Seeing Eye

On the Highway of Vice Presidents

Even from this distance, it looks like a brain. As big as an Airstream trailer and shiny like polished, dented aluminum, its skin is shrunk and crinkled, pitted and fissured.

My notes tell me it is a bioherm and that I am to blow it up, which I do. It is one of my first acts as Vice President. I am wearing a yellow hard hat when I ram down the demolition plunger as they do in action movies. The plunger makes a ripping sound like fishing line being stripped from a reel by a well-hooked bass. The engineer had told me this is the sound of an electric current being generated, rrrrr like a siren. We wait.

It surprised me that it took a while for the electricity I had generated to reach the charge. They had showed me the dynamite, red paper sticks bundled together with black electrician’s tape. It looked like dynamite, but the fuse didn’t burn like it does in cartoons. We followed the wires back to the black box where someone stripped them and attached them to the plunger by turning thumbscrews. Then another person raised a flag, a whistle blew, and a siren went off that sounded throaty and hoarse like the sound of the plunger I pushed when they said I should. We waited.

And I thought for a second about the old dinosaurs, the huge ones with long necks and long tails, and how they had walnut-sized brains and needed all these other littler brains to relay a message from the tip of the tail to the bigger brain in the head. Hey something is biting you back here. Hey something is biting you back here. Hey something is biting you back here. Until it got the message: Hey something is biting me back there.

Boom! The charge goes off. The brain-thing, which was, just the moment before, sparkling with a slick fluid of light as if it had been freshly scooped from a skull, now bursts into a brain-shaped cloud that hangs there for the longest time. Its different hemispheres bulge, contracting and squinting like it is thinking real hard. I imagine it is thinking: What the hell happened?

The engineer had told me that a bioherm is an ancient fossil reef built over centuries by shells of dead mollusks sinking to the floor of an ancient inland sea, cementing themselves together layer after layer. To think that Indiana was once the bottom of such a sea. I looked hard at the bioherm before we blew it up. We stood around, a group of us, having our pictures taken in front of it. I wore a yellow hard hat. I saw things that looked like snails and worms, whelk shells and mussels and clams all stuck to one another like different kinds of noodles fused together after being left in a strainer in a sink overnight. But bigger. Much bigger.

I thought about my own brain made up of all those tiny cells, each one storing the flesh of something special, a memory, say, like this one when I blew up this huge rock that wasn’t a rock at all but a kind of bone sponge to make way for a highway that will bypass my hometown. I have not talked to any experts about this. It is probably the case that a brain does not work this way at all, that the cells in my head are not like ranks of offices along long corridors that account for just one scrap of information each. I shuffled through these thoughts as I thumbed through my index cards. I read a little speech then.

I remember the trucks that rumbled through Huntington, my hometown, on old 24 painted circus colors and coughing up exhaust from the stack behind the cab as they downshifted on the grade leading to the Wabash. I sat there on the hot white sidewalk and shot my hand up over my head then yanked it down and with it came the blast of the air horn from the passing truck loud enough to rattle the picture window in its frame. They liked me, I thought then, and waved. Things would happen if I made the right gestures. I could snatch the sound right out of the air, wall it away in some deep crevice in a fold of a wrinkle in my head.

Now the cloud before us in the field has lost all its glue and has turned into a gauzy curtain of sparkling powder. Through it, I see the lunky yellow earthmovers scraping along the staked out route of what will be called the Highway of Vice Presidents. The machines have a gait like crabs, their huge balloon tires stepping over the rolling floor of what my notes tell me was once an ancient inland sea.

And, later, in the Marine helicopter, my aids shouting out the briefing for the next stop of the day, we’ll hover a few feet above the ground. I’ll wave to the crowd gathered below. They are staggered by the blast from the prop. The dust begins to boil at their feet. The helicopter pivots on its main rotor, the long green tail lashing out and around in an arch that turns us north. I’ll nod my head slightly. We’ll dip forward and pick up speed, climbing. And from a distance, I’ll look down as the bulldozers creep toward the scorched crater I leave behind. Huntington will be somewhere over there. With any luck I won’t need to come back this way until Coats runs again for the Senate.

On the State of the Union

The Speaker bangs the gavel for order. The gavel is a gift to the United States from the people of India, the largest democracy to the world’s oldest. Order.

I’m standing in front of my swivel chair next to the Speaker. I’m the President of the Senate. At the beginning of his speech the President of the United States will call me Mr. President.

The party members are still on their feet. Some are whistling, fingers stretching lips, like fans at a basketball game. The red light bounces from camera to camera around the house. The Majority are settling in, looking before they sit, picking up the text that has been distributed to their seats. Some are riffling through its pages. Others are shouting into their neighbors’ ears while they continue to applaud routinely. Order.

The gavel is made of pale marble and ivory fitted with brass trim. The Speaker rests his weight on his knuckles, the gavel’s handle squeezed in one fist. He looks like my father, his chin lowered, looking out at the House through his bushy brow. It makes me want to do something bad, and the boys in our party on the floor start up again after the Speaker has introduced the President just as much to see that stern mask set deeper on the Speaker’s Neanderthal face as to cheer the President on.

I watch the red light on the cameras as it goes off and on around the room. I try to guess where it will alight next. The one in the lobby doorway. The one fixed on the mezzanine wall. The one behind the Speaker that shows the fanned seating of the floor. The angle that captures the various Secretaries and Generals and Ambassadors. I never know when the camera will focus on me. I am looking thoughtful, I think, as I applaud. The light flickers on the camera aimed at the wives in the gallery above. I follow the vector from that camera, its lens slowly extending for a tight close-up on the First Lady, who stands by the railing in the blue dress with big buttons, pearls bubbling at her throat, her eyes glassy, as always, applauding effortlessly. I see her over the President’s right shoulder, smoothing her skirt around her hips as she sits down. And we all sit down.

Her husband begins to speak, and I remind myself to count the number of times he will be interrupted by applause. I know the words that are cues. The Whips have briefed us in caucus. There are plants salted in the gallery to trigger responses. The pauses are scripted. I always tell myself that I will keep track of the applause to match the number with the talking heads at the networks. But I lose track. My thoughts flit away from me like that light that now burns on the camera in the center aisle below us suddenly extinguishing itself and suddenly flaring up again after completing a circuit of the room during an interlude of cheering.

They’ve been working on the President. I can see the line of Pan-Cake on his neck where the napkin masked his white collar. Color has been brushed on the cheek he turns toward me when his head scans the room. His hair is freshly dyed, the television lights polishing the contours, each strand lacquered into place.

I know what people are thinking. They see me brooding behind the President. I have touched up my own temples with a hint of gray. It is important that we all forget about the President’s mortality. I alone am allowed to age. I imagine the Members on the floor squirming in their seats, adjusting their angles of vision, using the bulk of the President to blot me and then the thought of me out of their minds. The President’s most recent collapse, captured on television, has brought me back into their thoughts that now are drifting away from the prepared text, the paragraph on infrastructure they have been following halfheartedly, and into that percentage of every minute each has allotted to daydream, fantasy, or prayer. I walk in the corridors of some skulls out there. The possibility of me. The blue-eyed, bushy-tailed fact of me.

