The Dick Gibson Show

1

VITA; DICK’S LOG:

When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. And he could get Omaha, could get Detroit, could get Memphis; New Orleans he could get. And once — it was not a particularly clear or cold night; for that matter it may even have rained earlier — he got Seattle, Washington. He listened almost until sign-off, hoping that the staff announcer would say something about the wattage put out by the station. Then, after the midnight news but before the amen of the sermonette, the station faded irrecoverably. He’d learned never to fool with the dial, that it did no good when a signal waned to reclaim it with some careful, surgical twist a half-dozen kilocycles to the right or left. It was best to wait through the babble and static for the return of the electronic tide. Often it would come, renewed for its hiatus, its cosmic romp and drift, strongly present again after its mysterious trip to the universe. This time it didn’t.

He did not hear that particular station again until he was a part-time staff announcer in Butte, Montana, a kid who in those days — it was his first job — liked to doll up his speech and introduce into its already bygone mid-Atlantic base — Tex Ellery he called himself — some heroic man’s man drawl, a quality of bright bandanna, checked wool shirt and sheepskin coat — a crackling, youthful noise, courteous and ma’aming, but cautious and deceptively slow in another, knowing register: last to draw, first to shoot. He had not yet learned the good announcer’s trick of distance, his way with a mile, the sense he gave of the alien, of the Southerner come north, the Northerner dropped south, sliding subtly into regionalism only during the commercial, not presuming to presume to direct, but doing all commanding and urging and wheedling in a sort of moral blackface, deferentially one of them only when the chips were down and money passed.

He heard the station again in Butte, Montana. He was sitting miles out, in the transmitter shack where he sometimes doubled as engineer. He had just done his sleepy duty to the dials he did not really understand, uncertainly monitored the audio frequencies and seen to their many-trillioned amplification. (He did not read the figures themselves, merely the dangerous red margins of the curving dial faces, looking out for the insufficiencies implicit in the needles’ steep ascent, the surfeits of their fearful plunges at the other end, alarmed only for their throes, engaged by extremes and compensating by reactions, reining in and pouring it on by turns.) It was a quiet night in an early stormless spring, the stars distinct, the sun spotless. The needles floated easily in their white calm, and he listened to the radio he had brought with him. The other, a speaker permanently tuned to the Butte station, softly played a transcription of dance music. Rotely he turned the dial of his radio, a little bored, too familiar with what he could expect to bring in here, when suddenly, and as clearly as if it were a local station, he heard the old Seattle call letters and remembered at once the evening he had first heard them in bed. Strangely, though he was thousands of miles closer to Seattle than he had been when he had first heard its signal all those years before, the city seemed just as distant, the intervening planes of time undiminished, all imagination’s vast, seamless landscapes still between. Excitedly he entered the station’s call letters and wave length in the logbook he kept. He listened for the announcer’s name and entered that, together with a brief description of the nature of the program. The log, a ringed, black leather looseleaf notebook, was thick with the entries he had made over the years. Arranged alphabetically according to their call letters, the designations seemed more like words to him than sounds or names, the harsh, often vowelless “K” calls and softer “W” calls and “C” for Canada calls and stations in Mexico beginning with “X” like the difficult names of Aztec gods.

When he had made his entry he was momentarily distracted by the low sounds coming out of the speaker mounted above his desk. The music was still playing, but he thought he detected a shift, a sudden soprano sharpness in the mix. He looked nervously at the dials but saw that all the needles still treaded easily in the safe middle depths of their dial faces. He turned up the volume on the speaker and listened. He had a sensitive ear, for the sound of radio some sort of unmusical perfect pitch, and he was certain that the tone quality had changed. Yet the dials, consulted again, registered nothing wrong; as blandly steady as some Greenwich constant, they signified an almost textbook energy. He turned off his radio and tilted his head judiciously toward the sounds that came from the speaker. He looked at the telephone that connected him on a direct line to his station, certain it would ring. Checking the dials a third time — the sound had thickened now, exactly, it occurred to him, like the signal of a station just before it fades — he decided that the trouble must be in the transcription itself.

He picked up the phone. The studio engineer was already on it. “What’s going on?” the man asked.

“It’s got to be in the transcription. The dials show I’m putting out everything I’m receiving. Get Markham to make an announcement.”

“Markham’s out,” the engineer told him. “The transcription was supposed to run for a half hour. I’m the only one here.”

“Well, put on something else. It sounds awful.”

“I know. Look, use the standby mike. I’ll cut you in from the shack. Open your mike in thirty seconds. I’ll have to duck out to the music library and get something. Can you talk for a few minutes?”

“I’ll say something.”

He replaced the receiver and rushed to the microphone. It was an ancient thing from the earliest days of broadcasting, an enormous iron web used now only for emergencies, calming alarm at alarm’s source with messages of contingency deflected and the handled untoward. It shattered the sudden or extended silences with the hearty good cheer and sweet reason of all backstage coping, by that fact creating a sense of the real silence held off, engaged elsewhere: nothing to worry about while the auxiliary microphone still burned and the staff still lived. The bulletins of reassurance — PLEASE STAND BY; ONE MOMENT PLEASE! — showing that emergency could still be courteous, disaster graceful-spirited. He had first heard them as a child, thrilling to their lesson that help was available. When the film tore or the lines went down there were always calm men to give these signals. In a way, it was what had attracted him to radio: the steady steady-as-she-goes pep talk of trouble shooters who routinized the extraordinary.

He counted to ten and opened his microphone. He heard the needle arm tear across the surface of the transcription, leaving the mounted speaker not dead but crepitant, the mike still open at the station broadcasting the void itself now, amplifying the bristling snap and hiss of the universe. “Please stand by,” he announced. But he had forgotten to turn down the speaker and heard his voice bounce back at him, enormous and delayed by a fraction of a fraction of a second. He became confused. “One moment please,” he begged, and again the two voices — the one in his mouth that all his life he would stand behind, his sound but always sent away, forever sacrificed, and the one booming from the speaker — seemed to collide fiercely in midair. It was a phenomenon he had experienced at the studio whenever someone had carelessly left open the door to the engineer’s booth, and he knew it could combust in a sudden piercing feedback. But something about the shack’s isolation, the idea of his ricocheting voice, its far-flung ventriloquous roundtrip, was exciting to him. Although he still expected momentarily to ignite a shriek as the two voices sparked each other, he began to speak.

“Please stand by,” he said again. “One moment please. Please stand by one moment. Stand please. Please, one moment. Please stand one moment.” Meanwhile he reached for the control knob on the mounted speaker, found it, and turned the volume all the way down.

Air time was expensive, a queer, infinite vacuum that might be filled with a whisper but always had to be fed with sound. Unthinkingly and forgetting the engineer who waited at the studio, he began to discharge his voice into the vacuum. “A little technical difficulty, pardners. This is your announcer, Tex Ellery, assuring you that it’s only some trouble with the ol’ transcription. We’ll set it all to rights in a minute, folks, and that’s a promise. You can bet your boots it is. Meanwhile this is your master of ceremonies, Ted Elson”—it was a slip of the tongue but he liked the sound and repeated it— “Ted Elson out at the transmitter shack just outside beautiful Butte, Montana, promising all his radio friends that something very special’s coming up, something they wouldn’t want to miss. So stand by and don’t touch that dial or you’ll be making a mistake. Ma’am, Mom, call the ranch hands in, they’ll want to hear this too. Sure as shootin’ they will. One moment puhleeze!”

He expected to hear the music when the engineer put it on at the station, but he had forgotten that he had turned down the speaker. He figured the man could not find anything suitable and continued to speak, perhaps above the music the engineer may already have put on the turntable. He was no longer nervous and began to enjoy himself, excited by his efficiency and the sense he had of successfully handling an emergency.

“Ted Elmer here, folks. We’re just about ready. Meanwhile I thought you’d like to hear this joke.” He told them the joke; remembering another story, he told that, and then a third joke and a fourth. He was easy now, elated by the deep-breath risks he took, delighted by the sound of his voice, those swaggered drafts of lung-strut, chug-alugging the vacuum itself. Disregarding voice level, he laughed loudly at the punch lines, getting a generous sense of helping his cause and clearing his sinuses, blowing those seats of the crabbed and ordinary skyhigh. As he spoke he fidgeted with the looseleaf notebook he still held, absent-mindedly tearing pages from it and dropping them to the floor as he would the pages of a script.

He spoke until it was time for the next program to go on; then, reluctantly, but with the certainty that they would hear him again this way — he envisaged a magnificent future — he turned his listeners back to the studio.

“This is your host, the inimitable Dick Gibson, signing off for now.” (The name had come to him from the air.) “Take it away, Markham!”

SOME DEMO’S; FAMOUS FIRSTS:

“Dick Gibson, WLAF, Somerset, Pennsylvania—

“I can tell you this much: I was among the first to hear of Pearl Harbor, to hear of D-Day, to hear FDR died. I knew that Hitler had marched into Russia before the President knew. And Hiroshima — I was one of the first Americans to get the word on that. ‘Keep calm,’ I said on that fabulous night when Orson Welles scared hell out of the country with his invasion from Mars. ‘Stand by please for a bulletin.’ You might have heard me say something like that if you lived in Toledo when Eisenhower suffered the first of his heart attacks. Or Winston-Salem the afternoon we made our move in Korea. Of course you’d have to have had certain principles, been out of lock-step with a number of your kind, had this penchant for the rural and off-brand, distrusted, perhaps, the smooth network voices of the East. Maybe you’re kind to amateurs. Maybe you’re an amateur yourself.

“Not that I am. A pro true blue and through and through. As you can tell from all the history I’ve been in on. It was no fluke that I heard before you did of the birth of that new volcano in Yucatan. Four hundred farmers died. I saw that come in over the wire. I chose to sit on it, chose — I remember I was spinning Doris Day’s ‘It’s Magic’—to let the music finish. And then I still didn’t say. Chose not only not to say but not even to read it on the late news. I pulled it off the machine and folded it into my pocket and that was that. And if you lived in Pekin, Illinois, in the middle of the summer of 1954 and didn’t take a Chicago or St. Louis paper or keep up with the magazines, you still don’t know, or know only now. Power. The power of the pro.

“No fluke. All the invasions, surrenders and disasters. No fluke I’m in on the revolutions, those put down as well as those pulled off. That I know bad news first and bear it first, absorbing in split seconds my priority knowledge, adjusting to it, living with it minutes before my countrymen. Oh, the newsrooms, those ticking anterooms of history, where I, the messenger, hang out. Or called by a bell or flashing light to the ticker tape. Oh, those New York and Washington sequences, those graduated two-blink, three-blink, four-blink hitherings! Those ding and ding-dong and ding-dong-ding and bong-bong-bong-bong beckonings! Who determines those? Now there’s a messenger. There’s power — the kind I had in Pekin when I fished those four hundred Mexican farmers out of my machine, whisked them away and lit a match to them in my room at the Pekin House, singeing them a second time, unsung singed Mexicans. The Yucatan volcano was a fourflasher. Did you know that the atomic bomb — this is interesting — was only a three-flasher? Or that in the whole history of radio there have been just three five-flashers, and no six-flashers yet at all? They say that the end of the world will be only a six-flasher. Shock’s rare half-dozens. There’s something in that. Please remain calm. Please stand by. Please be easy.

“But maybe you take your assassinations elsewhere. Television, perhaps. Or network radio. Maybe you didn’t catch my six-flasher grief when I let go for once—‘They shot him. In Dallas. Oh, Christ. Some son of a bitch in Dallas shot him.’ I’ll tell you something. Mad and stunned as I was, I knew what I was doing. I threw in ‘son of a bitch.’ I made that part up. Maybe I was anticipating my mention in Time, but I threw in ‘son of a bitch’ for the verisimilitude of the passion. You may have been tuned elsewhere, or speeding out of range with the car radio down the highway. But it’s something, I tell you, bearing bad news. It’s something, all right.

“And I’ll tell you another thing. There are times, watching the mountain outside this studio, staring at it for hours while I spin my records, when I seem to see it go up in flames — the whole mountain, the trees go up and the town come down and the fire fighters on fire, a new Pompeii in Pennsylvania, and me, the stringer getting the word out. The sugary coda sweet in my mouth. ‘Dick Gibson — WLAF, Somerset, Pennsylvania.’ That’s the word. There’s my message.

“People ask how I can sound so sincere on the commercials, as if this were some burning question—sure, the questions burn, but not the mountains! — as they’d pry trade secrets from the wrestlers or demand of lawyers how they can defend guilty men. My advice to these folks is relax. Use your grain of salt, everybody. That’s what it’s for. Please remain calm. Stand by please.

“For a long time these demo’s of mine have been the talk of the industry. Well, I’m gutsy, brash, waiting for someone to come along who likes the cut of my jib. My demo’s are jib-designed. Collector’s items they’ll be one day. Because: though hypocrisy can take you far, it can only take you so far. When will you station managers realize that? Is there any one of you out there who likes the cut of truth’s jib?

“If you want tricks, I can give them to you. Every last trick I know. I have a friend who does a five-minute slot twelve times on weekends for one of the networks. You’ve heard him. (We say ‘heard,’ not ‘heard of,’ in this business.) Who doesn’t know that voice today? Only the deaf. (We despise deafness. We’d rather hear a friend has gone blind.) He has this sports news and comment show. (Sports! He throws like a girl but he has an athletic voice.) Well, we used to work together on WPMT, Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. It’s a resort town, and often there’d be celebrities around from the big hotels, and my friend or I would interview them. One time when I was in the booth before the show I heard the engineer ask for a level. ‘Listen, Mr. Thus-and-Such,’ my friend was saying, ‘my first name’s written down here on this piece of paper. Would you mind very much if you called me by it when we talk?’ Then, on the air, he would hit the star with the guy’s first name, and the star would hit my friend with his first name. They could have been the best pals in the world. And you’d be surprised how it worked on the listener’s imagination, what it did for the listener’s idea of my friend to hear him so intimate with big shots. I tell you that I myself — who knew how it was done — forgot sometimes and found myself wondering about my pal’s rich past; I was proud to know such a guy. (But notice how I keep him anonymous here. Not here do I call out that phony’s name. ‘Mr. X’ I call him here, or ‘my friend.’ How do you like that ‘Mr. X’, my friend?)

