End Zone

14

Most lives are guided by cliches. They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely accepted sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence. Their menace is hidden with the darker crimes of thought and language. In the face of death, this menace vanishes altogether. Death is the best soil for cliche. The trite saying is never more comforting, more restful, as in times of mourning. Flowers are set about the room; we stand very close to walls, uttering the lush banalities.

Norgene Azamanian's name did not seem ridiculous for long. We knew that nothing is too absurd to happen in America. Norgene, the man and the name, soon became ordinary, no less plausible than refrigerators or bibles or the names for these objects. When he died, of injuries sustained in an automobile accident, we repeated certain phrases to each other and dedicated our next game to his memory. A local minister called him a fallen warrior. An article in the school paper quoted the president, Mrs. Tom Wade, as saying that his untimely death at the age of twentyone would serve as a tragic reminder that our destiny is in the hands of a Being or Force dwelling beyond the scope of man's reason. Norgene wasn't a very good football player. But death had overwhelmed even his mediocrity and we conspired with his passing to make him gigantic. For many of us it was a first experience with death. We beüeved the phrases. He was indeed a fallen warrior; we were unquestionably reminded of our destinies. We took the field on the night of Norgene's memorial game and played like magnificent young gods, not out to avenge death but only to honor the dead, to remake memory as a work of art. That was the first half. In the second half the whole game fell apart. There were fights, broken plays, every kind of penalty. We still won easily. But the last hour left a bad taste (as the saying goes) in everyone's mouth.

Several weeks later, sometime bet veen three and six in the morning, Tom Cook Clark shot himself in the head with an ivoryhandled Colt.45. Emmet Creed referred to him in a eulogy as one of the best football minds in the country. He was also a molder of young men and a fine interdenominational example of all those fortunate enough to have been associated with him. Creed himself assumed the deceased man's responsibilities with the quarterbacks. The wake was held at the funeral home in town because there was nowhere in particular to send the body and no family to send it to. Everyone commented on how good the embalmed corpse looked. This became the theme of the wake. We assembled in the anteroom, clinging to walls, avoiding the center of the room for some reason, and we told each other how good the dead man looked, as if he were not dead at all but only waxed and welldressed as part of some process of rejuvenation and would soon be buzzed awake, thinner than ever and quite refreshed. We reacted to the impact of death in this way, exchanging comical remarks in all seriousness, consoling each other with handshakes and slogans. Major Staley came to pay his respects. The major commanded the Air Force ROTC unit at the school. He saw me and came over. We shook hands, slowly and delicately, foregoing on this special occasion all intimations of virility.

"I understand he was despondent because of ill health," the major said.

We heard about the collision right away. It happened only about a quarter of a mile from campus. It was about ten at night. State troopers stood on the road, writing in their little books, copying from each other. They identified Norgene from the contents of his wallet. There were three others dead, one a girl (passenger, female, white). Her legs stuck out of the wreck, terribly white, the only white things in all that blood and swirling red light, the only things quiet in the voices and noise. I wondered who she was. I also wondered why her death seemed more wasteful than the others. I kept looking at her legs. Then I went back to my room, thinking about the extra syllable in the fallen warrior's Christian name, how it had shamed tradition and brought bad luck.

This was Major Staley's first year here. His father was the school's most famous alumnus, a threeletter man and a war hero, one of the crew on the Nagasaki mission. The major was about thirtyeight years old. He taught just one course, Aspects of Modern War. Since I wasn't part of the cadet whig I had taken to seating myself in the last row, a bit of civilian humility. One day I asked the major how many megatons would have to be contained in the warhead of an antimissile missile in order to guarantee interception of aa SS9 missile with multiple warheads.

"You'd probably need in excess of a twomeg warhead to get the kind of xray pulseintensity you're talking about"

I was fascinated by the way the state troopers copied from each other's little books. One trooper stood writing, another at his shoulder writing what the first one wrote. They checked each other out until it was apparent that they had reached an accord. It was a safeguard against errors and stray facts. There couldn't possibly be a mistake if they all had the same information.

In my room that night, before falling asleep, I tried to imagine where Tom Cook Clark came from, what he thought, what kind of life he led. I don't know what made me think of him that particular night. (At that point, of course, he was still alive.) I tried to understand who he was and what made him whoever he was when he seemed no more than a face, a hat, a certain way of talking. He existed (then). I lay in bed thinking of him as I had thought of only several others in my entire life, all casual acquaintances, blanks more or less. I could guess nothing about him. I could imagine nothing. I could invent nothing. Why did he remain so blank? It made me feel stupid and weak. Perhaps the man had a need to live in another man's mind. His existence might be threatened if he could not be brought to life in perhaps the only mind that had ever tried to reconstruct him. It was strange that he would kill himself in a matter of weeks. Maybe the failure was mine, the ill health mine, that blank life a kind of notebook in need of somebody else's facts, those facts a mass of jargon for the military mind, this jargon resembling cliches passed from mourner to mourner in the form of copied notes. But it was just another of my philosophic speculations, to think his life depended on what my mind could make of him, existence turning on a wheel, numerical, nonbuddhist, the notes comforting the notebook, numbers covering the words used to cover silence. He was a scholarly man, I thought (in the anteroom of the funeral home), remembering that he smoked a pipe and did not use profanity.

"Given three warheads per missile and an accuracy factor of a quarter mile, they'd need four to five hundred of the SSnine classification to achieve firststrike destruction capability of ninetyfive percent relative to what we could hit back with in terms of Minuteman counter capacity," the major added.

Billy Mast, who roomed two doors away from me, worked every night at memorizing a long poem in a language he'd never read before, never spoken, never even heard except in one or two movies. Billy got extremely high marks in everything. Scholastically he ranked in the ninetyninth percentile. In several of his classes, prorated scoring systems were devised according to the standards he set. Every night he did more work on the elegy. I'd visit him sometimes just to hear the sounds he made, his guttural struggle against those grudging consonants. He liked to hit his desk with both hands as he recited. Billy's course in the untellable was restricted to ten students. Knowledge of German was a prerequisite for being refused admission.

Closing my eyes, finally, on the night of the accident, I wanted to dream that I put my hand between the dead girl's legs. Arousals of guilt had considerable appeal to me, particularly on waking. I liked to lie in bed, viewing afterimages of morbid sex and trying to apportion guilt between the conscious mind and the unconscious. But that night's sleep turned out to be a restless one, empty of remembered dreams.