To get back at them, I employ the old Toastmaster trick of imagining the audience naked, and they sit there like dollops of frosting, their famous gray heads collapsing into puddles of fat that fill the seats. The esteemed colleague from Rhode Island is a smear of freckles. There, Howie has a rash that itches. I see secret tattoos. Trickles of sweat deliberately trace the topography of Teddy’s sagging breast. The thighs, worn smooth, shiny, and white by a life dedicated to always wearing trousers, straddle the shriveled assortment of penises, the Members’ members, that now are listening to their owners’ own state of the union, a message of hope and resurrection punctuated by a worn catalog of past and very private images. Order. Order.

Up on the toes of their naked feet, cheering, their flesh jiggles and sways, breaks out in splotches of color. Bill’s thighs have been stripped of veins for his bypass. The gentleman from New Jersey has new plugs. They are otherwise unremarkable, marked only for the death they have convinced themselves for now does not exist for them. The cancer ticks in a chest, a strangled heart, a brain that forgets to remember. There is another nakedness beneath the twill layer of beige skin. And it is, perhaps, only accessible to me from my strange vantage on this dais looking out at them all. I see into them. My job description gives me this vision since all I do is wait on death. I am the official mourner. The shadow of death cast a few polite paces behind the aging President.

Above us all, the First Lady, also naked, her face framed by an aurora of hair, rises from her seat and continues to rise to hover near the ceiling. A gesture of etched lines divides her body into hemispheres of breasts and belly and clefts of her butt, a kind of ancient statue, veined marble and ivory. She cleaves apart suddenly. The parts whirling into a system of orbiting planets. The President looks up at the glowing constellation of his wife.

The President’s speech continues. All of it has already been distributed. It is being delivered as if by a machine. I witness the essential part of him leave himself for a moment, shedding the shell of his suit, to float up above the august chamber of the House of Representatives, joining the animated and precious flesh of his wife.

I think such thoughts because the President thinks such thoughts. Much of what we do is fantasy. It is my job to dream his dreams. In case he is unable to complete his constitutional duties, I am ready to step into his place.

I chair, at the pleasure of the President, a commission on space. I see in his dark suit the deep black fabric of the universe. There are still flakes of white dandruff on the shoulders and back. I stare into the depths between those flecks of white transforming into twinkling stars. It is a map of heavenly bodies. This vacuum has a texture. I lose my way in its blackness. I no longer hear the speech. On television, I will appear lost in grave thought. I have forgotten the spontaneous applause. The infinite silence between those stars terrifies me.

On the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

Who were these soldiers? The hairless living ones who helped me place the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. One of them was black. One was white. But what I saw of what was left of their faces (the glossy brims of their caps squashed down on their noses and the straps hid the lips outlining the metallic exterior jaws) were identical grim expressions made up of the least expressive parts, the plane geometry of their cheeks and chins. Their hands were gloved and gripped the green florist’s wire stand that connected them as if it ran out of their palms and extruded through their squeezing fingers. Their skeletons must have been made of the same pinched wire running through the clay. When they moved, they moved only the moving part. Marching, the legs didn’t disturb the head or torso. When they lifted the flowers, their hands alone snatched them up. Their wrists ratcheted to a predetermined calibration in the joints. A pause and then their heads snapped forward together, leaving their bodies still facing the wreath they held motionless between them. Another pause, then their left legs stepped toward the tomb, Egyptian, the mechanism of the hips hidden beneath the flare of their blue belted jackets. The air reeked of carnations and roses and mothballs that had steeped their wool uniforms. I followed them conscious of the wobble in my limbs, my wrinkled suit, my puckered face, my hair blowing into my eyes.

As a congressman, I had sent visiting constituents out to Arlington to see the show, shaking their hands at the door of the hired cab. Sometimes, I went myself and took the kids if they were out of school in time to watch the changing of the guard. I counted the twenty-one gliding steps along the red carpet, the twenty-one seconds of silence between the pivots and the echoing heel clicks, the twenty-one steps back past the tomb. Suddenly the replacement and an officer would appear, enter into the rhythm. They barked at each other. The officer inspected the rifles. His hands breaking open the breech. His head snapping his chin to his chest as he looked from behind his dark aviator glasses at the gleaming round in the exposed chamber. Twenty-one steps. Twenty-one seconds. The officer and relieved soldier slid off the runway when the new guard stopped to click his heels. They disappeared behind the cedar trees that screen the barracks.

My grandmother took the copper bracelet she wore in memory of the missing Navy flier of the Vietnam War with her to her grave. I remember reading the name and dates on the green band around her wrist as the family removed the other jewelry before the casket was closed. We decided to leave it on since he’d never been found and because my grandmother always said the copper helped with her arthritis. We left the hearing aid in her ear as well, her plates. The pacemaker was buried in her chest. She had an artificial hip of titanium and gold made by a company in Warsaw, Indiana, in my old district. It is guaranteed to survive forever.

I saluted as the soldiers placed the flowers before the tomb. Beneath the slabs of marble at my feet there were remains of unknown American soldiers from the other wars that followed. World War II and Korea. We have gotten better at knowing though. There is a marker for the Vietnam War, but nobody from that war is unknown really, everyone has been accounted for. Everyone is alive, dead, or missing. Say a tooth turns up in a riddle sifting the dirt from a crash site in a Delta paddy. It is rushed to the lab in Hawaii, and they puzzle it out and match the tooth with a name. The classifications shift. There is nothing left to find in the jungle that will now leave us ignorant. You are either lost or found. But not unknown.

So just what is interred here? Perhaps we’ve created a Gothic monster in reverse, not animated after being stitched together from pilfered corpses, but a fake pile of remains constructed out of the stolen wax limbs of movie monsters posing in Hollywood museums. What is buried here is still known only to God; it just isn’t human. The only part of it that is human at all is the lie that placed an empty coffin here, that sustains the fiction. We buried a symbol. We buried not knowing. Be we know. We know we know.

In Disneyland they maintain a Hall of Presidents, a stage filled with jerking dummies of the dead Commanders in Chief. After I’m dead, if all has gone right, something that looks like me will nod its head sagely seated next to the smiling hulks of Lincoln and Hoover. The engineers have worked so hard to encode grace and gesture into my lower right arm. They move from tendon to muscle and back again, experiment with a new substance more like cartilage, import artificial femurs and rotor cuffs from the factory in Warsaw, Indiana. Programs to scratch an ear run for thousands of pages.

On this other stage, these living boys of The President’s Own Guard, having practiced alone in their barracks, wish to extinguish every twitch. They force themselves not to blink. They wire their jaws shut with will. They attach governors to their stride, unlearning their bodies. Who are they? As taps played, I concentrated, trying to catch one of them breathing. I could hear in the silence between the sad notes only the whirr of the cameras winding after the hiss of the shutters.

Before all this pomp, between the world wars, families came to the cemetery and used the marble tomb as a table for picnics. They looked out over the new sod of a field of Civil War dead. The place was only occasionally guarded then by groups of veterans who would police the area for the scored wax paper, the chicken bones, and the child’s ball left behind. Who knows? Perhaps it was a better ceremony to stretch out on the marble table after a big dinner and let the sun feast on your itching skin. Perhaps better than a wreath. Watching the unflinching bodies of the soldiers at attention, I imagined losing myself. I was a statue come to life, tap dancing on the plinth of the Unknown Soldier, looking out over the Potomac to the distant white memorials melting in the haze.

The crowd of people assembled for that Memorial Day applauded as I walked away. They know who I am, they think. I let them think what they think.