“So I know the shortcuts and the cheats. I’m not old but I’ve been in the business years. Listen, I’ve jazzed up my fan mail to impress a station manager. There have been times I’ve written myself up to a hundred letters a week. Jesus, I’ll never forget this — in one batch I once made the mistake of asking for pictures, and the station manager had me make them up and pay for them myself. And one time, at KRJK, Benton, Texas — I was Bobby Spark back then — I organized my own fan club, using the name Debbie Simon as a front. I described the club’s activities and made them sound so attractive over the air that before long almost two hundred teen-agers were interested in joining. They wanted to know how they could get in touch with Debbie Simon, and I was really in trouble there for a while. I told them that Debbie had been spending so much time on the fan club that she had been ignoring her schoolwork and her parents had made her drop out of the club until her grades improved. Out of fairness to Debbie all activities of the fan club were suspended, I said, until she could get back into them too. So about a month later some kids wrote in to ask how Debbie was making out in school. For some reason it had become a big thing in Benton, and one day I had to announce that Debbie Simon was sick. Then, the next day, and treating the news just as I would some three- or four-flasher, I waited until I was playing the nation’s number one song — which I was sending out to her in her sickbed— and broke in on it to tell them that Debbie’s mother had called to tell me her daughter had passed away — with my name on her lips. In large part Debbie’s mother blamed herself, I said, for putting too much pressure on her daughter, and making her drop out of the club. Then some sixteen-year-old kid named Stuart Standard called to ask if he could take over the club and continue Debbie’s work now that she was gone. I told him he could, and the kids themselves renamed it ‘The Debbie Simon Memorial Bobby Spark Fan Club.’ Don’t tell me there’s anything wrong with today’s teen-agers.

“For the most part, though, I’m above tricks. Instead, I pour myself into these demo’s. (But demonstration records are expensive. I pay for the sessions myself, and press up to a hundred at a time. Something had better happen soon, no kidding. Networks and affiliates please note.) What programs these would make! Honeys! I could change America. But what do you need me for to do that, hey you big shots? You do it yourself every thirteen weeks. There are always stars. We breathe in the sky, for God’s sake. (Give me a crack at the yahoos one time. I’ll make their tabletalk for them, I’ll be their household word, my taste as high or low as anyone’s in the industry.) But don’t contact me unless you’ve really got something to offer. You’ve got to put me on a clear channel station and give me a show of my own. The last demo got me this job at WLAF, and here I am doing another demo. Oh yes, big deal — NBC invited me to take their Page exam. Forget it. (See? See how vulgar?) Look, forget the part about doing my own show. I’m willing to start further down if the station’s important enough. I’ll do continuity for you, commercials. I won’t even insist on a talent fee. Consider my voice. Listen: ‘This is WPTA, Hometown, America. Now back to the Baton Twirling Contest.’ How do you like that? The voice is young, strong as an ox, flawless, no hoarseness, no crack, educated but not what you could call cultured — four years at the state university, say, or three years in the army as an ROTC lieutenant. I’ve been blessed, you guys, with my God-given gift of a voice, my voice that’s been thirty-one years old for the past decade and won’t be thirty-two for another ten years. And where did I grow to manhood? I defy you to say. Regionless my placeless vowels, my sourceless consonants. Twangless and drawl-less and nasal-less. And my name: Dick Gibson. (Though thus far I’ve used it only a few times on the air; I’m still saving it.) Dick Gibson of Nowhere, of Thin Air and the United States of America sky.

“I’ll tell you how I came by my interest in radio. It’s an interesting story. I’m not just another of your star-struck kids turned artist and sissy from childhood’s isolation. You could say, I suppose, that it’s actually in my blood. My father was in the point-to-point dot-dash news and private-message market back in the late teens and early twenties during the fabulous wireless/cable wars. He was a personal friend of Dr. Frank Conrad in East Pittsburgh, where KDKA started. My earliest memory is of being with Dad and a bunch of other men crowded around a receiving set to hear the Harding-Cox election returns. November 2, 1920. I was an infant, but I remember everything about it.

“‘Listen to this, son,’ my father said, ‘and remember all your life that you heard the birth of modern radio.’ And I have. I was so impressed that I have.

“‘Gentlemen,’ Dr. Conrad said, ‘this day wireless has come of age.’ There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He must have suffered plenty to make his dream come true.

“‘It’s grand, Dr. Conrad,’ my father said. ‘Let me say that I feel privileged to participate in this historic moment. Congratulations, Doctor.’

“‘Thank you,’ the great visionary said, ‘but any thanks there are must be shared with others, with those workers in the vineyards who are no longer with us, men without whose contributions this great moment would have been achieved — oh yes, it would have come anyway; sometime it would have come; there is no withstanding the siege of destiny; it would have been achieved, but delayed, the world made to wait. I mean men like Edinburgh University’s James Clark Maxwell, who was the first to encounter ether waves as long ago as 1867; forgotten men like Hertz and the naïve Righi who gave us the phrase “magic blue sparks”; men like Onesti and Lodge and the Russian Popoff. To say nothing of the giants — the Marconis and De Forests and Lieutenant Sarnoff.’

“‘And Dr. Conrad,’ my father said.

“‘Thank …’ Dr. Conrad began sweetly. But perhaps something caught in his throat at this moment, or it may be that he was too tired after his heroic efforts to bring this night to pass; or even, simply, that by one of fate’s tragic twists and ironies Dr. Conrad had voted for Cox — whatever it was he couldn’t finish, and the rest of us, the men with him and my father with me in his arms, feeling the old man should be by himself just then, tiptoed softly from the room. I remember as if it were yesterday.

“There you have it. I am marked, historically attached to radio. Thank you for your time. Dick Gibson, WLAF, Somerset, Pennsylvania.”

In the first years following his departure from the station in Butte, Montana, he did not again have occasion to use the name. For three months, with WMAR in Marshall, Maine, he was Ellery Loyola. Then, for an even briefer season with KCGN, Butler, Kansas, he was Marshall Maine. He replaced an announcer who had been hired by KCMO, Kansas City, to MC a program of dance music originating in the Buhler Hotel there, but the hotel burned down — the program was on the air at the time and the announcer had been instrumental in guiding the dancers to safety — and the man was given his old job back, and Dick became Bud Kanz of KWYL, 1450 on your dial, Hodge, Iowa. By the fall of that same year he had become I. O. Quill, WWD, La Crosse, Wisconsin. He worked for the La Crosse station for a little over a year; then in the next two years he had jobs with five more radio stations.

That he moved about so often in those early years was no proof of his restlessness; rather, it was his way of learning the business. He was your true apprentice — eager, willing, a boy who would chip in for any chore — but all the while he kept a careful accounting and worked with a special sense of his own destiny that converted the difficult into the necessary and created in himself metaphorical notions of money in the bank and bread cast upon the waters — a priggish, squirrelly sense of provision. Even his rooms in those days, those below-stairs cubicles in the homes of widows for whom he shoveled snow and stoked furnaces whose heat never seemed to reach his room, and which were all he could afford on the fifteen- and twenty-dollar-a-week salaries he made, or his rooms in the towns’ single hotels, near the railroad stations, bargained for, a rate granted not simply in deference to his extended stay but in recognition of some built-in inferiority, the bed always in a vulnerable position, the room itself in a vulnerable position, over a boiler perhaps, or machinery, or behind the thin wall of the common washroom, or too far from it, or his window just behind the vertical of the hotel’s blazing electric sign — there was a room in Kansas where owing to some obscure fire law the bulb in the high ceiling could never be turned off — even these rooms left him (despite the indifferent luke warmth that came from ancient, prototypical radiators) with an impression not of poverty or straitened circumstance, so much as of guaranteeing his life later, discomfit comforting, assuring him of his mythic turn, patience not just a virtue but a concomitant of future fame, hard times every success’s a priori grist.

The American Dream, he thought, the historic path of all younger sons, unheired and unprovided. The old-time test of princes. “One two three testing,” he had said into countless microphones on hundreds of cold winter mornings, sleep still in his eyes, he and the engineer the only ones at the station, and he there first, his key to the place not a privilege but a burden. “One two three testing.” And even as he spoke the announcer’s ritual words, he suspected the deeper ritual that lay beneath them, confident that a test was indeed being conducted, his entire young manhood one. There were so many jobs—then; later he had different reasons — because he insisted on these tests. He built a reputation as a utility man, an all-rounder, and he was never really sure that this didn’t harm rather than help him because he was, for many of the 500- and 1000-watt stations for which he worked, a luxury, primed for emergency and special events which rarely, in those uneventful places he served his apprenticeship, occurred. But so set was he on sacrifice, so convinced in his bones of some necessary pay-as-you-go principle, that even an absolute knowledge that his special talents worked against his career would not have altered him. He continued to work in whatever he could of the unusual and by consistently putting himself in the way of opportunity, managed to do everything, discovering in the infinite resources of his voice, in the disparate uses to which it could be put, the various alter egos of human sound.

He was forced by radio to seem always to speak from the frontiers of commitment, always to say his piece as if his piece were all. Emphasis disappeared, for everything, the merest community-service announcement of a church supper and the most thunderous news bulletin, received ultimately the same treatment. With the necessity it imposed to be always talking, singing, selling, to be always speaking at the top of its voice, radio itself became a vessel for collateral truths. He had come to think of the sounds radio made as occurring on a line, picturing speech as a series of evenly sequenced, perfectly matched knots on a string, chatter raised by the complicated equipment to the level of prophecy. Pressured by the collateral quality of the noises he made, it would have been easy to have turned against the noises themselves. Others did. Most announcers he knew were men with an astonishing facility for disengaging themselves from their copy. Many actually made it a point to have their faces laugh while their voices continued to speak seriously. They horsed around — and those who had been in the business longest horsed around the most. He had noted — in New York City he took the same Radio City tour that everyone else did — that even the network people loved to clown, to shock their studio audiences with their studied superiority to the material, creating an anecdote for them to take back to Duluth, giving them all they could of the insider’s contemptuously lowered guard.

He eschewed their wiseguy character and scorned to duplicate their vicious winks for a deft professional reason of his own. He felt these acrobatics, these defections of the face, took away — however minutely — from the effectiveness of one’s delivery, that even such muscular stunts as a mere wink pulled, too, at the vocal chords, puppeteered them. He could hear this. Monitoring his radio in the signal-fortified nights, omnisciently tuning in America, transporting himself with just his fingers five hundred miles north or a thousand east, these lapses were as clear to him as lisps, and he could see in his mind the smug double-dealing of a hundred announcers through their voices in the dark, as if he sat in the control booths watching them. The faculty for belief in the things he was required to say was no greater in him than in the biggest star or the oldest studio hack on the most important network station in America, but he used sincerity to body-build his voice. It would no sooner occur to him to insist on his personality when he was on the air (with the others, he knew, it was a last ditch shriek of their integrity, an effort to write off their disgust) than it would occur to an actor on a stage to answer for himself instead of for the character he played. So, striving for conviction, he became something of a boomer, a hearty herald. (Briefly he was Harold Hearty, WLU, Waverly, Georgia.)

For a time — and he never completely rid himself of this habit — he carried over into his outside life the tones he used on radio, sometimes actually frightening people with his larger-than-life salutations: “Good morning there, Mrs. Cubbins! Lou George, WBSF, Kingdom City, Mo., here to see about the room you advertised!” Or embarrassing them with the breathy intimacy of his ten-to-midnight “Music for Lovers”: “Haie there, Miss. Bud Kanz. I’ve got a three o’clock appointment. The doc said he’d — sqaeeeeeze me in.”

Bluffness and sensuousness were not all his range, nor even a significant part of it. If he had to single out a tone which best characterized him in those early years it would have been rather a flat one. And why not? He was chiefly a man speaking to farmers, reading them the weather, telling them the hog and sheep and cattle prices, a harbinger of grain and vegetable conditions— “soybeans” and “rye” and “oats” words in every other sentence out of his mouth. He had learned almost from the outset to avoid folksiness, vaudevillizing their ways. The single time he had tried to appropriate what he took to be their vocabulary, he himself had had to answer the telephone to listen to their offended complaints: “You tell that damn Jew you got down there he’d best not make sport of us. That town bastard don’t know piss from cowplop.” From then on he spoke to them in flat accents as unnatural to him as dialect, his neutral reading of the daily markets as much a performance as any he had ever attempted.

But it was precisely on stations such as these that he got his best experience and was permitted to exercise his widest range. As soon as it became light — it was as if he could hear the farmers leaving their houses — he was left with their wives. These took, if their husbands didn’t, a certain amount of kidding. Not that he tried any more than with the men to pass himself off as a country boy. Instead he went the other way entirely. He felt himself some traveling salesman among them, come to life from a joke. Emphasizing his alienness, his dazed slicker-in-the-sticks incarnation, as if he had just been set down there from Paris or New York, he made all he could of their funny ways. He flattered them with their homespun notion of themselves, never letting them forget their ailing-neighbor-fetched soups and astonishing pies of vegetable and wild fruit, finding his theme in the idea of appetite, exaggerating their capacities, bunyanizing the hunger of their men and selves: “Ladies, I’ve got a recipe here for a Kansas farm omelet. First, take eight dozen eggs. All right, we’ll need some butter in this. Four pounds should do it.” Or zeroing in on the quilts he pretended they were always making: “An Easterner came by yesterday, saw one and went blind. What I want to know is how you get any sleep under one of those things. One lady I heard of hung hers to dry out in the henhouse. Those hens laid eggs all night. The rooster came in about midnight, saw it and started to crow. He thought the darn sun had come up.”

But he tickled them hardest with his allusions to the wily sex in them, inventing this appetite as he had built on the other, taking his biggest risks here, openly blue, barnyardy, pretending a kind of slicker exhaustion at the thought of their lusty bouts, frankly animalizing them, claiming awe and a ferocious physical respect in the face of their enormous sexual reserves, careful only to specify the essential domesticity of their ardor, its vaguely biblical franchise. (But even this sop shrewdly dispensed with when it came to their daughters, those — as he had it — one-hundred-sixty-two-pound, big-boned killers of traveling men, singing their raucous muliebrity and celebrating their quicksand bodies in which whole male populations had gone down, entire sales forces.) The opportunities were limitless — their alleged flour- sack underthings another source of his feigned astonishment, imagining for them beneath the hypothetical homespun and supposed calico, hypothetical bodies, heavy toonervaudevillian tons of robust flesh, imperial gallons of breast, the thick, fictive restraining chest bands helpless against such soft erosion. And this was as aboveboard as their concupiscence, for it was all in reference to an exercise-and-reducing show he had talked the station manager into letting him do.

