into a ruthless instrument. You teach yourself to reject certain categories of thought."

"Why don't you want to be Jewish anymore?"

"I'm tired of the guilt. That enormous nagging historical guilt."

"What guilt?"

"The guilt of being innocent victims."

"Let's change the subject."

"Also the predicate and the object," he said.

He did not modify his expression. He seemed sublimely sad, a man engaged in surviving persistent winters at some northernmost point of the compass. I thought that winter must be his season, as it was mine, and it did not seem strange that we had come to this place. Even now, long before the snows, there was some quality of winter here, converse seasons almost interspersed, a sense of brevity, one color, much of winter's purity and silence, a chance for reason to prevail.

"Anatole, do you ever think of playing pro ball?"

"I'm not quick enough. I don't have quick feet. Tweego keeps after me about my feet. He says I'd be the best passblocker in the country if I had quick feet."

"I'd like to play pro ball," I said. "That would really be tremendous."

"You could make it, Gary."

"I don't have the speed. I'll never be big enough to go inside tune after time, twentyfive or thirty times a game. And I don't have the speed to turn the corner. Up there you need overdrive. It would be tremendous if I could make it. It's tremendous just thinking about it."

"There are Jews in those big cities," Bloomberg said.

The window was open and there was a breeze. We were speaking very slowly, almost drunkenly. Our words seemed to rise toward the ceiling. The air was light and sweet. The words we spoke did not seem particularly ours; although we said nothing remarkable, the words surprised me at times. It may have been my hunger that accounted for these feelings.

"What's it like to weigh three hundred pounds?"

"It's like being an overwritten paragraph."

"They should get you a larger bed."

"I don't mind the bed. Everything is fine here. Things are going very well. I'm glad I came. It was good thinking. It showed intelligence. The bed is perfectly all right."

"Does the silence bother you?"

"What silence?" he said.

"You know what I mean. The big noise out there."

"Out over the desert you mean. The rumble."

"The silence. The big metallic noise."

"It doesn't bother me."

"It bothers me," I said.

I was enjoying myself immensely. I was drunk with hunger. My tongue emitted wisdom after wisdom. Our words floated in the dimness, in the room's mild moonlight, weightless phrases polished by the cool confident knowledge of centuries. I was eager for subjects to envelop, tìmeless questions demanding men of antic dimension, riddles as yet unsolved, large bloody meathunks we might rip apart with mastiff teeth. Nothing unromantic would suffice. Detachment was needed only for the likes of astrophysics, quantum mechanics, all painstaking matters so delicate in their refracted light that intellects such as ours would sooner yield to the prudish machine. There was no vulgarity in the sciences of measurement, nothing to laugh at, to drink to, to weep about like Russians guzzling vodka and despairing of God a hundred years ago in books written by bearded titans. Bloomberg and I needed men, mass consciousness, great vulgar armies surging dumbly across the plains. Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity. It seemed a worthwhile goal for prospective saints and flagellants. The new asceticism. All the visionary possibilities of the fast. To feed on the plants and animals of earth. To expand and wallow. I cherished his size, the formlessness of it, the sheer vulgar pleasure, his sense of being overwritten prose. Somehow it was the opposite of death.

"Feet retain the qualities they possessed at birth," Bloomberg said. "They're either quick or they're slow and there's nothing you can do about it. Tweego knows this. But he keeps after me anyway."

"Tweego is halfman, halfpig. All Creed's assistants have their piggish aspects but Tweego heads the list. He's fully halfpig. Tweego, Vern Feck and Hauptfuhrer. Mythology chose to ignore the species."

"I respect Tweego in a way. He thinks in one direction, straight ahead. He just aims and fires. He has ruthlessness of mind. That's something I respect. I think it's a distinctly modern characteristic. The systems planner. The management consultant. The nuclear stragegist. It's a question of fantastic singlemindedness. That's something I genuinely respect."

"It's all angles," I said. "The angle at which great masses collide. The angle at which projectiles are aimed. The angle at which blunt instruments strike a particular surface. Consider our respective positions."

"Go ahead, I'm listening."

"Consider the placements. Foot to hip. Knee to ear. Angles within angles. Interrelationships. The angle of incidence. The angle of reflection. Of course I'm just beginning to formulate this concept."

"Where do you do your thinking, Gary?"

"I've been spending time in the desert lately. You can evolve theories out there. The sun's heat purifies the thinking apparatus. Which reminds me. Why are you so white, Anatole? I've been reluctant to ask."

"I stay out of the sun whenever possible because I don't like to peel. I hate the whole process. Let's just say that my awareness of reptilian antecedents is unnaturally vivid."

"I like to peel," I said. "I like to reach behind me and strip the skin off my back. Or have it stripped off for me. A girl I knew in Coral Gables used to do it. Slowly peel the skin right off my back. She was Jewish."

"Did she make sounds while she did it?"

"Noises," I said. "She made noises."

Bloomberg shifted on the bed.

"I'm hungry," he said. "They had chicken for dinner. Fried chicken, mixed vegetables and corn bread. They had peach pie for dessert."

"Anatole, I think you should forget your diet. You'd be a better football player at two seventyfive. But a greater man at three hundred plus."

"It's possible but not probable. I base my notion of probability on a given number in a given pattern expressing the likelihood of the occurrence of a sequentially ordered set of events, such as the ratio of the number of coordinate elements that would produce the set of events to the total number of elements considered possible." "I look forward to these talks of ours, chaplain." At Logos there existed both Army and Air Force ROTC. I belonged to neither. But I had received permission to audit AFROTC courses. Geopolitics-one hour a week. History of air power-one hour a week. Aspects of modern wax-one hour a week.