On Late-Night TV

The television is secondhand from the White House, an early color model dating from the Johnson administration. The mahogany cabinet, gaudy as a casket, holds three screens. I can tune each to a different channel, watch the same network on all three. It has been modified for remote. It is cable ready, and three VCRs have been hooked up. Johnson had it built so he could watch simultaneously the three versions of the evening news. The maps of Vietnam were in different colors. He must have had an aide at the ready, turning the volume controls by hand. “Let me hear Cronkite, the bastard,” he would bark. Or maybe he just left on all the sound. He would have to distinguish who said what the way you pick out instruments in a symphony. I can see him, slouched in a swivel chair, his tie loosened, his eyes skipping from screen to screen to screen, the room filled with the babbling voices. I watched the same war on WISH-TV in Indianapolis never dreaming that it would come out like this.

Most of the furniture we have here at the old Naval Observatory was once in the White House. Each new resident sweeping clean, sends tables and chairs, portraits and drapes, mantel clocks and mirrors over in the GSA vans. The first floor looks like a furniture showroom. The televisions, however, I had sent up to our room. In the evenings, propped up in the water bed we brought with us to Washington, I watch the televisions. The mattress is slightly baffled to dampen the waves. Still, it is soothing, the gentle rocking. I float, watching the late-night shows.

Marilyn falls asleep each night after the local weather. Curled away from me under the light blanket, she wears a frilly black blindfold like the ones panelists wore on old game shows. The elastic band bunches her hair together into a dark helmet. She snores politely beside me. The sheets are silk. There is a slight roll in the mattress. The polyester in the blanket will discharge static from time to time, faint sparks tracing her hair and shoulders, letting me know she is here.

On the far wall, the televisions are on. The screens seem to float too, a slight flicker in the pictures. I like to arrange the programs from left to right. I have a remote in each hand, and I am good enough now to read the buttons with my thumbs like braille. I can start with Carson on the first screen, then move to Arsenio in the middle. While I am watching him, noting the strange new design cut into his hair, I can leapfrog Johnny’s image to the screen on the right, catching him as he turns toward Doc. My fingers are busy moving Arsenio from the middle screen left, nudging the volume up there so that I can hear his first joke while I watch Carson, arms behind his back, lean forward toward the audience like a figure on a ship’s prow. I cue up Ted Koppel on the middle set just to find out tonight’s subject. If I’m not interested, I’ll switch to the comedy channel with its parade of club stand-ups or run the tape of the morning talk shows, scanning for any reference to me until it is time for Dennis Miller to come on after Nightline on ABC.

If I am alert enough, I can record the jokes on the other two VCRs. I now sense when a joke is coming. When Leno stands in for Johnny, he uses me last after a string of gags based on the day’s headlines. He likes to end with me. Arsenio seems embarrassed, the punch line swallowed, buried in his nervous guffaw. It is almost as if he feels compelled to make a joke about me. I am able to catch a couple of these jokes a night, save them on one of the two 120-minute cassettes.

Late at night, after all the talk shows are over and the overnight news shows are on the networks, I’ll run the tape, one long string of jokes about me. I want to remember who said what. There are the nightly bits that turn on my stupidity, and then the frenzy of jokes when I have done or said something silly. “Did you see where our vice president visited Los Angeles?” The comic shakes his head. “This is true,” he says. “He had a few things to say about television.” The audience is already howling. He goes on with the joke. Quiet, I think, I want to hear this. I want to know what’s true, you bastard. Tell me what’s true.

On the other screens, I like to run the weather channels, with their shifts of nameless hosts pointing at loops of computer-enhanced weather swirling left to right across the map of the nation. The comic appears between two computer-enhanced maps of the country. The storm warnings are boxed out, the line of storms a slash of red.

Weatherpeople look like ordinary people. Rumpled and tired. Their suits are off the rack. Their jokes are corny, harmless. I like to watch the weather dancing behind them. I know it isn’t actually there but projected on the screen, blended into the signal by the control room mixers. The screen they point to is really blank, and they must look at a monitor offstage to see the map. They learn to do this by watching television. I could watch them do this for hours.

While I was in law school, I did watch David Letterman do the weather on that Indianapolis station, sticking pictures of umbrellas and smiling suns in sunglasses on an airbrushed map of Indiana. He drew arrows that meant nothing, made up forecasts on the spot, and teased the anchors, who smiled back at him. The other students thought he was funny. My study group took a break to watch him every night. He would spend his time asking on the air what a flurry was, who had seen high pressure, why was Indiana always colored pink.

And now I have him on all three screens. He fiddles with his suit, licks his teeth, presses his face into the camera. His jokes aren’t funny, and the audience doesn’t laugh. But the funny part is, I think, that that is what is supposed to happen. The audience groans and boos. The harder he works, the more it fails, the better the audience likes it. I don’t get this being dumb. I don’t get it.

At 2:00 A.M. the dogs in Washington start barking. I can hear sirens going up and down Massachusetts Avenue. I have been watching the weather. There will be snow in Vail and sunshine in Palm Beach. It’s a great country. You can ski or play golf on the same day. I’ve been watching a show-length commercial for a new kind of paintbrush and, on several channels, the pictures of the pouting women who say they will talk with me live if I call them right now.

All the phone traffic is logged here at the residency. I couldn’t get away with dialing a 900 number. There would be a leak. Word would get out. I can anticipate the jokes late at night, the winks. I can almost make them up myself.

Marilyn snores, and her snoring sets up a rocking in the bed. The water sloshes. She rolls over, and her face turns toward me. Her eyes are masked, but I can see the twinkling blue screens reflected deep within the black satin.

I want to walk onto The Tonight Show in the middle of someone’s time in the guest chair the way Bob Hope does. Perhaps on Carson’s very last show. I want to straighten this whole thing out. Let people see me as I really am.

“I can only stay a minute, Johnny,” I’d say. He apologizes for that evening’s joke during the monologue. “Hey, I understand. I’m used to it.” I can take it. I’d show them.

I watch the televisions. I start with the one on the left. The later it gets, the more ads there are for private conversations. The women say they are standing by, waiting for the phones to ring. I could call right now. I could. I would tell them who I am. And they believe me right away. I say, “I’m the Vice President.” I say, “No, really. I’m not making this up. I am the Vice President. I am. I am.”

On Anesthesia

The naval officer with the football clutches it like, well, a football, tucked under one arm and the other arm wrapped over the top. We call it the football, but it’s not a football. It’s a silver briefcase stuffed with all the secret codes for launching the missiles and the bombers. He slumps in his chair at the far end of the Oval Office. Secret Service agents, packed into the couches, read old People magazines. The lenses of their dark glasses lighten automatically the longer they’re inside. They’ve let me sit at the President’s desk in the big leather swivel chair. Now my back is to them. I’m looking out at the Rose Garden, where the white buckets weighted down with bricks protect the plants. On the bureau beneath the window, the President has a ton of pictures. His kids and grandkids. His brothers and sisters. Shots of Christmases. The house in Maine. His wife. The dog. I don’t see me. Little elephants are scattered among the frames. Carved in stone or wood or cast in polished metal, they all head the same direction, their trunks raised and trumpeting.

Every few minutes I like to turn dramatically around to face the room. Nothing happens. The agents flip through the magazines, licking their thumbs to turn the pages. Other aides huddle by the door fingering each other’s lapel pins. The naval officer with the football has a rag out now. He breathes on the briefcase, then rubs the fog off the shiny surface.