“What? A skinny kid like you? Don’t make me laugh.”

“What difference does it make how I look? I’ve got a voice like Tarzan. Let me try.”

And the man did — on the condition that he stay off the streets and that his audience never be permitted to see him.

He became “Doctor Torso.” The voice he created for his new role was extraordinary. Deliberately aged, carefully made to seem just senior to the oldest lady doing the exercises, he sounded like some professional, not a gym teacher but a coach, with all the coach’s indifference to the bodily distinctions between male and female — the body, ulteriorly, one big muscle he crooned over in his faintly theatrical telephone operator’s diction. Himself sitting perfectly still at the table with the microphone, and, for the sake of the slight strain it gave to his voice, leaning on his elbows, his forehead forward and clamped into the heels of his hands. “With a one and a two and three and a fower. A fiuv and a six and a seven and an eight.” Then, blowing out his breath to clear the poisons, “All right, ladies. This next exercise is for your sitters. Get right down on the floor, now. Palms spread and about four inches to the side of those thighs we just firmed up so nicely for your hubbies. All right, now those precious legs straight and shut tight. Just like the vaults in the Bank of England.” Interrupting himself. “Mrs. Frangnadler”—his imaginary scapegoat, his one-hundred- sixty-two-pound common denominator— “I said tight. No cheating on me. Tight together. You don’t still have that rash. Tight now, tight. Squeeze. Pretend they’re the two halves of your purse, and you’re in town on a Saturday night, and you’ve got your egg money in there. Come on, Mrs. Frangnadler, I said tight.” Slyly. “Why, if I was a thief I could reach right down in that purse of yours and steal something really valuable. Then what would your husband say? There, that’s better. Why, I could hardly get the edge of my knife down there now. Could I, ladies?” Then, pretending that he had turned back to the rest of them, “All right, then, when I start counting I want you to bring up the left thigh high as you can. I want to be able to slip my hand under there. Then down on the even number and bring up the right on the odd. We’ll do this ten or twelve times together and then you practice it by yourselves at home. You’ll soon feel the difference it makes. And if I know those husbands of yours, they’ll feel the difference too. Incidentally, you mothers, start getting your young daughter to do this exercise with you. I pity the traveling man that tries to pinch her! All right, that’s enough rest period. Ready, begin!”

But the rest periods, of course, were the point of the program; it was what they listened for. All of them relaxing together and him giving them all any of them would ever know of the locker room. They must have thought longingly of the easy sensuality of the city.

Just before he left that station and went on to the next, he announced the official tally — he had had them send in cards — of the weight they had collectively lost. It came to exactly one hundred sixty-two pounds. He always felt as if he had taken one of their women from them.

In lieu of a raise. For though he was a member of AFRA, the small stations he worked for in those days were not required to pay union scale. There were too many graduates of radio schools waiting for jobs. And though the big-city stations wouldn’t touch them — back-of-the- matchbook dreamers, bad-complected, imperfectly pitched tenors and forced basses you had to hear just once to know all you ever needed to, not just of the condition of their lungs but of their glamour-caught souls too, their striven-for resonances accusing as fingerprints — small stations depended upon them. With his experience he might already have moved up to any number of stations cuts above the ones he worked. The NBC affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, was looking for someone exactly like himself, and would have paid him twenty-five dollars a week to start and jumped him to thirty dollars at the end of three months. Had he taken such a job, however, he would never have been allowed the liberties he took on the small stations. He was grateful for the temptation, but threw it into the pot with all the rest of the sacrifices he had made — more bread cast upon the waters, further frog years.

So he continued, for a while anyway, as an itinerant, a circuit rider, his colleagues still those same graduates of the radio schools, actual fairies many of them, but fairies of a lower order: penniless, pained fellows who strove for taste and a sense of the finer as they strove to stretch their range and improve their diction.

SOME DEMO’S; FURTHER FAMOUS FIRSTS:

“Dick Gibson, KWGG, Conrad, California. This next number is ‘Dick’s Demo,’ Demonstration Record number twenty-seven, and goes out to all the guys ’n’ gals in the industry who hire and fire. This is a take. Take! I am calling you — ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh.

“I tell you about the time I worked the newsroom at KROP, Roper, Nebraska? The apprenticeship was on me and I wasn’t Dick Gibson yet. I was Marshall Maine, KROP, The Voice of Wheat. Some place that was. The ad I answered in Broadcasting said it reached listeners in three states. And so it did. We saturated two counties in northeast Nebraska, and leaped across the Missouri River to the Dell Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Whoever happened to be tuned in along a small rough stretch of Route 33 in western Iowa could also catch us.

“But let me tell you about those two counties. Sylvia Credenza County and Louis Credenza, Senior County. The whole area consisted of eight enormous farms owned by these eight brothers. The Credenza brothers: Louis III, Jim, Felix, Poke, Charley, George, Bill and Lee. That part of the state had been gerrymandered long before, and every two years each county sent a brother to the statehouse in Lincoln. They took turns. I was there during the reign of Charley and Bill.

“The station was a family hobby, sort of a Credenza hookup. Like a party line. They built it in 1935 when reception was still bad in the area and they had nothing else to listen to. Later, when Sioux City, about sixty miles off, put up KSUX, a 5000-watter, reception improved, but the boys had gotten so used to having their own station that they decided to continue it. The funny thing is, none of the brothers enjoyed speaking on the radio themselves. They became self-conscious and would cough and sputter and stammer helplessly whenever, during those biennial political campaigns they put on for each other — brother ran against brother, though only two brothers were nominated from each county and, for all I know, only Credenzas were registered to vote — one of them had to make a speech. So, though they listened constantly to their own station — they had radios mounted on all their tractors and each barn — they never performed on it except during one of those queer campaigns. (I was around during one of them. Lee was running against Jim in Sylvia Credenza County, and Felix was up against George in Louis Credenza, Senior County. It was something, hearing those speeches, each Credenza urging his three constituent Credenza brothers — one the incumbent— to get out and vote. It didn’t make any difference, they said, who they voted for. The important thing was that they exercise their ballot.)

“A staff ran the station for them from the beginning. When I was there there were two engineers, two transmitter men and two announcers. We all spelled each other and took turns sleeping in the same bunk beds out at the transmitter shack.

“Surprisingly, we did almost as many commercials as a normal station. With their two votes in the Nebraska legislature, the Credenzas carried a lot of weight with important firms around the state and could always pressure a little business out of them. They even prided themselves on the good job they did for their clients, though almost no one but Credenzas could ever have been listening. One time, when I was really into something and neglected to do a commercial exactly when it was scheduled, I received an angry call from Louis III.

“‘Hey you — Marshall Maine. What do you think you’re doing down there? The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Lincoln paid money to have that commercial done at 3:15. That don’t mean 3:14 or 3:16 or 3:18 or 3:20. Three-fifteen means 3:15. They picked that time because that’s when folks get thirsty and want something cool to swallow. They want their message said right then. You understand me? You think the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Lincoln wants its message jammed up against the Mutual of Omaha message at 3:23?’

“When people are thinking of their deaths, I thought, when they’re thinking of loss of limb, their houses on fire, liability, personal injury. ‘No sir,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I was into something.’

“‘Well, you look to your knitting, sonny, or you’ll be fast out on your ass of something else.’

“‘Yes, sir,’ I said, for the truth is, I liked working there. The apprenticeship was on me, as I say, and I was getting valuable experience.

“‘Call me Lou. You last long enough around here I might be your representative. I expect it’ll be me over old Poke in a landslide. In America it don’t do to say sir to the man that’s your representative.’

“We followed FCC regulations to the letter, and functioned exactly as any station would, with all the ordinary station’s customary programming, though with the sense I had of the station and its listeners, the programs seemed experimental to me, as any public activity would seem strange performed in private. I had this notion of command performance and, because of this, a fear of my audience which was unfamiliar to me.

“Yet even granting our ordinary format of music, news, and public service, there was something special about our programs. The Credenzas wanted their tastes catered to. ‘A station has to meet the needs of its audience,’ Felix Credenza often reminded me. So for Jim, the musical Credenza, we did ‘The John Philip Sousa Hour’ from eleven to midnight. For Felix and his wife, childless Credenzas who liked to pretend there were kids around the house, we did a children’s program with fairy tales and Frank Luther recordings. The most popular program, however, the one that pleased all the Credenzas, was a public service show called ‘Know Your County!’ It was about — I quote from the introduction—‘the living legend of Sylvia Credenza and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties.’ What it really was, was the history of the Credenza family done in fifteen-minute dramas, the Credenzas themselves putting together the scripts from their memory of family gossip. The program had been on since the station’s founding, and everything that had ever happened to the Credenzas had already been aired several times. When they came to the end of the cycle — each one, like the verses in ‘This is the house that Jack built,’ slightly longer than the last because of the additional increment of history — they simply started all over again. It was the way congregations read the Bible.

“Most of the programs I was involved with dealt with the family’s founders — Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior — and related how they were sweethearts in the old country but couldn’t marry because Louis was scheduled to be called up for military service. There were shows about the plots and payoffs that got him smuggled to America, Louis Senior’s wanderings in the New World, the letters they exchanged once he was settled in Nebraska, Louis’s dreams, Sylvia’s misgivings about making the trip, the bad time she had in steerage, her missing her train in Chicago. This last was a milestone in the legend, a sort of Ems telegram approach to history, just that destiny-ridden. For Louis, it seems, had missed his train in Omaha. He had intended to surprise Sylvia by meeting her in Union Station and riding back to Nebraska with her, and if the two lovers hadn’t both missed their trains they would have missed each other, presumably forever. The mutual layover somehow permitted their reunion for all time.

“And what a program that was — the reunion. KROP montages. Excerpts from Louis’s letters about his dreams. Solemn, forlorn blasts of exodus ship’s whistles become Chicago’s cheery choo-choo chugs. Then Louis’s ‘Hello, Sylvia.’ And Sylvia’s ‘It’s you, Lou.’ It was all down there. I tell you, I embraced myth then — all myth, everybody’s, anybody’s. To this day I’m a sucker for all primal episode: Bruce Wayne losing his parents and vowing vengeance; Tonto teaming up with the Lone Ranger; Clark Kent chipped out of Kryptonite — whatever.

“Who played Sylvia? Who played Sylvia if there were only the two male announcers? Some Mrs. Credenza, you think? Not at all. Ego like the Credenzas’ wouldn’t have permitted it. They insisted on themselves being out of it, insisted on the high privilege of others doing it for them, their words in other people’s mouths, themselves cozy by their receivers, hearing their own legend. An Indian lady. A squaw did. A chief’s old wife. Squaws were brought in for all the female Credenza parts. Credenza legend was the single Dell Reservation industry. The counties had been theirs; the Credenzas had been their enemies, were still their enemies. They loved their grudge, I guess, and thrived — anyone in the studio could see it — on the Credenzas’ side of the story, bland with omission, the blandness and good will the givens of the Indians’ patient rage. At air time, the old squaw’s voice was waverless with Sylvia’s youth; it could have been under a spell. It was under one. How else could she, who had never heard it, get the precise mix of old country accent and young English? And how did I, who had never heard it either, know it was precise? Better, how did she manage the hyperbole? I mean the exact input of glory and meaning with which she iced those pale speeches and which the Credenzas licked up at face value? Why, she was an Indian. She had come up on the settlers’ wagons, infiltrated Fort Credenza, outwoodsed them, I tell you, crept up on their Credenza souls and last-laughed them to death in some red way the Credenzas never understood or even suspected.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself. My major effort at KROP, what I thought at the time was the most valuable thing I did there experiencewise, grist-for-the-millwise (do you see what I was like back then? how ingenuous my concerns? I had an apprentice’s heart; I wanted to learn everything, do everything, conscientiously preparing myself with some self-made, from-the-ground-up vision of the world, assuming the quid pro quo and just dessert as if they were laws in nature) was the news programming. I had done news before only as a rip-and- reader, pulling the sheets off the teletype seconds before they were scheduled to be read, doing them cold. (And deriving thereby a certain false and snotty confidence, a sort of pride in what I took to be my professionalism. I didn’t see that this was the cynic’s way, the wiseguy’s way.)

“At KROP I became a real newsman for the first time. I still had to depend heavily upon the wire services, but just as the Credenzas were interested in Credenza history, so were they interested in Credenza current events. When I saw a brother and asked ‘What’s new?’ it was as a reporter I asked, and I was required to make a good deal of his answer. ‘Flash: Louis Credenza III announced today that the new car he purchased three weeks ago has gone back to the dealer for its one-thousand-mile checkup. “The defective cigarette lighter that came with the car will be replaced for nothing,” Mr. Credenza said. This is in accordance with his 20,000-mile guarantee covering parts and labor. … Elsewhere in the news, George Credenza, wife of the candidate for state representative from Louis Credenza, Senior County, spoke long distance last night to her sister in Worcester, Massachusetts, Mrs. Lloyd Brossbar, the former Dorothy Kiddons of Rapid City, South Dakota. Mrs. Brossbar is said to have told Mrs. Credenza that the children are well and send their love to their aunt and uncle. KROP has also learned that they thanked them for the chemistry set … The 8 P.M. Worcester temperature was sixty-two degrees.’

“It was at KROP that I got to do my first remote, calling in my news over the telephone when I was sent to Lincoln to cover Charley Credenza’s maiden speech in the legislature. It was, I recall, a filibuster. No particular issue was at stake, no great principle; Charley just didn’t want to give up the floor. They finally had to vote cloture on him — the first time in Nebraska history. I was there. Marshall Maine was there.

“But do you know what the Credenzas liked best? Better even than self-reflexive history or on-the-spot coverage? Human interest. Folksy coda. I scoured the wire services and newspapers to feed their need for anecdote, their love of contretemps and feeling for that long line of the pratfallen — stick-up men who pulled their heists in front of police stations on plainclothesmen, double-parked judges who appeared before themselves on traffic raps, candidates for mayor out- polled by their wives. And when, as it sometimes happened, the news was all hard that day, I made up stories. ‘And that would be all the news if it weren’t for the fellow in the Pacific Northwest whose wife filed for divorce today; her first, his fifth. This time, however, Leonard Class of Seattle, Washington, may have some difficulty meeting his alimony payments, for Leonard lost his job as well as his wife. The city fathers are just a little upset with Leonard’s marital difficulties and have voted to remove him from his position as Director of Seattle’s Bureau of Matrimonial Counseling.’