I get to be President for about twenty minutes more. The real President is under anesthesia at Bethesda. In the big cabinet room the chiefs of staff are watching the operation on a closed-circuit hookup. A stenographer is taking down everything that’s being said. They asked me if I wanted to watch with them, but I get squeamish at the sight of blood. I’d wait in the Oval Office I told them. An amendment to the Constitution lets me be Acting President in such situations, but there is nothing for me to do. We’ve been ignoring the press. No sense mentioning it.

I’ve been doodling on White House stationery I found in the desk drawer. I always draw parallel zigzagging lines, connecting them up to form steps. When I am finished I can look at the steps the regular way and then I can make myself see them upside down, flipping back and forth in my head from one way to the other. I arrange the pens on the desk blotter after I’ve used them as if I am going to give them out as souvenirs.

They let me make a few phone calls. I called a supporter in Phoenix, but I forgot about the time difference and I woke him up. What could I say? I’m sorry. I left a message for the Governor of Indiana, a Democrat I play golf with sometimes. His father, when he was a Senator, wrote the amendment that let me be President for a few hours. “Just tell him the President called,” I said. I wanted to rub it in. I called Janine, my high school girlfriend, who is an actuary in Chicago. I don’t know her politics. “Guess where I am,” I said. She couldn’t guess. When I traveled commercial I used to call her at her home from O’Hare on a stopover. I let her know I was a Congressman, a Senator. I wanted her to know I was on my way someplace.

“Try,” I said. “From where I sit I can see the Washington Memorial.” That wasn’t true. I was looking at the Commander with the football. She told me she was running late, that her eggs were getting cold. Janine had a view of the lake, I imagined, her building near a beach on the North Shore.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “This is on the taxpayers’ nickel.” I wanted everyone to hear me. The men in the room, I could see, were trying hard not to look like they were listening.

I was anesthetized once. This was a few years ago. All four of my wisdom teeth were impacted. Before they put me under, I had to read a form and sign it. It said I understood all the things that could go wrong. The procedure was usually performed on patients much younger. Nerves could get cut. Dry sockets. Shattered jawbones. I don’t like blood or guts, so I signed it quickly to stop thinking about the possibilities. I signed, sitting in the chair while the oral surgeon held up the syringe, squirting out drops of the drug from the gleaming needle.

“We are going to put you into twilight sleep,” the doctor told me. “Not really sleep. Not deep enough to dream. You’ll just be very relaxed,” he said, slapping at my arm to find a vein. “If we weren’t going to work in your mouth, you’d tell us all your secrets. You’d just let go.”

I was out like a light. It felt like sleeping in a seat on an airplane. I remember thinking I wish I knew what my secrets were, what I really thought. But the drug that made me tell the truth also put me into twilight sleep so that I never really knew what I said. I know I was talking, telling them everything. I kept rocking along through the dark night. Then, the doctor and the nurses were looking at me strangely. Had they heard me say something, the muttering I had been making becoming clear when they swabbed up the blood or turned away to pick up another instrument? Did they stop and listen?

Tell me what I said, I said to them. But it came out nonsense. I could just begin to feel my face again, feel it swelling up. My lips and tongue had vanished.

“Who stole my tongue?” I said.

“Is someone coming to drive you home?” they asked as they walked me into another room.

“Ma mamph,” I said. I could hear again. I was vaguely aware of other bodies on cots scattered around the room. The doctor and the nurse eased me onto my own cot. They stuck a sheet of instructions in my hands and slid a small envelope into my shirt pocket.

“Those are your teeth,” they said. I had wanted to do something with the molars, polish them up and have them made into jewelry or shellac them for a paperweight. But when I opened the envelope later all that spilled out were splinters of bone, crumbs of teeth. They had to be chiseled out the doctor told me when I called. “They didn’t want to budge,” he said.

I looked at the pile of fragments on my desk. Here and there I could see a smooth contour of a tooth, the tip of a root, the sliced off crown like a flat-bottomed cloud. I pushed the parts around on the desk. Most were ragged, caked with clotted blood and bits of browning tissue. The pulpy nerves crumpled to dust. I poked the pieces into four piles, the bits making a scratching sound as they slid across the stationery they were on. I had drawn stairs on the paper, and I climbed them up and down, up and down.

Maybe it was the painkiller I was still taking. I sat there staring at the piles of dust thinking: These are all my secrets reduced to ashes.

“It’s the drugs,” Marilyn said when I told her how sad my wisdom teeth had made me. I tried to explain that the operation had pried something out of me. I couldn’t begin to explain it. “It’s the drugs talking,” she said.

The kitchen timer the Secret Service set bings on the end table, and they all stand up from the couches. They toss the People magazines in a heap on the coffee table. I turn back to the window and see the naval officer sprinting for the helicopter revving up on the lawn. He’ll fly directly to Bethesda. The official White House photographer snaps a few pictures of me at the desk. A Secret Service agent rushes my doodles to the shredder in the closet. “You want me to dial the phone,” I ask, “sign a few papers? What?”

“Just act natural,” the photographer says as aides usher Marilyn into the room. I stand up, push the chair from the desk. We kiss in front of the bureau, the elephants sniffing up at us. I hear the snap, snap of the camera, sense the white flash on my eyelids.

I am sentimental, I think. I feel lots of things. I just don’t let anyone know. No one will know how it felt to be the President of the United States for a few hours. Janine, on her way to work, cannot begin to imagine the depth of my feelings. Everyone else, the whole country waking up and getting ready for the new day, they can’t begin to imagine what I feel I feel.

The photographer wants another picture of us kissing. Marilyn leans into me again, her eyes closed, her head cocked to the right. I could kiss her on the cheek or on her mouth. Kissing is all different now. After the extraction of my teeth I found that feeling would never return to my lips, the nerve endings crushed or severed by the operation. I don’t like to think about that, nerves and tissues. I decide to kiss her mouth, and I do. It is a sensation I’ve grown to like. The numbness.

On Barbie

“What is your real name?” I ask the woman who is Barbie. She is shivering next to me as we stand in the open doorway at the end of the assembly line. The satin sash she wears matches the ribbon we are supposed to cut. The sky is gray, and the pigeons, scared up by the band music, are spiraling back down to the holes in the eaves and windows of the unused part of the factory where they roost. She tells me her name as she takes my arm. Her hard hat floats on top of her thick hair.

“You could be Ken,” she whispers to me. “Let’s pretend.”

The CEO and owner of this plant is speaking to a crowd of workers and reporters who spill out to the big parking lot. I’ve thought of that. I could be Ken. I have that block-shaped head. The hairline and the line of the jaw are Ken’s. I smile at her, imagining the way we look. I am holding the giant pair of scissors with my other hand. Barbie and Ken and a pair of scissors scaled to make us look doll-sized. Our smiles are frozen on our faces. You have to practice this. Yes, I could be Ken. He’s a good-looking guy. I take it as a compliment.

The Corvettes spaced along the line are pink. This factory now makes all kinds of electric cars for kids. The cars have two forward speeds and one in reverse controlled by pedals and gearshifts. The detailing of the paint and upholstery matches the vehicle it is modeled on. But I am told it is the novelty of the keys that come with the car, starting it up and shutting it off, that sells the product. Children in elementary school love them. They carry their jingling key rings to class for show-and-tell.

“It is like a real car,” the CEO told me earlier. The Corvettes are just one line called Barbie’s Corvette. It’s a licensing agreement with Mattel. “And it comes in any color you want,” the CEO said, “as long as it is pink.”