“‘You have a nose for news,’ Poke Credenza himself told me after one of these stories. And so I had — a flair for all the trivial lessons of come-uppance, an intuition into the Credenza conscience itself. I fueled their condescension with an endless parade of housewives who won national bake-offs with ready-mixes and firechiefs whose homes burned down. The human comedy, the lofty laugh, a bit of patronage, and no harm done.”

Ultimately he went too far, betrayed by the dark side of his professionalism that came to light in northeast Nebraska.

These were heydays. There was Uncle Don and his “That ought to hold the little bastards.” Coast to coast, it seemed, in the primest time of that prime time, there were open keys, unthrown switches, bloopers, stoopnagelisms — but diffusing accident, there was form, order, a national sense of the institutional. There was Allen’s Alley, The National Barn Dance, Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, Lux Presents Hollywood, Town Meeting of the Air. And not even partisan, a wider community than mere fan—though these were the days of the signed glossy, of the fifty- cent “family album” of stars — something constituent almost, franchised. One knew that all America was tuned in. You can see the photographs in the encyclopedia. The family in its cozy parlor. (It is always wintertime in these photographs.) Father in his business clothes, Sis in wools, Mother with a bit of knitting in her lap, the floorlamp behind her right shoulder, the shade slanting the light forthrightly where her book would be if she were reading. The son is stretched out on the floor, belly to carpet, doing his homework. The gothic radio, like a wooden bell, on a table in the corner. They smile or are concerned or absorbed or wistful, as though they hear a song common to each — an anthem perhaps of some country where they had all once lived. The caption explains that this American family, like so many millions of others, is enjoying the jokes of a popular network comedian, or engrossed in the news that will be tomorrow’s headlines, or engaged by one of the many fine dramas that may be heard on the radio. And you know that it’s no fake, no mere posturing for the photographer, and indeed if you look close you can see that the dial in the radio glows.

There is another photograph above this one. A newscaster sits in his studio behind a big web microphone. In his dark, wide-lapelled suit he looks like a banker, the longitudes of his decency in the dimly perceived pinstripes. He holds his script. You glimpse a thin bracelet of shirtcuff. The “On the Air” sign is still inert, but there is a large-faced wall clock behind him, a thick second hand sweeping toward the landmark at the top of the clock where time begins. He looks toward the control booth at his director. He sits militantly, responsibly urgent — and this is no posture either but the careful, serious alertness of a man pacing himself, as attuned and concentrated as a child waiting to move in under the arc of a jump rope.

Alias Dick Gibson, alias Marshall Maine, alias Tex Ellery, alias a dozen others, knew, knew then, blessed by nostalgia as some are blessed with prescience, this steady hindsight that was contemporaneous to him and as involuntary as digestion, that all this was the truth, that those pictures had it right: Americans were in their living rooms, before their floorlamps, on their sofas, in their chairs, along their rugs, together in time, united, serené. And so he felt twinges, pins and needles of actual conscience; he needed to join his voice to that important chorus, that lovely a cappella.

He approached Lee, the reasonable Credenza, and spoke to him about it. He said KROP should be no different than other stations.

“I see what you mean. I’ll talk it over with the brothers and get back to you,” Lee told him.

And then, two weeks after he had first introduced the subject, he received a delegation of Credenzas in the transmitter shack. Surprised by their presence there and to a certain extent intimidated by seeing so many of them gathered at one time — only Charley and Bill, whose legislative duties kept them in Lincoln, did not come — he was at first alarmed, suspecting actual physical attack.

Louis III spoke. “You, Marshall Maine, Lee says you ain’t satisfied with the way we do things on our station.”

He was prepared to yield at once, to concede to the pressures of what seemed to him their vigilante loomings, when the off-duty transmitter man — one of those tattooed vagrants common in those days, an old navy man, retired possibly, but more probably court-martialed and perhaps even a deserter, one of those thick-veined, long-armed quiet men, someone keeping to himself, soured by a grudge or ruined by a secret — woke up and, seeing the brothers, having less contact with them than Maine — even more of a drifter than Marshall, there less time than him — not knowing who they were, or perhaps suspecting that they had come for him, threw a punch, drew a knife.

“Hold it!” the transmitter man yelled, missing Felix. “No tricks!” he screamed, and turned briefly to Marshall Maine, forming their plan even as he lunged toward the Credenzas. “The Saigon caper, mate,” he said, “I take these four, you get them two.” At these words — they had barely spoken in the three weeks the man had been at the station — Marshall felt an unaccountable flush of pride. Then Poke poked the transmitter man and the old fellow fell down — collapsed, for all Maine knew, died. Poke’s punch had loosened the man’s grip on his knife and it flew neatly, almost politely, handle first into Jim Credenza’s hand.

Marshall Maine found himself mourning, grieving for a pal. “The Credenza County caper, mate,” he said softly. Then, anger at the Credenzas’ building on his grief for his new friend, he addressed himself to George and Louis III, the two Credenzas he had been left to handle in the transmitter man’s plan. “He thought you—” he protested. “He was only … What did you have to hit him for?” The Credenzas looked at him blandly, the transmitter man’s four as well as his own two, incapable of understanding friendship’s way despite their expertise in family’s. Seeing their indifference he reversed himself again, having in the same two minutes found a buddy and lost him, mourned and forgotten him.

Forlorn, he gave in to the Credenzas, putting for good and all their value on things and feeling abashed, exposed, like one caught out in an act of bad taste. Thenceforward, for as long as he remained at the station, Marshall Maine was never again to feel comfortable with any of the other employees, seeing them as the Credenzas saw them — not family, outsiders like himself. And not only not comfortable with them, but actively resenting them, squeamish for the first time in the bunk they shared, fastidious over the common washstand, handling the common soap as if it were tainted, hovering and actually constipate on the seat of the flush toilet the Credenzas had added on in a corner of the transmitter shack. He found himself longing to stretch out luxuriously in Credenza tubs and to sit wholeheartedly, four- squarely, on Credenza-warmed toilets, those fine fleshpots and seats of kinship and power. If he could divorce himself from his colleagues, he felt, he would be that much closer to the Credenzas.

“And that’s why I’m such a good radio man. Because there are standards, grounds of taste. Because I would rid myself of all dialect and speak only Midwest American Standard, and have a sense of bond, and eschew the private and wild and unacceptable. Because I would throw myself into the melting pot while it’s at the very boil and would, if I had the power, pass a law to protect the typical. Because I honor the mass. Because I revere the regular. Because I consent to consensus. Because I would be decent, and decently blind to the differences between appearances and realities, and daily pray to keep down those qualities in myself that are suspect or insufficiently public- spirited or divergent from the ideal. Because I would have life like it is on the radio — all comfy and clean and everyone heavily brothered and rich as a Credenza. This is KROP, the Voice of Wheat. Your announcer is Marshall Maine, the Voice of Wheat’s Voice, staff announcer for the staff of life. Give us this day our daily bread. Amen.”

He tried to explain to the brothers what he had in mind, first apologizing for his apology for the transmitter man, washing his hands of that dirty old seadog and showing them clean to the Credenzas (“ … who didn’t care, who hadn’t noticed past the time it took Poke to dodge the punch and counter it anything other than the man’s otherness, who held in a contempt that could pass for forgiveness all otherness, who expected that sort of thing from unbrothers, and not only didn’t bother to despise it but did not even bother to distinguish between one sort of otherness — the hostile deserter’s — and another— my, Maine’s, benign own”).

“Never mind that,” George Credenza said, “you sometimes get too close to the mike. We hear you breathe.”

“You’re not always careful with the records. There’s some that are scratched,” Lee said. “Lift the arm clear when it gets to the end. Use your chamois to wipe them clean.”

“Sometimes it’s the needle,” Louis told him. “Dust it, pull off the crud. That’s a thirty-five-buck needle, but it’s got to be clean.”

“The turntable squeaks. Oil it,” Poke ordered.

“When there are storms,” Felix said, “make sure the studio clocks are reset correct.”

“On ‘News, Weather and Sports,’ when you give the reports, a death on the highway or damage to crops, get a little chuckle in your voice.”

“We don’t mean to laugh.”

“It ain’t no laughing matter.”

“But a chuckle, a smile, something to signal it isn’t so bad.”

“Say the time and temperature twice. I don’t always catch it the first time around.”

“Now what was it you wanted?” George asked.

“I didn’t know you were so disappointed in me,” Maine told them dejectedly. “I didn’t know you weren’t satisfied.”

“Who ain’t satisfied, Marshall? We’re satisfied. We’re satisfied fine.”

“When we ain’t satisfied you’ll hear we ain’t satisfied.”

“We’ll haul your ass out of there.”

“We’ll fire your ass.”

“We’ll see you never work your ass in this state again.”

“That your voice, you take your ass to Iowa or Dakota nearby, croaks at the state line.”

“We’re satisfied.”

Just keep those cards and letters coming in, Marshall Maine thought.

They had intimidated him. Making one kind of metaphor of his ass as he made another. He saw them now as something closer knit even than family, close knit as interest itself, and himself forever absolved of the hope of kinship with them, reduced by his very value to them to something not just expendable should that value wane, but destroyable as a gangster’s evidence. The ass they spoke of so dispassionately he came to see as more vital somehow than the heart, not their metaphor for his soul at all, but just their prearranged, priority target, the doomed bridge- and railheads of his being. He would be undone in the behind when the time came, there kicked (they would actually do it), scorned. Destroyed in the ass. They were dark, gigantic generals, booted for business and answerable only to themselves. So he was intimidated, and he knew it. And this is what happened.

For the first time in his life he developed mike fright. Not just that stage-wary fillip of excitement, nor even that panicked realization that one’s words are gone, nor yet that temporary, pre-curtain woe in the wings that is often an actor’s capital, a signal, like the rich man’s haunted look, of money in the bank, of reserves of adrenaline to turn terror — no ordinary, innocent commotion, the heart all thumbs, or momentary inability to function that is only function in the act of sparking. Not mike fright at all, really, but some pinched, asbestos quality in himself of unkindling, some odd, aged and deadened dignity. That is, he could speak, could read his scripts and do his commercials, but he had a sense that he was working on slack, a loose-tooth sense of margin. All urgency had gone out of his voice. There was a certain loss of treble, a corresponding increment of heavy bass. It was the voice of a drowned man, slow and waterlogged.

He was forced to make certain changes in his chatter, to bring his talk into accord with the changes in his delivery. Formerly his remarks on introducing a song matched the mood of the song, while filler material provoked an illusion, even at this distance, of KROP’s relationship to show business. (“Now, from the sound track of Walt Disney’s feature-length animated cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the RKO Studio Orchestra plays the wistful ‘Someday My Prince Will Come.’ Maestro …” “From the hit Broadway show Showboat of a few years back, the lovely Miss Helen Morgan sings this show stopper, the haunting ‘He’s Just My Bill’ … ”) With his new constraint, however, words like “sound track,” the names of studios, even the titles of films, suddenly made him self-conscious. Catch phrases like “from the motion picture of the same name” caught in his throat. His old attempt to set a human mood—”A romantic confession now, some sweet excuses for a familiar story: ‘Those Little White Lies’”—seemed the grossest liberty of all. The idea of setting a mood for the dark-booted Credenzas was blasphemous, a sort of spoken graffiti.

At first he tried simply to announce the title and identify the singer, but the discrepancy between the tunes and his flat statements was even more disturbing to him than his old chatter. As a consequence he began to play a different sort of music altogether, songs that were so familiar they needed no introduction, love songs nominally still, but from a different period, or rather from no period at all, songs that had always existed, in the public domain years, nothing that could ever have connected KROP with show business: “The Old Oaken Bucket,” “Alice Blue Gown,” “I Wandered Today to the Hill, Maggie.” Because they were the sort of songs no crooner anyone had ever heard of was likely to have recorded, he found it difficult to speak the names of the obscure tenors and sopranos who had recorded them, the Fred L. Joneses and Olive Patzes and Herbert Randolph Fippses who had cornered the market on this kind of thing. So he said nothing and looked instead for instrumental versions of the recordings, leaving Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties on his day off and going down to Lincoln on his own authority to the big radio station there, to speak to the music librarian and offer him money for his discards. At first the man didn’t seem to understand what he wanted, until Marshall explained that he did a request show for shut-ins, and invented for him the Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties Old People’s Home, a place, he said, where the staff used the golden hits of yesteryear as therapy, offering the invalided and senile a musical opportunity to re-court their wives, re-raise their children and re-fight their wars, the idea being, Maine said, not to pull the afflicted (he called them that) from their pasts but to push them back into them.

Together they went into the music library, and there he found a cache of exactly the sort of thing he was looking for: “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” played by the Netherlands Deutschgeschreir Orkestra, Jerome Klopf conducting; “I Wish I Was in de Land ob Cotton,” sung by the Luftwaffe Sinfonia; Sir Reginald Shoat leading the Edinburgh Festival Orchestra in a Stephen Foster medley. There were also some fine things by the Hotel Brevert- Topeka’s Palm Court Band.

“Gee,” the librarian said, “I didn’t know we had all this stuff.” “Yes,” Marshall Maine told him. “These will do.” The man put one of the recordings on the library console. “The quality’s not good. This one sounds strained, as if it was transcribed from the short wave.”

“Yes,” Marshall Maine said, “that’s fine. They want that quality— the suggestion of the distant past.” “But they’re all instrumentals.” “Yes, that forces them to remember the words.” “Oh, look here, Lily Pons doing ‘Funiculi Funicula.’” “No,” Maine said sharply. “But if you had choral groups, I might take some choral groups of the right sort.” “Choral groups?”

“It gives them the sense they’re not alone.” So he took back with him a hundred and twelve instrumentals, plus an armful of recordings by a few choral groups — rejecting, for example, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians’ rendition of “In the Merry, Merry Month of May” in favor of the Utah Military Institute’s Marching and Singing Soldiers’ version of the same song, and the Brockton Riding Academy Mounted Chorus’s “Silver Threads Among the Gold.”

Furnished with these he returned to KROP and put them on the air. He could hear through his long afternoon record show the adulterated strains of the vaguely decomposing music he played, performances that the wind might have blown through, or the sea squeezed. Usually he no longer bothered to announce the songs. Remembering the Credenzas’ warning, he made sure that no dust stuck to the needle. He oiled the turntable, lifted the tone arm smartly when a record was finished and placed it carefully in the right groove of the next selection. Every few minutes he moved his head a precise seven inches from the microphone and gave the time and temperature twice: “It’s two thirty-five. It’s two thirty-five. The temperature is fifty-three degrees. It’s fifty-three degrees.”