I thought it was a bad idea driving one of the Corvettes around the parking lot. The CEO and the PR people had hoped I would take one for a spin. I thought of Dukakis in the tank. I pictured myself wedged in the tiny cockpit, my knees up by my ears, my hands on the steering wheel between my feet. The Secret Service were to act as pylons. Stiff as posts, staring from behind their dark glasses at everything except me. I would scoot around their legs in the car, turning a complete circle around one agent, then slalom back through their dispersed pattern on the parking lot, a test track. I would try to cut the corners as close as possible, trench coats slapping my face.

Instead of driving one of the cars, I admired them during a photo opportunity. One turned slowly on a tabletop turntable, the television lights playing over its pink gloss finish. Barbie stroked the fenders with the fingers of her long hand. This was my first look at the car. The ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of the assembly line came later. We were to take a tour of the plant and the factory showroom, where salesmen walked among the highly polished demonstration models handing out brochures. When we got there, we picked our way through the cars at our feet, the miniature Mercedes and tiny Jeeps. We stopped to marvel at a replica of a ’57 T-bird coupe.

“Oh,” Barbie said bending over to pet it, “so cute.”

This is what Vice Presidents do. Bury the dead and open factories. This factory had once made tractors for semitrailers, Trans Stars for the local van line company, and green Army two-and-a-halfs. The white star stenciled on the door. The factory is in Fort Wayne, in my home district. It had been a ruin for ten years, ever since Harvester closed the plant in favor of one in Springfield, Missouri.

When I was a kid, my father brought me up here. He was covering a rollout for the paper then. Crammed onto a reviewing stand, we watched the trucks blast around the banked track, stutter over a patch of cobblestones, then plow through a shallow pool splaying a wake of water from beneath each wheel. I got to climb up in the cab as the engine idled and rumbled beneath the seat. With my arms stretched wide I couldn’t hold both sides of the steering wheel.

On the way back to Huntington, my father tried to explain the future to me. The truck I had been in was just an idea, its model year two or three years away. I didn’t get it. I had smelled the diesel fumes, heard the sneeze of the air brakes. “Who know,” my father said, “a lot could happen.”

I let them love me in Fort Wayne. I swung a grant their way. Jawboned the locals for tax relief. Some people are working again. Let them blame that on me.

“I am really Malibu Barbie,” Barbie says to me. “The doll comes with a Frisbee, a tote bag, and a beach umbrella.” That is why she is wearing the swimsuit on this early spring day. The sky is as dirty as the grime on the big windows. Off in the distance, at the other end of the property, is the red brick bell tower. The old company logo, the small i bisecting the capital H to look like a gearshift pattern, still hangs crookedly just beneath the roof. The stink of the drawn copper from the wire works next door begins to coat my tongue.

“You from around here?” I ask her. Her neck is long and thin. Her swimsuit is made out of a miracle fabric in an animal hide print. She is wearing sheer hose that sparkle even in the bad light and hiss like scissor blades cutting construction paper when she walks.

Earlier, we toured the whole factory, even the abandoned parts. The new assembly line took up a fraction of the acres under roof. The toy car company had been started in the owner’s garage. At first he just made go-carts for the neighborhood kids. Then, as business grew, he moved to a Quonset hut in an industrial park. There is plenty of room to expand now.

Barbie’s heels snipped over the steel plate on the floor that had covered the conduits for cables that fed the old machines long removed. On the terrazzo I could see where they had been positioned from the footprints of discolored flooring outlined with filth. Here and there were rusting heaps of metal that could not be salvaged and yellowing scraps of paper that looked like scaling fungus on rotting trees. The factory opened up to three stories, the web of girders supporting the roof lost in the gloom. Dripping water from somewhere matched Barbie’s cadence. We stopped in the middle of the vast hall to rest. There was a little oasis of gunmetal stools and desk chairs on coasters. The Secret Service drifted on, their backs to us, spreading apart to form a perimeter, right on the edge of being seen. No one spoke. What light there was seemed to be drawn to Barbie, who swiveled slowly in the office chair. Her legs, crossed at the ankles, stretched out to keep her pointed feet off the floor. Her head was thrown back, the hard hat adhering to her hair. She closed her eyes as if she were sunbathing. She shimmered, bobbing like a needle in a toy compass slowly nudging north. I could hear the pigeons cooing in the rafters and then suddenly flapping after launching out, gliding into sight to land on the floor across the room.

“You know,” I said to Barbie, “we always live in the age of lead. We stand on the shoulders of giants.” I looked at her to see what impression I had made.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “Look at the toys these days. Nothing is left to the imagination.”

I felt like an accessory in a new play set. Call it Barbie’s Factory. Action figures and clothes sold separately. Any moment the vast roof could crack open, the walls hinging out. I am Midwestern Ken. A seed cap, dungarees, and a farmer’s tan.

Barbie is a head taller than I am. I sat quietly and watched her turn in the chair, propelled by invisible forces. The Secret Service whispered to each other in the shadows.

At the end of the day, we cut the ribbon. I grasp one handle with both my hands. Barbie has the other. I remember again the gigantic wheel of the truck. I am confused, confused again by size. I never fit. I never fit no matter what I do. The scissors are useless at cutting through the ribbon, the fabric folding then slipping between the blades. We end up tearing through it after the threads of the edge have been frayed enough by our frantic efforts. We pull the handles apart, then hurl them back together. The blades slicing closed smack with a kiss.

Barbie leans over and gives me a kiss. Her lips are waxy on my cheek. We pose that way. Barbie’s long neck stretched out as she nuzzles my face. A hand on each of my shoulders for support. I am smiling at the cameras. This is what I am thinking. I’m thinking: It’s a small moment of triumph no matter how you look at it.

The air is permeated with the tang of metal. I hold out in front of me the shiny keys that fit the brand-new pink Barbie Corvette I was given, which the Secret Service will later carry out to my limousine and store in the trunk like a spare to begin our trip back to Washington. And later still, in an intimate ceremony on the Mall, I will donate the car to the Smithsonian. Mattel will send another Barbie, this one dressed in a gold gown that might have been worn at an inaugural. Together, with the pink car roped off in one corner of the museum, we will have staked out our own little piece of history.

On Hoosier Hysteria

This is true. During the annual high school basketball tournaments in Indiana, the winning small towns send a team to the cities for the regional or semistate finals. Those towns empty completely for the games, the whole population evacuated by yellow buses and strings of private sedans and wagons. The Governor declares an emergency and sends a few state troopers or a truckload of the Guard to patrol the deserted streets.

I got sent to Marion one spring when that team was playing up in Fort Wayne. I was attached to a clerical unit stationed at Fort Benjamin Harrison outside of Indianapolis. We convoyed up from the south and parked on the outskirts of the ville as the residents streamed north. We could hear the horns. A muscle car sped by camouflaged with crepe paper and tempera. We were humping it into town, two files, one to a gutter, along the main street. The lieutenant sent a squad down a side street. Dogs barked. Up ahead was the small downtown of two-storied stores and offices. Hovering just above the brick buildings, a huge water tower seemed to float like a dark cloud, its supporting legs obscured by the buildings and trees. There was writing on its side that couldn’t be read from where I was, the town name and zip code perhaps, the sense of it stretched around out of sight. We had to hold the town for the day, and, if the team won its afternoon game, stay the night in bivouac set up on the high school football field.