He had never been to England and so had never heard the BBC, but he had an impression that this was what it must sound like. He had a sense, too, of service, a special nonprofit feel of a government- managed, tax-based, public utility, as if the story he told the music librarian at the radio station in Lincoln somehow had come true. Giving the time and temperature, he imagined his voice coming out of loudspeakers in the dining halls of prisons or the card rooms of veterans’ hospitals. He liked this. In a way — though it had come about in a manner entirely different from the one he had counted on when he had approached the brothers — he felt exactly the responsibility he had hoped to feel.

His nervousness began to relax its hold on him, though he did not tamper with its effects. Now his constraint was designed, a technique, and he acquired still another sense of his professionalism, a wicked inside knowledge of his own manner, the same knowledgeable sensation available, he supposed, to workers on newspapers who see the headlines before they hit the streets — a split-second edge that was all one needed to maintain a notion of his uniqueness and to confirm his closeness to the source of things.

“I had never had it before. But what did I have? What did I have exactly? A knowledge of what time it was and what time it was getting to be? Access to the weather report? The sequence in which the records would be played that afternoon? What I had was inside information about myself, what I was going to do, what particular shape my dignity would take next, how much shyness or reserve would be there in the next time signal, what unmood would be provoked by the next unmusic I played.”

But that only got him through the afternoons. The music, however transatlantic and anonymous, was the point. He merely served it, bringing it to the turntable like a waiter, his presence hidden in his deference, his shyness only the giver’s decent effacement. If it weren’t for the music, however, and the time and temperature, he would have been lost, so though the fright did not actually return, it waited for him like that portion of a sick man’s day when the temperature climbs and the pain begins.

Doing the news that followed his afternoon record show, for example, and recalling the brothers’ insistence that he make more palatable the inevitable reports of accident and sudden death with a deflective cheer — they meant, he supposed, no more than that he lift the pitch of his voice — he felt enormous pressure to oblige, pressure that existed even as he read those stories that had nothing to do with disaster: neutral items about the sale of farms in adjoining counties, or the paving of the dirt road that led to the new dam. He knew what was coming up, and like some unsure singer who knows of a difficult passage later in his song that he has negotiated hit and miss in rehearsal, he could anticipate only those bad places in the road where the car turned over and the children died, and felt his throat begin to constrict, his mouth to dry, his teeth to dry too, like hard foreign objects suddenly in his mouth. So, even as he continued to read the report of the new engine purchased for the volunteer fire department and what the governor said in his address to the Building and Loan convention, he would sound a little hysterical, and once or twice when the time came for him actually to give the damaging bulletin, he lost control entirely. Aiming for the C above high C that was the perfect pitch the Credenzas wanted, the exact and only comforting tone of catastrophe for them, his voice broke, he overshot and gave them not perfect pitch nor even imperfect pitch, but wild pitch, shattering the decorous modulations of radio with falsetto, with something close to a real shriek or scream. Someone hearing him might have thought it was his child who had burned to a crisp in the fire, his wife raped and slain, his father struck down by the lightning or fallen into the thresher.

After these performances he waited to hear from some angry Credenza, not even returning to the transmitter shack when his relief man came for fear they would phone the moment he left the station and not wanting to add anything to their already considerable rage should they miss him. So he sat by the telephone to wait for their call.

It didn’t come.

Nor did it come the next day or even the next time he lost control of himself and, too keen, keened the ferocious grief of his mistakes. He knew, of course, that he was vulnerable now, that this time he would surely hear from the Credenzas. When he didn’t he realized that they were giving him not leeway but rope. He took their unspoken hint and went the other way entirely. To save himself he went the way they had told him not to go. Now when he came to those bulletins he laughed openly: “Early this morning — along the Lake Baxter rim road — a car with two pa-ha ha-hass-engers went out of contro-ho ho — l, and h-hit a t — a tee — a tee hee — tree. The passengers, Ha-ha-ha-rrr— ho ho — ld, Ha-ha rold and Haw-haw Hortense Sn-sn-snick, were be- ha ha-headed.” The engineer stared at him. “It’s seven minutes after four,” he ad-libbed. “It’s seven minutes after four.”

Still the call did not come. It was clear; they meant him harm. He returned to the shack as soon as he was finished with his shift and asked if there had been any calls for him. The transmitter man did not even look up.

“Have there?”

“The injuns want you to their picnic,” the man said.

Still frightened, but made willful by his fear, he determined to force a confrontation, convinced that only through a showdown could he ever hope to negotiate his brotherhood with the Credenzas. He eliminated from his repertoire all those human interest stories they loved, and selected only bad news to read. He gave it euphorically, blithe as Nero. Some Credenza cattle had come down with disease. A few had already died. He gave the news of these fatalities with a chipperness nothing less than ecstatic. He’d heard from one of the hands that when disease had broken out on a ranch he had once worked in Texas, the herd had to be shot. He took this gossip and repeated it over the air. “An undisclosed but reliable source high up in Credenza management,” he said, “is already speculating that the entire herd may have to be slaughtered.” He added that it was better economics to cut one’s losses at once than to drag out hope, meanwhile spending more on feed each day for the sick beasts.

He seized on every rumor available to him — desultory talk among the farmers about the expectation of a severe winter, random chatter of a decline in the price of dairy or a dip in grains — and presented it as the hard inside information of experts. If rye prices were expected to be disappointing, he carefully pointed out that the Credenza interests were heavily overextended in rye. His weather reports were jeremiads. If the sun was shining in northeast Nebraska he found a storm gathering in western Canada and spoke darkly of the prevailing gravity of weatherflow, its southern and easterly shift from its fierce source in the Bering Strait.

The engineers and transmitter men and the other announcer, silent as the Credenzas, pretended to ignore his new antics. He supposed that they were under instruction, that the Credenzas, fearful of tipping their hand, wanted him to continue for a while in his fool’s paradise.

“At the time of the tone,” he announced on his record show, “it will be three-thirty.” Then he coughed brutally into the open mike, dredged up phlegm from deep in his chest, and made the lubricious rattle preparatory to spitting. “It’s three-thirty. It’s three-thirty.”

And often when he played his records now he deliberately kept the key open on his table microphone, thus adding even more hollowness to the already bloated convention-hall vagueness of the music.

Then, almost two weeks to the day since he first began his campaign to get a rise out of the Credenzas — the record on the turntable was “Asleep in the Deep,” sung by the South Philadelphia A.C. Girls’ Aquacade Chorus and recorded at poolside — he purposely brushed his elbow against the switch on his table mike, and beginning not only in mid-sentence but in mid-syllable so that it seemed accidental, he said in perfectly controlled, conversational speech, as if to a guest with him in the studio, “ … rstand that Charley’s wife, Grace, and Poke Credenza have been seeing a lot of each other lately. More than it’s usual for a brother- and sister-in-law to see each other. More than it’s even legal, if you know what I mean. Well, what the hell, Charley Credenza’s been down at Lincoln with the legislature two months now. Grace told him she couldn’t be away from the house that long. Couldn’t or wouldn’t. Anyway, she’s an attractive, healthy woman, even if she is too heavy. Poke likes them big, I guess, though why he didn’t marry a large woman in the first place instead of that furled umbrella of a Lucy, I can’t say — unless of course the talk is true that he had to. Come to think of it, it might be true at that. That woman has hot pants. Did you see the way she was riding Louis III’s right leg at the Fourth of July dance, and how she put her hand on his ass? I thought there’d be trouble, but old Poke was making out too good with Grace even to notice. Wait a minute, I’ve got to take this record off … ” Then, as if he hadn’t noticed that the switch was already on, he turned it off and, extending the myth of the accident, spoke into the dead microphone: “That was ‘Asleep in the Deep.’ We hear now ‘Come Josephine in My Flying Machine’ in the new instrumental version recorded by the Association of Missouri Underwriters.”

He faced the engineer and winked, but couldn’t get the man’s attention.

He went back to the transmitter shack convinced that at last he’d torn it, and when he got there things did seem different.

For one thing the beds were empty. Carpenter, the off-duty engineer, in whose car they had returned to the shack without speaking, hung around only long enough to pick up Mullins, the off-duty transmitter man; then they had gone off to town together. Murtaugh, the other transmitter man, was not by his equipment but had gone out behind the shack to check a guy wire on the tall main transmitter. Alone, the cramped, submariney quarters seemed almost spacious to him. He lay down on his bunk and it occurred to him that except for those few minutes in the outhouse when spurning the new flush toilet he had vainly sought Credenza brotherhood by emerging himself in what he took to be the Credenza smell, despite his knowledge to the contrary — he knew they were only the anonymous and corrupt smells of former staff, an indiscriminate odor that was no longer shit but shit’s shit, chemically changed, fermented to something beyond the strongest wine in the world but vineyardy still, acrid and eye-searing, smelling not of the cozy, snuggish intestines at all but of fire, or of sun gas perhaps, if you could get close enough — this was the first time in the months since he had come to work for them that he was by himself, without an engineer, without a bunkmate, without anyone.

Then he heard the radio.

“I knew it was no accident I was alone, that the Credenzas had anticipated me, that plans had been laid in advance, that Carpenter and Mullins now worked as a team, that the Credenzas picked up their check and they rode to town on Credenza gasoline to toast my disaster in Credenza beers. Still in my bunk I looked out the single window at Murtaugh, the transmitter man, squatting on his heels by the base of the antenna fooling with a wire and I thought: you lazy bastard, is that what Credenza (they had become one enormous undifferentiated persona for me now) pays you for? Climb, bastard, decoy me at something better than ground level. Ah, old sealegs, a little at least sweat, please! Make those picturesque adjustments up in the mizzen of that thing. Lazybones, landlubber, less decorousness in your game, if you don’t mind. Murtaugh must have been left by him (I meant the Credenza brothers, and the wives and sisters too now) as a sort of staff sentinel and shill, a nice philosophic touch. Can a man fall in the forest if there’s no one by to hear him scream?

“I heard the radio and realized that’s how it could come, my fate a spot announcement perhaps, or a bulletin, or maybe he would come on the air himself and read out my doom in some Credenza fireside chat: ‘We’—strangely, Credenza, the single merged nemesis did not mean ‘we,’ he spoke for himself but had slipped royally into the inverted synecdochic—‘have not lightly arrived at our decision to speak out this evening. No one not in our situation can know the ponderous personal gloom and wrenching loneliness attendant at these levels of responsibility. It gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. But despite our hopes for an amelioration of our difficulties and maugre our four times forebearance, those hopes have foundered. Sadly we needs must admit the priority pull of necessity and lay at once the claims of all soft sentiment. We have decided to act — whatever the cost in dashed hopes and even, we may say, lives. No matter that it gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. We needs must, perhaps, go into a little of the background of the situation. We must needs indeeds lest what is devastating seem harsh.

“‘At the beginning, then, the man that calls himself Marshall Maine… ’”

Music was coming over the radio. It was The Children’s Hour. The man who called himself Marshall Maine could not make up his mind whether it was more likely that Credenza would allow the nursery rhyme to finish, or interrupt it, hoping to take him by surprise. The song concluded and Maine thought now, but it was only the relief man speaking patronizingly in the voice of Uncle Arnold. He played another nursery rhyme. Then it was time for the relief man to read the bedtime story, and Maine again thought now, but except for what Marshall felt to be some strange emphases — the story was “Jack and the Beanstalk” and the relief man’s voice was loud when it should have been soft and meek when force was called for — he was permitted to get all the way through it without interruption.

The suspense was terrific. He knew it would come, but he could no longer even hope to anticipate when. It would be random; he could not second-guess it. It was as if they were playing some mortal version of musical chairs with him. As if this were exactly the case he turned away from watching the transmitter man and went to stand by the receiver that couldn’t be turned off as long as the station was on the air. It was within a yard of the transmitter man’s chair, close by his complicated machinery. He thought that if he heard Credenza’s voice he would still have time to rush to the chair before the man could pronounce his doom. Credenza may have permitted him this one hope of forestalling his annihilation, he thought crazily.

“Why did I stand around waiting? Why didn’t I just get out? I couldn’t. Mullins and Carpenter had taken the car. There were endless empty miles of Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior counties to traverse before reaching safety. Why, I would have had to have run out of the effective range of the radio station itself.”

He stood there all through The Children’s Hour and through The Six O’Clock Round-Up (thinking he might hear it as a piece of the news itself, announced as something that had already happened; perhaps it would be tacked on at the end, what they meant to do to him one last human-interest story), and through Dinnertime Melodies till Seven, and was still standing there during the electrically transcribed Mormon Tabernacle Hour — Now, he thought, now he’ll break in, his plans for me a goddamn sacrilege—and on into the sixth inning of the remote pickup of the charity ballgame between the migrant workers and graduating seniors at the consolidated high school, when something suddenly seemed very wrong indeed.

The migrants were ahead 1–0. The seniors were up with the bases loaded. There was one out. Shippleton, the relief announcer, a man who had been with Credenza for years, was doing the play-by-play. “The tension here,” Shippleton was saying, “is terrific. Consolidated High has a good chance to tie it and even to go ahead, and this crowd knows it. Their hopes are on Scholar Joe Niebecker to hit one out of here. (Scholar Joe’s the valedictorian and could really make himself a hero if he connects.) Just listen to this crowd. I want you to hear this—” Then came the sound that Shippleton was talking about. Only it wasn’t the expected roar at all, just something very faint, something softly liquid, not a roar or a rush but more like a trickle of water in a pipe in a distant corner of the house at night.

Shippleton’s gone crazy, Marshall Maine thought. He knew that Credenza, like the parents of the boys themselves, was a strong supporter of the high schoolers, and resented something in the mute underprivilege of the migrant workers as the townies resented their strange rough ways. Did Shippleton mean to be ironic, Maine wondered. What was the point? Appalled, he thought, have I inspired him? It was insane. Shippleton was a hack, a safe man. Yet when Niebecker hit into a double play and ended the graduating class’s chances in that inning, Shippleton’s voice came booming over the speaker in top-heavy decibels. “IT’S A DOUBLE PLAY! THIS INNING IS OVER!” It was exactly like the wrong weight he had given Jack’s slow progress past the sleeping giant.

In the last inning, when the kids went ahead and won the game, Shippleton sounded quiet, defeated.

He left the shack to call Murtaugh. The man lay on his back inside the steel ribbing at the base of the antenna, poking a flashlight up at the various angles of the tower and pulling on cables to test their tension.

“Heh, Murtaugh,” he shouted, “you can knock that off now. Come here a minute.”

The man directed his beam into Marshall’s eyes. “What? What is it?”

He thinks it’s happened, Marshall Maine thought. Whatever it is, he thinks it’s already happened.

“Maybe an emergency,” Maine said. “Come inside.”

Moving from beneath the steel tent, Murtaugh swore softly.

Marshall Maine stood at the speaker and waited for him. They had switched back to the studio where the engineer had put on some marches while waiting for Shippleton to return. Maine pointed at the speaker. “Listen,” he said.

“For Christ’s sake, buddy—”

“Shh,” Maine said, “listen.”

There was no mistaking it. The values of the music were totally confused. The volume bore no relation to what the band was playing. The sound was completely erratic — now loud and booming where it should have been soft, or so thunderous and distorted where it should merely have swelled that Maine thought the cone of the speaker had ripped. At other times the music was incredibly tinny, as if someone was moving the needle around the record at exactly the right speed but with the power off. Then the sound would settle normally, only to erupt or fade again seconds later. The effect was incoherence, a sort of musical gibberish.

“Hey, that ain’t right,” the transmitter man said. He went to the control board and examined some dials. He turned a knob experimentally, Maine watching his hand carefully as it reached out for the knob. It ain’t right, he thought warily. Something’s fishy, Murtaugh. You were supposed to be pulling cables, weeding the hardware, planting the tower deep in the garden.

“Something’s wrong,” the transmitter man said.

“It is,” Maine said, and wondered what Credenza was up to, how his ends were served by throwing the transmission out of whack. What did he mean to do, give him the headache?

“Here,” Murtaugh said, “when I give the signal, push the amperage on that dial up to eighty. I want to try something.”

So, thought Maine. So. Electrocution. It’s to be electrocution. Then he understood why Credenza troubled with vagrants, why he kept them around — so they could electrocute the announcers when they got out of line. Maine shook his head and, walking calmly toward the doorway, planted his feet firmly on the rubber welcome mat, grounding himself.

“Come on,” the transmitter man said. “Quit fucking off. I’m testing for a short circuit.”

“I’m a staff announcer,” Maine said simply. “I have nothing to do with the equipment.”

“Shit,” Murtaugh said. Then, to Maine’s surprise, he went through the motions without him, fiddling with knobs and dials, throwing switches and, at one point, actually taking apart a rather complicated piece of machinery with a screwdriver, the best acting Maine had seen him do that evening. When Murtaugh finished he looked up at Maine. “It’s at the studio,” he said.

“Is it?”

“I’ve checked everything out. It’s at the studio. The only thing it can be is the coil.”

Marshall Maine planted himself even more firmly, making himself a dead weight on the doormat. “The coil, is it?” he said.

“The meter’s disabled,” Murtaugh said. “I’ll call the station.” He picked up the direct-line telephone and said something to someone at the other end. He waited for a few moments, appearing to listen as the engineer got back to the phone and made his report. The transmitter man nodded. “I didn’t either,” he said. “No, what’s-his-name, the staff announcer told me about it.” He put back the phone. “It’s the meter, all right,” he told Maine. “The needle must have jammed and shorted the coil.”

Marshall Maine looked at him.

“That’s why it sounds like that,” Murtaugh said. He pointed to the loudspeaker. “He’s been riding a false gain. There’s no equilibrium in the output. He couldn’t tell. The needle was just floating free.”

“ONE MOMENT PLEASE!” they heard the engineer shout. Then the loudspeaker went dead.

“And he hadn’t noticed,” Marshall Maine said.

“What’s that?”

“He hadn’t noticed. That’s what he told you before you said, ‘I didn’t either.’ That he hadn’t noticed. You hadn’t either.”

“That’s right. Hey, how’d you know that?”

“He hadn’t been listening. Only watching the needle.”

“That’s right. Say, mate, could you hear all that?”

“When I shrieked,” Marshall Maine said.

“What’s that, fella?”

“Nothing,” Marshall Maine said. He stepped off the mat and came back into the shack. He leaned against the equipment. He played his fingers over the dials and stroked the switches. He thrust his hand into the space from which the transmitter man had removed the electric panel which he had taken apart. He picked up one of the loose wires.

“Hey, watch it!” the transmitter man yelled. “You want to get burned?” Murtaugh knocked the wire out of his hand.

“Right,” Maine said calmly, grabbing the wire again and picking his teeth with it.

Murtaugh shook his head and started outside with his flashlight. “Call me when it comes back on,” he said.

The first time I laughed, Maine thought. When I shrieked that time. That’s what jammed it. That’s when I tore it. And they hadn’t noticed. Not the engineer or the relief engineer, not the transmitter man or the relief transmitter man, not Shippleton, not the Indians — not even Credenza himself. Hell, not even me.

“Because we had all stopped listening.

“And that’s why I never heard. Because one by one we had all stopped listening weeks before when I came back from Lincoln with the new records. Because they never heard those other programs. Because without consulting anyone each of them had become bored, without even recognizing the moment when they no longer cared to listen to their own radio station, and without even deciding not to, without — my God, they must have been bored — its even being a conscious act on their part, and so there was just this piecemeal tuning me out, just this gradual lapse as one loses by degrees his interest in a particular magazine he subscribes to, just this sluggish wane, just this disaffection, not from my programs alone but from Shippleton’s too. They were all so bored that it was simply something personal, taking boredom for granted, almost as if it were something in the eye of the beholder with no outside cause at all, just a shift in taste, as one day one discovers that he can no longer eat scrambled eggs. So bored that it was just too trivial to mention to one’s brothers, because each made the unconscious assumption that the others still had their appetites intact.”

Well, thought Marshall Maine, I’ll be. I ran KROP right into the ground. All by myself. I did it. Not even my engineer listened to me. Not even my transmitter man with nothing to distract him except the sound of the relief man’s snoring. I’ll be. It doesn’t have a single listener. Not one.

“This is Marshall Maine,” he said aloud in the empty shack, “KROP’s Voice of the Voice of Wheat. Be still. We interrupt this radio station for a special announcement. Be still.”

2

It is not enough to say that he lost his job. Rather, it disappeared — his as well as the jobs of the transmitter men and engineers and the other announcer. Even the radio station disappeared — KROP plowed back under.

As it happened, Dick Gibson was able to take advantage of the Credenza boredom for a few more days. Though now that some of his colleagues had realized what had happened — or soon would — he knew he did not have much time. Once the requisitions were put in to replace the equipment he had damaged, the Credenzas would easily be able to fill in the rest of the story. Meanwhile he worked.

Perhaps it was the knowledge that no one heard him, or perhaps it was to make a sort of amends for his former fear, or simply the hope that if they should tune him in now, at the top of his form, they would forget who it was that had driven them away from their sets in the first place and would place a new and stronger confidence in him. At any rate, using the name Dick Gibson, he spoke during this respite with a silver tongue, lips that were sweeter than wine, a golden throat. He was in a state of grace, of classic second chances. The more it galled him that no one heard him, the better he was. The weather had turned bad and there was a thin film of unseasonable ice along Route 33; yet he hoped that someone passing through might be listening. It could make the difference between one concept of the place and another. Such a stranger might think, for as long as the signal lasted, that he had entered a Shangri-la, crossed a border more telling than the Iowa-Nebraska one, and come into — despite the flatness stretching behind and before him — a sort of valley, still unspoiled, unmarked perhaps on maps. To stay within range of the signal — never strong and now damaged further by the involuntary surges and slackenings of an inconstant electricity — the stranger might slow down (it would have nothing to do with the ice) and Dick would guide him, preserving him on the treacherous road as art preserves, as God does working in mysterious ways. The stranger might even pull over to the side. Dick pictured the fellow, his salesman’s wares piled high in the space from which he had removed the back seat, sitting there, his appointments forgotten, time itself forgotten, preoccupied, listening with a recovered wonder unfamiliar since childhood, in a state of grace himself.

No matter. Within four days of discovering the truth he received word from Shippleton that none of their services were required any longer, that the Credenzas had decided to close down the station. That they fixed no blame and were willing to write letters of recommendation for all the staff was evidence that they had not yet figured out what had happened. But Dick knew, if the others didn’t, and felt a fondness for his crew, determinedly sentimental on the last morning they were together. (Actually it was the first morning: all six of them were in the shack for the first time, plus Lee Credenza, who had driven over to bring them their last paychecks.) As they packed and made hurried preparations for their exodus, he saw that in emergency each had auxiliary lives which they would now take up. They might have been men who had served with him in a war, or political prisoners given some eleventh-hour reprieve and told to leave the country. He saw that he had one of Murtaugh’s handkerchiefs and that Shippleton had a pair of his shoes. They re-exchanged combs, ties, books and magazines they had lent each other over the months. Why we’ve been friends, he thought, amazed, brothers (the six of them only two less than the sum of the Credenzas themselves, and actually equal if you didn’t count the Credenzas in Lincoln).

It was Dick, however, who went about taking down their addresses and carefully writing out his own for them. “Of course I won’t be there long, but a letter would always be forwarded. I’ve put down my real name, but here in parentheses is the name you’ve known me by. No, keep the scarf. I’ve got another.”

And when the valises were closed and placed beside the bunks while they waited for the taxi that would take them to town, he saw the makeshift essence of their belongings — bandboxes, cardboard grips tied with rope, duffel bags, paper parcels, only one leather suitcase— and was moved by this additional evidence of their gypsy, trouper lot.

And so, still a young man, he started out for home, where they would probably be happy to see him.

It took him months to get there. He found himself explaining this one night, a few years later, to strangers.

“How do you do, ladies and gentlemen, this is Dick ‘Pepsodent’ Gibson. I’m very happy to be here in Minneapolis tonight. Bob Hope will be with you in a few minutes, but first he’s asked me to come out here and talk to you all for a bit. I’m your warmup man. Are you cold, madam? Skinnay Ennis was supposed to do this but he’s working out, he’s getting in shape for a tug-of-war next week against the 142nd Airborne. I won’t say Skinnay’s team is the underdog, but Frank Sinatra’s the anchor man. Frank Sinatra — he was putting one of his songs on the phonograph last night and his hand slipped through the hole in the record. I won’t say he’s thin, but his mother used to use him to test cakes.

“Listen, Bob asked me to tell you he’s got a great show lined up for you tonight. Bob’s here, and Frances Langford and Vera Vague — and Frances Langford. Let’s see, then there’s Skinnay Ennis and his orchestra and Jerry Colonna — and Frances Langford. Frances Langford, I won’t say she’s pretty but the other day someone told me she looks just like the girl next door and I went out and bought a house. You know who lives next door to me? Vera Vague. Vera Vague — that’s Fibber Magee’s closet in a girdle. I won’t say she’s ugly but her beauty mark died of loneliness. I won’t say she’s unattractive but the St. Paul police saw her crossing Kellogg Boulevard yesterday and put out an all-points alert for a hit-and-run driver.

“Now the show’s going to begin in about thirty minutes, so if anybody has to cough let him do it now. I tell you what, when I count three everybody cough together. All at once now. All right, are you ready? Let’s go. One. Two. Three. Cough, everybody. Let’s do it again. One. Two. Three. Fine, now just once more. One. Two. Three. Wonderful. Everybody passes the physical. You’ve all just been inducted into the United States Army!

“Well, come on now, you don’t think I tell jokes for a living, do you? This is Dick ‘Pepsodent’ Gibson. I just warm you up for the star, let you know you’re among friends. Bob’s show’s dependent upon audience reaction and the way we get that — this is inside stuff, folks — is to let you know we’re human too. Now that fellow sitting on the stage there is Joe Glober. Joe’s Bob’s card man. Been with him for years. During the show he’s going to hold up a sign that says ‘Laugh,’ and that cues you to laugh. Joe, hold that sign up for these folks. Not upside down, for God’s sake. Who hired you, Red Skelton? There, that’s better. All right, people, let’s hear your laugh. The engineer wants a sound level. Come on, when I say three. One. Two. Two and a half. Two and twenty-one thousand twenty-two thousandths. Three. Go. Look at Joe’s sign, Joe’s sign. Too soft. This is coast-to-coast. How are they supposed to hear you in Tucson? All right. There were these newlyweds. They go off on their honeymoon. The trains are crowded, so all they can get is an upper berth. It’s their first night together and they’re in this little upper berth, do you follow? Well, it’s pretty crowded up there and they don’t want to disturb the other passengers, so the little bride whispers in her husband’s ear, ‘Sweetheart, when you want to make love just say, “Pass the oranges.” That way the other passengers won’t know what we’re doing. “Pass the oranges.”’ So the husband agrees and in five minutes he gets pretty excited and he tells his wife to pass the oranges. Then a little later the wife says, ‘Pass the oranges.’ Then in twenty minutes the husband says, ‘Pass the oranges.’ And that’s the way it goes all night. Then, just before dawn, after the guy’s asked for the oranges about forty times, they hear this voice from the lower berth: ‘Lady, will you hand him the god-damned glass carefully this time? The juice keeps dripping in my face.’

“Oh, you liked that one. Did you get a level on that, Mel? Mel Bell, ladies and gentlemen — the engineer. Mel’s been with Bob for years.

“So that’s the kind of material you people like, is it? Well, you won’t hear any stories like that once the show starts. We don’t talk dirty mouth around here. Not on your tintype we don’t. Not on the Pepsodent Show. Anybody here ever been to Boulder Darn? No, seriously folks, we can make all the jokes we want to about lust. Well, we can. What do you think those Frances Langford jokes are all about? And the Vera Vague routines? Why, to hear Bob tell it you’d think Miss Vague was a nymphomaniac or something. You want the inside story? Frances Langford isn’t even my type. (Herbie Lauscher, ladies and gentlemen, one of Bob’s writers. Been with him for years, years.) And Vera Vague is actually a very lovely person. A real lady. Sinatra weighs as much as I do and last year Jack Benny raised a quarter of a million dollars for United War Relief. Skinnay Ennis spells his name S-k-i-n-n-a-y. He’s from down south. They name folks like that down there. Wait till you see him. That’s just a joke about his being thin.

“All right?