It took us a few hours or so to walk the streets and rattle some door handles. Tacked up on every garage was a scuffed backboard and rotting net. I looked in the windows of the empty homes, saw the big glossy house and garden magazines scalloped on the coffee table, the dishrag draped over the faucet in the kitchen, an old pitcher filled with pussy willow branches in the middle of the dining table. Some places were unlocked, and I poked my head in, shouting to make sure no one was there. As I walked through one house, I listened to the clocks ticking. There was Eckrich meat in the refrigerator. I turned on the television and stood in front of it as it warmed up. The game was on, live, the boys going through warm-up drills at each end of the court. Somewhere in the crowd, the people who lived in that house shook pom-poms behind the cheerleaders. I stood there, too close to the set, in the living room, in full gear, my helmet on my head, cradling my rifle in my arms. The boys in their shiny outfits did layup after layup. Each of them took a little skip as he started to break for the hoop, meeting the feeding pass in midstride, the ball then rolling off his fingers, kissing the glass. A sergeant tapped on the picture window. “Quayle,” he said, his voice filtering into the house, “get your butt out here.”

I followed a squad down an oiled street. The sidewalks had crumbled into dust. The Kiwanis had tapped the maple trees growing along the side of the road, the sap plunking inside the tin buckets. We formed up at the end of the block, where the town met the surrounding field of corn stubble. The field went on for miles, broken only by a stand of trees, a cluster of buildings, a cloud of crows rising from the ground. We stood there waiting for something to happen. How strange and empty the world had become. In a few more weeks spring would be here for good, but you would never guess it from the way things looked. It was as if we had survived something horrible. I felt frightened and relieved. Then, the sergeant told us to saddle up and get back to town.

Later, we watched the game on a television we brought with us from the armory. The little diesel generator sputtered outside the tent. Marion won and would play again that night. We ate K rations while we watched, fruit salad in Army green tins. I saved the cherries for the last after eating the peaches, the pears, the pineapple, and the grapes in that order.

And later still, I climbed the water tower and circled the tank on the wire catwalk, looking down on the town. I saw the grid of streetlights come on automatically in patches down below. A sentry in one neighborhood waded through the puddles of light. A truck or a car would rumble up the main street and brake at the checkpoint near the square. On the wall of the water tank, high school kids had scratched their initials in the paint, coupling them with the stitch of plus signs. Now I was too close to read the huge letters of the town name and the legend that declared Marion was the Home of the Little Giants and the numbers of the years they had won the state championship. You had to read that from the ground. In my pocket was a souvenir I’d pilfered from a house below, a gravy boat from a corner cupboard. I have it still.

And when Marion won the game that night, I could hear the troops shouting that the home team had won. I watched from the platform on the water tower as all the patrolling soldiers came running from their posts to see the team cut down the nets on TV. From my perch, I looked north to the haze of light where Fort Wayne was supposed to be, recreating in my own mind the whole celebration I knew by heart.

I was floating above a peaceful Indiana in the dark. Out there, there were winners and losers. After tonight, we’d be down to the final four. I thought then, and I think now, that this is what we were fighting for.

On 911

He used to walk everywhere, Ed, the incumbent I beat for the congressional seat that got me to Washington. His campaign consisted of taking walks. He’d walk through a neighborhood in Fort Wayne, going up and knocking on a few doors, waving at cars as they passed by him. He gave out stickers in the shape of footprints and in the outline of shoes. He’d walk out into the country, out to Zulu and Avilla, Markle and Noblesville. The few reporters that trailed along tired after a few miles, caught a ride back downtown. He was a tall thin man. He slung his jacket over his shoulder, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. His pants were too short. Along Indiana 3, he’d wade through the patches of wild carrot and goldenrod. He was bombed by the angry blackbirds. He had thin hair and wore glasses with clear plastic frames. Near Leo, the Amish, who don’t even vote, passed him by in their buggies. He would stop at a farmhouse for a drink of water from a well. He’d get his picture in The Journal, the Democratic paper, kicking an empty can along the gutter in the streets of the new suburbs of St. Joe Township. He was always alone, hardly talked to anyone that mattered. No one walked anymore. His shoes were always dusty. It was a cinch.

After I won and Ed was showing me around the Hill, he refused to ride the Capitol subway over to his office. He put me onboard, and we left him behind to walk over by himself. His aides even rode with me. They didn’t bother looking back to see him shrink in the poor light of the dark tunnel beneath the streets of Washington.

He was too pitiful for words. He had more than enough rope to hang himself. The few rumors we fanned at Rotary clubs and the Zonta were enough. His skin was milky. His voice was pitched too high. He smoked a pipe. The pictures you saw in The Journal always showed him from behind, the loose white shirt draped with that summer-weight jacket. Such a target, his back exposed, brought the best out of the voters. I salivated along with my staff as we watched him walk through the fall.

His one piece of legislation was the bill that established an emergency telephone number, 911. Something a child could remember and dial. I can just imagine the debate. Who would oppose it? What could be wrong with it?

I imagine him right now sitting in his rec room watching television, perhaps the show that dramatizes the rescues once someone has called the emergency number. Every time I watch that program, I think of him in his recliner, feeling good about his public life, the stories he watches a kind of endless testimonial to his goodness.

When I was a kid, I believed in creating a kind of chronic discomfort, using the telephone to disrupt the workaday world. “Do you have Prince Edward in the can? You do? Well, you better let him out.” I dialed the numbers randomly. “Is your refrigerator running? It is? Well, you better go chase it.” I flipped through the phone book looking for funny names, calling the Frankensteins or the Cockburns. I liked transforming the telephone into something dangerous. People being startled by the bell, their hands frozen for a moment before reaching the rest of the way to pick up. My little voice, a needle in their ears, creating these anxious moments. Let him out! Go chase it! I’d make up fictions to clear the party line so that I could call my girlfriend. Or I would listen to the neighbors talking to each other, letting them know I was there. I would always be there.

A guy like you, Ed, would keep on answering the phone, would think after all the heavy breathing I’d want to talk with you. You believe in signs, in what they say. The tinkling bells of the ice cream truck would have you racing down the street. You answer the phone without a second thought. Is your refrigerator running?

Poor Ed. Everything in the world can be used, used in ways you’d never dream, used against you. Twisted. Devoured. Pulled inside out. I like to imagine you cringing in your dark rec room, the flicker of your television slapping you around, your sweaty skin sticking to the gummy vinyl of your lounger. I made you crawl. You were so easy to kick. I watched you drag yourself along the oiled back roads, the uncut ditches of Allen County, where well-bred children who hurl rocks at the Amish buggies just to hear the wood splinter took aim at you.

In the bedrooms of America, no one ever entertains the fantasy of a liberal with a whip. They desire something more, something more like me but dressed to the hilt in black uniform and patent leather, professional looking, someone who might be truly dangerous. It’s in the eyes. It’s there in the tight smile. In the privacy of their own rec rooms some people like to dress up. People like to be hurt. People like to hurt. They play out their own amateur versions of epic conflicts. Here words don’t mean the same things. Saying stop doesn’t work. Stop means keep on going. Try to imagine it. What to yell when things get out of hand, when the stimulation in these dramas exceeds the threshold of endurance? I’ve heard they scream or mutter: 911. 911. The number you invented has been absorbed into this language of love.

I hate to think about these things at all. But we live in the sickest of times. It’s still a matter of trust. Your partner will stop if you find the right thing to say. What can I say, Ed? What number can I call? It seems I can’t exist without these dramas. There are the good guys and the bad guys. I like that. Someone gets hurt. Someone does the hurting. And the bells keep ringing.