“And only the band goes by bus. That’s a practical arrangement, a matter of logistics. Mr. Ennis arrives by plane a day before the show. Mr. Hope travels first class but alone. The private life. And it would break your heart to see him come down the ramp from the plane with his coat over his arm and his briefcase in his hand. He brings the script, you see, he carries it with him. And even if some flunky fetches his baggage, why at least Hope has to hand him the claim checks. And most of the time he picks it up himself, if you want to know.

“All right, granted Bob Hope’s got a face people recognize. That makes a difference. But what about the others? The poet who carries his bags aboard the train and takes off his coat but doesn’t know where to hang it and rolls it up with the manuscript inside, then remembers and removes it, and folds up the coat all over again and puts it down beside him this time because he doesn’t want people to see him jump up and down and think he’s a hick? What of people in air terminals waiting for connecting flights, passing the time at coffee counters, the sleeve of their trench coats in the puddle of Coca-Cola? What of men on vacation or business in countries where they don’t speak the language or know the customs? What of the arrangements men have to make? I’m talking about obtaining rooms and getting your supper sent up. There’s no way of greasing all of life, I say.

“Are you warming up? Jacomo Miller, folks, Bob’s microphone man for many years. Been with him since he was a kid in fact. This summer the final adoption comes through.

“There’s always the tire gone flat in the desert and no air in the spare. This is small time, peanuts, granted, agreed. All I mean to get across is—

“Listen, maybe this will explain what I mean. The guest lecturer for the Men’s Auxiliary or the Temple Sisterhood. He’s been around the world. He has slides from the upper reaches of the Amazon. Beautiful stuff, no white man’s ever gotten this close. The slides are in a black leather case. He’s afraid to check them so he takes them aboard the plane with him. But the case is too big. They won’t let him put it in the overhead rack, and it doesn’t fit comfortably under the seat. Besides, he’s uneasy; suppose they hit an air pocket and the case slides forward under someone else’s seat? It would be all right in the rack, but the stewardess won’t let him put it there. What does she know? Where’s she been? To Cleveland five hundred times? This guy’s been everywhere — the top of the Amazon, the bottom. Still, he has to hold the case on his lap like any salesman with an order pad on his knee. It’s different, but who’s to know this? Nobody knows. There’s this appearance of ordinariness. That’s what breaks your heart. You follow? You see? Mel, quick, get a level. No?

“All right, try this … Your father. Your father goes to Indianapolis to call on a store. He forgets to take his shaving cream, or maybe he’s all out of it. Well, he has to make a good appearance. You don’t walk up to L. S. Ayers’s head buyer with five o’clock shadow. If you’ve got bad breath you can put something sweet in your mouth, you can hide it, but how do you hide your whiskers? What do you do, throw your hands up over your face? Well, it’s Sunday night, and he’s got an appointment first thing in the morning. The drugstores don’t open till nine or nine-thirty. In a town the size of Indianapolis there could be some place open all night, even on a Sunday, but it’s late. What’s he going to do, start looking now? The man’s tired, he’s had a hard day, it’s been a long trip. He goes to bed. The last thing on his mind before he falls asleep is the lousy shaving cream.

“In the morning he unwraps the little soap, the souvenir Ivory with the hotel on the wrapper, and he lathers with that. He rubs his palms furiously to work up the lather. He goes through the whole bar until it’s only a tiny sliver. He pats it on his face. He shaves. He cuts himself. That cut, that blood! That’s what I’m talking about — your daddy bleeding in a stuffy little room in Indianapolis. Where’s the dignity? Where’s the authority? Do you see? Do you see what I mean? Do you follow? Turn on the applause sign, somebody. Where’s Bob’s applause sign man? Joe Glober, hold up the ‘Laugh’ card. Pretend it’s applause. No?

“The private life. That everybody has. Being loose in the world. On your own. On mine, Dick Gibson’s. ‘Pepsodent’ is not actually my middle name. This is inside stuff. How much time do we have? Seventeen minutes? Twenty? … Marty Milton, ladies and gentlemen, Bob’s pre-show time man. How long have you been with Bob, Marty?

“I’ll tell you what happened to me after I lost my job. I meant to return the twelve or thirteen hundred miles to my home by bus. You’ll just have to accept this. It was exciting for me, the most exciting thing that had ever happened. I was in disgrace, you see. In a way. I’d blown it, fucked up, torn it. The shit had hit the fan. I’d lost this job in Nebraska. There’s a certain kind of disgrace in declining fortunes. And a certain kind of excitement in disgrace. This was a sort of ill health — an illness of recuperation. Oh, how weak I was, how vulnerable to everything. Dizzy as a lover. My pores were open, goners to drafts. I mean my spirit was such that I could have caught cold or picked up bad germs. Just to stand up straight made me giddy. And young as I was, I had this power of the has-been like a secret weapon. How sweet is weakness! How grand it makes us feel when we really feel it, how happy and how solemn! You’ve seen those men, five months past their heart attacks, making their leaden progress up the stairs, one foot on the next step and the other brought up to join it, a hand on the banister perhaps, and the deep, stately breathing.

“That’s how I was. And not the least of it was the bus itself. This was a few years ago, before the war. It was still the depression; only the rich traveled by plane and even at that only between coasts. Buses were respectable then. You remember Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in that movie. But this was my first time on a bus. Before when I had moved about — I was turning myself into a professional and I traveled considerably — I took trains. Well, I was always going to better jobs; people were to meet me. And even if that hadn’t been the case I would still have traveled by trains because I associated them with show business … The movies did that, the montages. Remember those triumphant tours, hands clapping over the big wheels and the successive signs saying Cleveland and Chicago and Detroit and the last one always New York.

“So there I was on this bus with this incredible ticket they give you like folded scrip — I hope you folks like small talk — and my unfamiliarity with the nooks and crannies of the thing, as if a bus were some queer sort of contraption they didn’t have in America. That’s it! I could have been a foreigner, but a foreigner come from a really major power to some hole-and-corner country where they drink wine with their meals and have no facilities for dry cleaning. My demeanor must have invited hospitality, reminded others I would be taking back my impressions of them. Or maybe it was the weakness I was telling you about. Whatever, several people smiled at me. And one older man actually got up and prepared this empty double seat for me. He raised the window shade and adjusted the footrest. Then he helped me with some of my things, kneeling on the arm of the seat to put them neatly on the rack.

“‘Thank you,’ I said, pronouncing my words distinctly. ‘You are very kind to me.’

“I sat down but the old fellow still stood in the aisle looking at me uncertainly. I smiled at him pleasantly but he seemed troubled. Then, looking away, he spoke to the woman in the seat in front of mine. ‘I think he ought to take his coat off. It gets pretty warm once the driver closes the door.’

“‘He’d probably be more comfortable,’ she said.

“The man turned back to me and I looked up at him with that curiously alert anxiety people show when others are discussing them. ‘Yes?’ I asked.

“‘We were thinking you might be too hot in that overcoat once the bus starts,’ the man said.

“‘Oh, yes. Thank you.’ I started to wriggle out of the coat and the man in the seat behind mine leaned forward to help. ‘You are very kind to me,’ I told him. The old man in the aisle folded the coat carefully and put it in the rack above his seat where it would not be crushed by my parcels. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You are all very kind to me.’ We smiled at each other and nodded, and then the man in the aisle took his seat and I settled in. In a little while the woman in front offered me her newspaper. ‘Oh, no,’ I said brightly. ‘Thank you. I am looking through the window.’ The woman nodded approvingly and looked where I was looking.

“‘Those are elm trees,’ she said.

“‘Oh, yes?’

“‘Elm,’ she said.

“‘Elm,’ I repeated.

“We came to a town and passed a schoolyard where some kids were playing basketball. ‘Those boys are playing the game of basketball,’ the old man said.

“‘The game of basketball takes much skill,’ I told him thoughtfully.

“‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘There are great universities that will pay for his education if the boy is skillful enough.’

“‘Ah.’

“‘They certainly have their energy. I suppose they’d play till the cows came home if no one stopped them.’

“‘With children it is much the same everywhere,’ I said.

“We went by an International Harvester agency where the machines were jammed up on the apron outside the store, the great yellow seats on the tractors and harrows like enormous iron catchers’ mitts. I looked out the window at everything, the best guest in history. And indeed, after my isolation and dedication of the last years, there was something profoundly interesting, astonishing even, about it all. I might have been a foreigner, a greenhorn to ordinary life.

“It was necessary for me to change buses in Des Moines, and over coffee in the Post House my new friends scrutinized my tickets and consulted with each other.

“‘His best bet,’ one said, ‘would be to lay over in Chicago for a night, look around the city tomorrow morning and catch an early afternoon bus out.’

“‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ the man said who had helped me off with my overcoat.

“‘He’d want to see Chicago.’

“‘Of course. But look. He doesn’t get in till two-thirty this morning. Then, until he gets his bags and finds a locker where he can check them and looks over the bus schedule and hails a taxi cab it’s another forty, forty-five minutes. Then he first has to start looking around for a hotel. It could be four o’clock before he gets into a room. You think he’s going to be up to sightseeing in the morning? And even if he is, how much can he see in a few hours? No. I say if he wants to look around Chicago, fine, but he should make it a separate trip. Not a lousy layover that don’t mean nothing.’

“‘Well, maybe,’ the old man said.

“‘What maybe? There’s no maybe about it. I’m right and you know it.’

“‘If he doesn’t know Chicago it could be very confusing to come in at two-thirty in the morning,’ the woman who had offered me her paper said.

“Then the driver called for them to reboard the bus and we all shook hands. The man who had helped with my overcoat paid for my coffee. I went with them to the bus and stood by as they climbed on. ‘Everybody is very kind,’ I said, ‘very friendly.’

“The old man was the last to go up the steps. He turned at the top and looked down at me just before the driver pulled the big steel lever that shut the door.

“‘Listen,’ he said, ‘good luck to you.’

“The old man was an old man, no high priest but a stranger with a good wish no stronger than my own, but it made me uneasy. There’s something terrible to have it assumed that one needs luck. And, remember, we were at a crossroads.

“And, indeed, when I returned to the restaurant where none now knew me, my foreignness seemed gone. No longer an object of interest to my fellow passengers, I was just one more weary pilgrim with all the pilgrim’s collateral burdens — his sour taste, the beginning of sore throat, a sense of underwear and standing oppressed by his luggage in an open place, feeling the attention divided and a touch of panic.

“Today with an hour to kill in Des Moines I would call up the big radio station, introduce myself and accept whatever professional courtesy was offered. But not then.

“In a few hours I was traveling again, comfortable and safe now that it was dark, snug, aware of the glowing dials on the driver’s console, relaxed by the long moist hiss of the tires.

“Somewhere along its route a girl had boarded the bus and sat down beside me. I saw her when I woke. Her eyes were shut but facing my lap. I turned on my haunch and closed my eyes again. I do not like to fall asleep in public because of the erection. I had one now — piss and lust — and I turned away to hide it. Something about my breathing must have put her wise, and I sensed that she too only pretended to sleep. We traveled like this for a time, both of us ever more wakeful. That she had come aboard some time after eleven o’clock from some small town, or even from beside the road perhaps, made her tremendously sexy to me. Somehow, even more than her proximity, her isolation and the lateness of the hour — which suggested that she was in trouble — made her seem available. It excited me that she had seen my hard-on, and our mimed sleep, of course. My God, I don’t know what I might have done, but just when I could stand it no longer, just when I was capable of doing something for which they could have thrown me off the bus, just then her hand moved, made a suicide leap from its place in her lap to the narrow space between us. No, not a leap; it was one of those great surrenders from an enormous height, this lovely Acapulcan plunge. The edge of her hand grazed my hip as it fell, took a wee nip of my buttock. Ah, I was on fire. Oh, I was hot. From this I took hot heart and turned blindly, still feigning sleep, boldly forcing my erection into her palm.

“She shrieked and slapped me. Was I wrong about her? ‘Don’t give me that,’ I said. I shook her shoulders and pulled her to me and maneuvered the whole works into her hand again. And you know what? She took it.

“What a lesson! What a lesson! So much for your timidities and reservations, so much for your doubts and reluctances, your equivocations and hesitancies and shields of decorum more heavy than the world. She held me, I tell you. Then I held her. We grabbed at each other like drowners grasping at spars. (We sparred all right: sparring partners!) But she had been sleeping, there was no question about it. It was like something in a charm: one smash of passion and poof went the world. There is more rape than ever gets into the papers, and madness is the common cold of the emotions.

“So we hugged and we kissed. Right there in the bus I put my hands up her skirt and down her panties and in her crotch. We hadn’t yet spoken, nor had either of us seen what the other even looked like. She unzipped me and pulled me off and collected my come and patted it on my prick like butter. In the bus. She squeezed it for luck and locked her legs around my hand when I started to withdraw it. These were her first words to me: ‘Not so fast, not so fast. Do me. Do me or I’ll scream again.’

“I did her. I thrummed her parts like rubber bands. Right there in the bus where they could throw you off for lighting a cigarette or talking to the driver. Then, when it was over and I was thinking, well now we can relax, she still held on. She did me again and I did her again. Then she started to tell me jokes, and that was the way we traveled through the night — me with my hand in her pants and her playing with my cock and ears and touching my teeth lightly with her fingers so that I could taste my own semen, and telling me jokes. Dumb little jokes like a kid might know, not even dirty, just silly riddles and ‘Knock Knock’ stories and dopey limericks and one-liners about ‘the little moron.’ She knew them all and whispered them to me as if they were love words. After a while I thought she might be in show business. I asked her that.

“She put her head down shyly. ‘I thought that’s the way people speak.’

“‘Maybe it is,” I said.

“When it grew light I sat with a newspaper across my lap until my pants dried. I put the paper down and saw that some of the print had come off on my fly. People stopped to read my crotch as they passed by.

“‘We’ll get off the bus,’ I whispered. ‘We’ll find a tourist cabin. We’ll make love properly. You’ll tell me all your best jokes.’ “‘We’re miles from anywhere. We have no motorcar.’ “‘Then let it get dark. I can’t stand sitting next to you and not being able to touch you.’ “‘Shh.’

“‘I mean it. This daylight is a bad business.’ “We introduced ourselves. ‘Marshall Maine,’ I told her. “‘Miriam Desebour,’ she said, ‘pleased to meet you.’

“Miriam was on her way to a convalescent home in Morristown, New Jersey, where she had taken a job as a practical nurse. I had intended to go home to Pittsburgh, but I went on with Miriam instead. She told her employers we were married, that I had been one of her patients, a sort of invalid who would never recover, and they accepted this.