On Quayleito

I know now how it works. I spent one afternoon in my office with an eyeglasses repair kit dismantling the thing. I unscrewed the little screws that held the tiny hinges, unhooked the rubber bands, untied the threads with tweezers, freed the minute springs as fine as hair. The pieces lay scattered on my desk blotter. I put the various parts in the empty squares of days mapped out on the appointment calendar. I had been ordered to lay low awhile, rehabilitate myself.

I never drink the water anywhere. It can make you sick. But in Chile, I waded into one of their outdoor markets to look for something local to ingest. I wasn’t going to be a Nixon holed up in the limousine rushing through the platas pelted by eggs. I believe native populations can smell the fear. Gorbachev kissed babies on a street in Washington, DC. I can shake a few hands and handle some grapes in Santiago.

Marilyn waited back at the embassy. I was sandwiched in a three-car motorcade. “Stop the car,” I ordered. “How do I say, ‘How much?’”

The car was already floundering in the market crowd. I like to move through a thick mass of people this way, the ring of security wedging me along, hands disconnected from the faces they belong to reach through to touch me, to try to grab my hands. “Steady, lads,” I barked out to the agents.

The squids were huge, draped over clotheslines like parachutes. The shrimps looked like stomachs. Chickens squawked when the vendors held them up to me by their feet. We’d move from the sun to the shade made by awnings of brightly colored blankets and gauzy dresses. I could smell coffee roasting. The potatoes were the size of golf balls and colored like breakfast cereal. Rabbits in wooden cages watched what must have been skinned rabbits skewered on spits turning over charcoal fires. Where we walked, the ground was covered with the skins of smashed vegetables and crushed leaves and tissue wrappers. I slipped on a mango peel.

I pointed at fruit I had never seen before. The crowd that had been drifting along with us hushed to a whisper. The farmer brushed the flies away from melons that looked like pictures of organs in an anatomy book. Stripped, gland-sized berries secreted gummy juices. The apples had thorns and were orange. Another fruit had been split open to show it was choking with sacks of blood red liquid. The flies swarmed around the farmer’s hand as he pointed from one bushel to the next. He threw some plums into a sack and waved away the aide who tried to pay him.

“Gracia,” I said, reaching in for one. I pulled it out and held it up. The crowd cheered. The press took pictures of me eating the plum. I felt like a matador, the crowd cheering me on. The translator said something about water. I told him I didn’t want any, that I never drink it. But he had meant that the plum should be washed. It should have been washed before I bit into it. Too late. The bite I took went to the pit. I survived though I was sick later. It didn’t matter. I was going to get sick one way or the other. The plum was good. It tasted like a plum.

On the way back to the car, we bumped into a stand filled with carved wood figures of little men. I thought they must be souvenirs like the dolls of baseball or football players you get at the stadiums back home whose bobbing plaster heads are attached to the uniformed bodies by a bouncy spring.

“¿Cuanto vale?” I asked the surprised seller. The translator told me what he said.

“Is that the right price?” I asked the translator.

He shrugged. “Seems fair,” he said. And I told him to tell the man I’d take one.

I held the figure in my hands, admiring the workmanship. Though crude there was a deftness to the carving, the way the clothes hung on the body. The bright paint seemed festive and foreign. People in the crowd jockeyed around to get a look. The statue was lighter than I imagined, hollow. I shook it and heard something rattle inside. I noticed an unglued seam at the waist. The crowd was shouting at me now.

“What are they saying?” I asked the translator. He told me they were shouting instructions on how it worked. As he said that, I was pulling gently on the doll’s head. Just then, the joint below the shirt cracked open and a little flesh-painted pee-pee sprung up. The crowd went wild.

Back then, when I bought the doll, I laughed it off. I told the press it was a gift for my wife. I jerked its head a time or two to show what happened. Everyone in the crowd was smiling and giggling. Security, too, looked back at me over their shoulders to catch a glimpse of the exposition, the flesh-colored splinter tipped with the head of a match.

When I returned to the embassy, I didn’t tell Marilyn what the doll did. She found out after listening to the Voice of America on the shortwave. Nothing was mentioned at the state dinner that evening. “Get rid of it” was all she said before turning off the lights and rolling over in bed.

Maybe I should have washed the plum. I was up all night in the bathroom. I brought the doll in there with me. As I sat in the bright tile light, I contemplated the thing. Its enigmatic smile, the way one eye seemed to wink, how its arms and hands and fingers looked like vines grown into the trunk of its body, what did it mean?

Everything I touch transforms into things I cannot begin to understand. I was terrified when I squeezed from my own penis its first drop of semen. I was twelve, taking a bath, soaping myself hard when I felt the shiver. I thought it was the chill in the air of the room, then I saw the little white pill slip out of me. It was soap, I thought. It burned. It had gotten inside. But it wasn’t soap. What had I done? Who could I tell? I had hurt myself badly, I thought, and once I thought that, it did not surprise me to then think that I had gotten what I deserved. I have always gotten what I deserved. I washed and washed myself. Years after that, here I was sick again in a strange bathroom in Chile, and a souvenir that didn’t have a name regarded me as my insides rearranged themselves spontaneously.

In Chile, I found out later, the ending — ito gets glued to every name. It means little, — ito. It’s affectionate. Little this, little that. And the kind of doll I bought that day in the market is now called Quayleito after me.

The guts of the thing are all spread out on my desk. I know now how it works. The springs, the trapdoor, the counterweights, the whole mechanism of the joke. I still don’t know its purpose, why it was made. Poor little Quayleito. What to do now? My days are empty. Idle hands. Devil’s playground.

On The Little Prince

The children are out in front selling lemonade to raise money for Jerry’s kids. One of them comes running in for more mix. It’s a holiday so we all have to shift for ourselves. The old Naval Observatory where we live is near the neighborhood of embassies. A pack of Africans in native dress have surrounded the card table, drinking from the tiny Dixie Cups while the kids are dumping the powdered mix into the picnic jug and wetting it down with the hose. I can see this from the house. Foreigners don’t understand why we have a labor day at the end of summer instead of in May. They are all working today, even the Marxists who live down the road. They are heading back to their desks after lunch, killing time at the stand.

I’ve got the television tuned to the telethon. Crystal Gayle, who is from Wabash, Indiana, is supposed to be on soon. Jerry staggers around the stage. His eyes are crossed, and he’s yammering out of the side of his mouth. The French think he is a genius. I hear that all the time. How the French think he is a genius. Personally, I liked him better when he was teamed up with Dean Martin, whose suave manners stood out against his sidekick’s clowning. I like the movie where Lewis plays a goofy caddy for Martin, who is a smooth golf pro. The high-pitched whining, bending the clubs, the divots. Martin gets the girl, wins the open. Now, Jerry looks doughy, the sheen on his hair matches the satin stripes on his formal trousers. My God, it’s time already to undo the bow tie. What the French say about him has to have gone to his head. He rants at enemies then leers buck-toothed, eyes bulging. He wears aviator glasses that look like copies of the pair the President wears.

French is still the language of diplomacy, I guess. It makes sense since everything they seem to say says the opposite of what should be said. Jerry Lewis is a genius. They use language as a kind of disguise for what they really mean. They praise adults who act like children. Is a genius, Jerry Lewis? I would have studied it in high school, where they made it hard on purpose, all those little la’s and le’s, to weed out the Z lane kids, who were routed into Spanish. I took Latin because it didn’t move around, because it would help me with my English, and because I was going to be a lawyer.

When they were younger, I read to my kids. I took turns when I could and chose the stories with a lot of words and few pictures assuming that, after a while, I would look up and the kids would be asleep, their faces smashed into their pillows, their arms hanging over the sides of the bunk beds. That’s the biggest myth, that reading bedtime stories puts kids to sleep. It revs them up, and after I had closed the book, I had to hang around in the dark and answer questions about the strangest things. They always wanted to know if I was there when the story happened and was the story different when I was their age. I’d rock in the rocking chair while they thrashed in their blankets pretending they were characters from a book, that there was something scary in the closet. “Settle down. Settle down.” I thought of torts and contracts, the stories of the man who falls down an old dry well, posted but uncovered, on a neighbor’s property while he is cutting the lawn as repayment of a previous debt. Who can sue whom? On what grounds? There were ways out of those stories. It ends up being settled. One could walk away, fall asleep.

I could have killed the Little Prince. Reading his story, I felt so guilty for growing up and having no imagination anymore. But one night, I understood that that was the point. I was supposed to feel bad because I no longer had an imagination. The French. This thing they have for innocence. “Go to sleep!” I always wound up screaming. “Pipe down!” I’d storm out of the room, the children whimpering. “Grow up!” I’d yell and yell at them until, one day it seemed, they had done just that, grown up.

I stay away from them now. They have their own lives, their lemonade stands. The Africans must be thirsty. They crowd the table. Somewhere among them are my children refilling their glasses with lemonade that is not lemonade.

Let me try to explain it to myself. Those books never are about what they are supposed to be. Reading transmits a disease that you get through your eyes. A thing like The Little Prince gives it to you. You feel worse. You feel like you have lost something you’ll never get back. But you never had it and that makes you feel bad too. Therefore: Don’t read. Stop now. Don’t even crack the book open. In every story there is a dangerous formula hidden in the forest of the letters. It is there already, always.

On Planet of the Apes

I was always one of those who hid in the trunk. You paid by the head at the Lincolndale Drive-in off U.S. 30 on the north edge of Fort Wayne. There was an orange A & W shack across the highway from the entrance. We stopped there just as the sun was going down and drank root beers, sitting on the bumpers of somebody’s father’s car. The parking lot had been oiled, and the heat of the day had squeezed out little blobs of tar breaded with dust. You flashed your lights on and off when you were finished, and a car hop who knew we were from the county and ignored us came over to gather up the mugs. Then three or four of us climbed into the trunk, fitting ourselves together like a puzzle. Two others always rode up front, somebody alone would be suspicious. One of them would drop the lid on us. bouncing it a time or two to make sure it latched.

At first, the dark smelled like rubber, the rubber of the spare tire and someone’s sneaker in my face. The car rolled slowly over the packed dirt of the lot, stepped around the ruts, then made a short burst across the highway to join the conga line of cars leading up to the theater gates. It was hot inching our way up to the box office. The trunk was lined with a stadium blanket. Who knows what we were breathing, the mothballs, the exhaust from the idling car. The brakes clinched next to my head. The radio from the cabin was muffled by the seat. I always thought I would almost faint from the lack of oxygen, and then I would. I went light-headed, floating in space, my limbs all pins and needles and the roof of the world pricked by stars.

“Dan O!” They called me Dan O then. They hauled me out of the trunk by the cuffs on my jeans. The car had its nose up, beached on the little hill that aimed it toward the screen. I slumped on the rim of the trunk sniffing the air, looking at the next swell of dirt, a line of cars surfing its crest, moored by the speaker cords to silver posts. It was wrong. I swore I would never do it again. I staggered up out of the trunk, afraid I was turning into some kind of juvenile delinquent. “Book me,” I yelled to my friends as they filtered between the cars toward the cinder-brick refreshment stand to buy overpriced burgers and fries with the money we saved sneaking in.

I was telling this to Chuck Heston in the greenroom of the convention. The greenroom was a trailer with no windows parked beneath the scaffolding of the podium. The crowd on the floor above sounded like the wind, and Chuck looked scoured and bronzed. He listened intently, his smile frozen on his face.

“Do you remember where you were from in Planet of the Apes?’ I asked him.

“From Earth?” he asked without moving his lips.

“That’s right,” I said. “But where on Earth?” I could see again the inquisitor ape in white robes interrogating the crazed astronaut. This is before we know about the beach with the broken Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. Chuck had been huge on the screen at the drive-in, his head as big and as brilliant as a moon. The screen is now a ruin itself, plywood plates have popped out of its backing, exposing the girders rank with pigeons. The box office is abandoned. The neon has been picked over and scavenged. The high fences are sunk in the weeds.

I saw them all, I told him. Planet of the Apes. Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Battle for the Planet of the Apes. I saw the first one with my high school friends at the Lincolndale that summer after law school. As a joke they put me in the trunk where I rattled around with the tire iron and the jack.

“I could have been disbarred before I was even barred,” I told Chuck. That night at the drive-in, my friends and I sifted through the rows of cars to the playground of swings and seesaws under the screen. I climbed up into the monkey bars and talked with my friends about the future. The huge clock projected above our heads slowly ticked down the time remaining until the movie started.

That night, before I had even seen the movie, I sensed that I was different from the rest, an alien walking among them. I imagined that the amphitheater of parked cars stretching into the dark had come to see me caught inside a cage. I looked out over the expanse of cars. Clouds of dust floating along the lanes were illuminated by the headlights for a moment before they were extinguished. There was the murmur of the speakers, hundreds of repeating messages reverberating in each car. I thought, I’m your man. I’m the one you’re looking for.

Chuck hadn’t moved. He had stared at me while I talked, his face sagging some as I went on with my reminiscence. Above us the convention crowd howled, a gale force. We would be on soon.

“You,” I said, “were from Fort Wayne in the movie.” And he looked a little relieved. “The astronaut you played was from Fort Wayne, and the apes took that as another bit of evidence of your hostile intention.”

“Oh,” he said, “I had forgotten.”

“I’m from near there,” I said.

I wanted to tell him that back then it had been important that someone like himself had come from that part of the planet even if it was all made up. And now I was here with him waiting for what would happen next.

His head was huge, I remember. As big as the moon. And when the news of his character’s nativity seeped into the cockpit of the car, we pounded fists on the padded dash, hooting and whistling. We flashed the car lights and honked the horn until the steering wheel rang. For several minutes, all the cars rocked and flashed, the blaring horns drowning out what was being said on-screen. It seemed at any second these hunks of metal we rode in would rise up and come alive. But they didn’t.

On Snipe Hunting

They told me to wait, so I wait. They gave me a burlap sack and pushed me out of the car into the ditch next to a field. I watched the taillights disappear. They told me they would drive the snipes my way. “Wait here.” And I do.

Stars are in the sky. I’m in a mint field. The branches of the low bushes brush against my legs, releasing the reeking smell.

I think, suddenly, they are not coming back. Back home, they are waiting for me to figure out they are not coming back. They are thinking of this moment, the one happening now, when I think this thought, that they are not coming back, and then come home on my own.

But, I think, I’ll wait. While waiting, I’ll think of them waiting for me to return home with the empty burlap sack. They’ll think that I haven’t thought, yet, that I was left here in the mint field, that I am waiting for them to drive the snipes my way. I’ll let them think that.

In the morning, I’ll be here, waiting. They will come back looking for me. Dew will have collected on the mint bushes. The stars will be there but will be invisible. And I won’t have thought that thought yet, the one they wanted me to think.

The imaginary quarry is still real and still being driven my way.