“Do you know about Morristown? It’s a very peculiar place — the languishment capital of America, maybe the world. It’s the major industry. There are no famous clinics or hospitals, but there are schools for the deaf and the famous Seeing Eye Institute. There are convalescent homes like the one that hired Miriam, and old people’s homes, and a farm for crippled children, and a sort of plantation where the retarded children of the wealthy spend their whole lives. There were people whose plastic surgeons had botched their operations and who felt they were too ugly ever to go home. There were ‘training schools’ from which few ever graduated, and old gassed soldiers from the First World War. There were other veterans, men who came to Morristown to learn how to use their artificial limbs but never got the hang of it somehow. To my knowledge there were no lepers, but one of the persistent rumors was that a colony of them lived somewhere in the hills around the city. (I think the occasional appearance in the streets of the failed plastic-surgery patients gave rise to these rumors.) Many had lost limbs. There was lameness of all sorts, and it occurred to me that to be without a finger or an arm or a leg was a stunning kind of nakedness. (I thought of public exposures, emergencies of bust zipper and collapsed elastic. The needles and pins industry in Morristown must have been enormous, great patch fortunes might have been made there — fabulous thread mines in the Morristown hills. Indeed, the town did seem to have more shoe-repair shops and tailors than one would see in a city its size, and now that I think of it, it seems to me that something in the hearts of these people caused them to carry about all the scissors and thimbles and spot sewing equipment I saw.) It seemed to me that all the afflicted people of the world were stuffed into Morristown. It had all it could handle, a cornered market of gimps, a secular Lourdes, but not, withal, ungay. We were a community of arrested diseases, patient patients, developers of fortitude and resignation — all the loser virtues, all the good-sport resources.

“It was something to sit in those Morristown drugstores and see the doting purchases of the healthy, magazines for the relatives they were soon to abandon, cosmetics to make them presentable, pens, stationery, portable radios — all the sick man’s sick-room detritus. It may have been a sign of my lassitude at this time that sitting in those drugstores as the cash register rang up the sales I thought no more about it than that it ultimately takes very little to live, that the desert isle and the beachcomber are worthy fictions. I owned a radio myself, of course, and listened to the Morristown stations. I wonder why I never realized while I was there that they were the same as radio stations anywhere. Probably the station managers thought the shut-ins wanted the world on normal terms. But nobody does.

”I lived in the home with Miriam, in the staff quarters, which were really no different from the facilities elsewhere in the home. There were rubber treads in the bottom of our bathtub, and a vertical hand rail screwed into the tile. There were conveniences all about the room, closets deep enough to store wheelchairs and whirlpool baths, a customized feel to the special heights of the furniture, defenses against arthritic stoop and arthritic stretch. We slept in a double bed with hospital sides — I’m just a prisoner of love. There were no locks on any of the doors, not even the door to the toilet. And the coils of our hotplate were a bright, cautionary fire red even when the electric was off. I have not been entirely comfortable in any room I’ve lived in since. Once one knows the hazards …

“That my physical appearance did not certify me an invalid was no special problem. Many of the people there seemed as healthy as myself. In fact there was an entire population of the unscarred: men and women whose lameness was in the blood, ruddy six-foot fellows as hollowed out as chocolate Easter bunnies, their stony-muscled arms piled high with blood pressure, their wrists with racing, warbled pulse. We were — I speak now not only for the community but for myself as well (‘as well,’ ha ha)—weaklings, our strengthlessness imposing an obligation on others, so that it exerted its force too, as everything alive does.

“Miriam, who knew my real condition, labored to make my assumed one come true. She made tight hospital corners on the very sheets we made love on and kept a bedpan for me within easy reach of the bed, and there was always a full glass of ice water on the nightstand. She sometimes gave me bed baths, first outlining one side of my body with towels and pushing the towels against it tightly like one beginning a sand construction, then pulling my pajama bottoms down—‘Can you raise your hips a moment?’—the length of the bed, producing them from beneath the sheet at the foot like a minor trick of magic. ‘Turn on your side, please,’ she’d say. ‘Can you turn on your side?’ Then, arranging the sheet so that just my back and the upper part of my buttocks were exposed — I felt prepared, lovingly set up, set off, appetizing as vegetable-ringed meat on a plank — she would begin to rub my back with the warm, soaped cloth. She spoke as she worked, peaceful, passive monologues, her voice more distant than her hands which turned and rubbed and stroked, telling me not the jokes now — she had run out of jokes, though she was always careful to tell me the new ones her patients told her — but about her life before she met me.

“‘I have to help people,’ Miriam said. ‘I thought I’d be a schoolteacher. In Iowa you don’t have to be a college graduate. You can get a temporary certificate so long as you’re enrolled in college and earn at least six credits a year. A lot of teachers never graduate. They just sign up for summer school year after year, but I’ve known some who manage to save enough so they can take off every third year or so and maybe get their degrees in eight or nine years. Of course, those who get positions in Ames or Iowa City have an advantage: they can teach and go to the university at the same time. Those are the plum jobs, though. They’re very rare.’

“‘Mnn.’

“‘When I graduated high school I did teach for a year. Fourth grade. I liked it very well. It was very interesting and I enjoyed being around the children, but you know — when it comes right down to it that’s not really helping people, teaching school. I mean, kids aren’t in trouble, not even if they’re poor, not even if they don’t always get enough to eat. I mean, they’re kids, you know? Kids can play. I guess really the only kind of trouble people can get into is to be sick.

“‘I mean, their bodies can be in trouble. That’s really all that can happen to a person. I’ve always been strong. I’m very thankful for that. I love being strong. I mean, if we were to wrestle I’d probably win. I wouldn’t try to hurt you but I’d win. Here.’ She handed me the washcloth. ‘Do your private property.’ She giggled. ‘That’s what we call it. Or “family jewels.” Isn’t that silly? Sometimes we say that to the men.’

“‘You do my private property, Miriam.’

“‘Don’t be wicked, Marshall.’

“‘Miriam, you do my family jewels.’

“‘Now I’ve already spoken to you, young man.’

“‘Do my cock, Miriam. You do my prick. Please, Miriam, do my wang wang.’

“‘Marshall!’

“‘You said you liked to help people.’

“‘People in trouble. You’re not in trouble.’

“I turned on my back. ‘There’s trouble and there’s trouble.’

“‘No,’ Miriam said firmly. ‘Whenever I wash you down there you just come all over the sheets and there’s nothing left for me.’ She looked down at me and laughed. ‘Look at you. You’re just like one of the old men around here with their big old things.’

“‘Do the old men get hard?’ I was interested; I hadn’t known this.

“‘Of course they do. It’s a reflex, silly. There are some men around here who get an erection when I feed them.’

“‘Who? Who does?’

“‘Never mind. That’s a nurse’s confidence.’

“‘Who does? Who gets an erection when you feed him?’

“‘Never mind. You’ll never get me to violate my professional ethics.’

“‘What about enemas? Do they ever get one when you give them an enema?’

“‘Enemas too,’ Miriam said.

“‘Jesus.’

“‘Turn around. I’ll do you back there.’

“Gently she reamed me. When Miriam had finished one of these baths you could eat off me. Then we made love. Me and Nurse. Calmly, not like on the bus, but languidly and with long graceful glidings like paddling canoes in dreams. Afterward I lay back with my hands behind my head, and soon it was me talking. I told her about being on the radio.

“‘Mnn,’ Miriam said, for neither of us were much at discussion. There was give and take but it was of a certain kind, like the rules of service in a ping-pong game. I’d serve five times, then Miriam would. It’s the way people who will grow closer speak while they still don’t know each other very well.

“Miriam talked only when she was doing something — I suspect it was a habit she picked up from her rounds, a compulsion to fill up the silence imposed on patients whose blood pressures or temperatures are being taken. There was something curiously polite, not to say efficient, about this habit, as though language were one more service she rendered. For my part I seemed to speak only when spent, as after lovemaking.

“Miriam was making us some bouillon on the hotplate. She was naked despite the fact that there was no lock on our door; this, together with the domestic tour she made about the room — fetching the kettle and bouillon cubes, going to the bathroom sink for water— seemed very erotic to me, like the establishing of the story line in a stag film.

“‘My father was an unhealthy man,’ Miriam said. ‘I mean, he was without health. His heart was bad — he’d had three heart attacks, two of them massive — but there were other things: his liver, migraine— more than that even. He’d had operations. But even before he was sick physically, there was something delicate about him mentally. He was very tender-hearted. I mean, he couldn’t take bad news. It didn’t just make him unhappy as it would others; it affected him physically. That’s what his illness was—bad news, bad news chipping away at his health. It was a sort of erosion.

“‘We’re a large family — from Cedar Rapids originally. We moved across the state to Simms, Iowa, because it was easier to shield Daddy from bad news there. We were away from the family, my father’s and mother’s brothers and sisters, all of them getting along in years, and all their old friends too, whose illnesses and deaths could be managed better than if we were still with them right there in Cedar Rapids. Now that the news could come through the mail instead of over the telephone, we could plan how best to shield it from Father.

“‘But not only physical things affected Daddy. Bad news could come in all sorts of ways — like if my sister or I got a bad grade in a subject, or if business was bad. Father had a little money and was a silent partner in a few small businesses — a grocery store, a barbershop, a drycleaner, that sort of thing — so that except in boom times there was always some bad news coming in from one business or the other. But even political things could upset him, current events from all over the world. My God, how that man had sympathies! Mother tells about the time she had to keep the news of the Lindbergh kidnapping from Father. She just cut it out of the paper — the big front-page headlines and stories and pictures, everything. “Here, what’s this?” my father asked her when he saw his paper all cut up. “Oh, that,” Mother told him, “that’s just a recipe I cut out of the paper.” “From the front page?” Father asked. “Well, the second,” Mother said. “The second?” “It’s a very newsworthy recipe,” Mother said, “it’s a big sensation all over the country. It’s for a good cheap eggless cake.” “Eggs are high?” Father said. “Yes,” said Mother, “very expensive.” “Oh, that’s terrible,” Father said, clutching his chest. “But we’re saved by the new recipe,” Mother tried to reassure him, but Father still held his chest and had grown very pale. “What’s wrong?” asked Mother. “I’m not thinking about the cakes,” groaned Father, “I’m worried about the omelets.”

“‘Well, you can see how it was, how we had to shield him. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except that he was an unrelenting questioner. He knew the harm it did him but he couldn’t help himself. He was like someone flirting with a bad tooth, teasing and maneuvering it until it hurts.

“‘We had a little dog, the cutest little thing. Well, it was my dog but everyone in the family loved it. We were always petting it and making up to it, even Father. Maybe we loved Roger too much because he never really enjoyed being outdoors. Why should he? He had everything he wanted in the house. Well, of course a dog has to go out sometime, if only to make number one or number two, so we would send Roger out once in the morning and once again at night. That was one of the good things — if it was ever too cold or rainy to walk him, why we could send him out by himself without being afraid he’d run away. He’d do his duty and come right back, whining to be let in. But one time when we let him go out he didn’t come right back. Mother and my sister Rose and I were concerned but we didn’t want to alarm Father so we arranged it that two of us would go to bed and the other would keep a vigil for Roger. Of course we couldn’t go outside and yell for him because Father might hear that and then where would we be?

“‘My sister was the one who stayed up, for Roger was my dog, remember, and Father might get suspicious if he came down at night and saw me. Also, we weren’t sure I could fool Father; I might not be able to hide my concern. Well, he did get up and come down that night. He saw the light and came into the kitchen where Rose was drinking from the glass of milk which Mother had cleverly thought to pour out for her so she’d have something to do in case Father came down. “I just can’t seem to sleep tonight, Father,” Rose told him, “I thought this milk might relax me.” “Is something wrong. Rose? Why can’t you sleep?” Father asked her. “No, nothing’s wrong, Daddy,” Rose said. “You know how you get sometimes, you just start thinking about things and you can’t seem to fall asleep.”

“‘That was exactly the wrong thing to tell Daddy, of course; right away he wanted to know what things. Rose made up some stuff about the school elections to tell him. She was in charge of publicity for the candidate put up by her home room and she didn’t know where she was going to get the paints and cardboard for the posters. Well, that troubled Father and he had a little angina pain even though both knew the elections were a good two months off, but as Rose pointed out it wasn’t the end of the world, and that seemed to calm him some. But then he started to ask where everybody was: were Mother and I in bed, and where was Roger? Well, she had just let him out, Rose said. This satisfied Father for it was a natural thing to do, and so he went back to bed.

“‘Roger still wasn’t back in the morning, but fortunately Mother, who rarely was up before Father, this time was, and she told him she’d just let Roger out. That started something in our house, I can tell you. From that time on poor Mother and Rose and I had to take turns rising before Father just so’s one of us could say we’d just let Roger out. The trouble was, Father usually got up at dawn. We were always tired now because we had to take turns staying up late too. This hurt us in the alertness department. I mean, it was self-defeating, for without sleep we just weren’t sharp enough to withstand Father’s assaults on us for information. It was wintertime — a cold one in Iowa that year — and suddenly it seemed as if all our relatives and friends were coming down with everything all at once. The three of us were always so tired now that we didn’t know what we were saying and would spill the beans to Father accidentally.

“‘It wasn’t our fault, but the bad news would just tumble out all over the place and there didn’t seem to be anything we could do about it. It was just awful that we couldn’t shield him any more, and believe me it took its toll on that dear man. He lost weight and had pain all the time and his parameters — pressure, pulse, eye track — just went from bad to worse. About all we could manage was to keep Roger’s disappearance from him, and this at a time when we’d given up hope of the dog’s ever returning. For that matter, Father was so generally dispirited and debilitated by now that he rarely ever asked after him. We wondered if it might not be better just to find some way of breaking the news to Father, have done with it altogether, and then maybe manage to get enough control of ourselves to try to deal with the routine day-to-day shielding of Father that the situation demanded. But of course we were too far into it now. We couldn’t just say we’d lied, and we certainly couldn’t tell him one morning that the dog had just gone off. Father had too much sense for that; he’d have seen that Roger had been missing for weeks.

“‘Well, the way it turned out we didn’t have to choose any of these alternatives, but frankly I thought it was all over with us when Father himself brought up the subject. “I don’t know, Miriam,” he said, “I just never see Roger any more. The dog is always out. He never used to be like that before this damned winter. Oh, these are hard times, Mim. I’m hearing so much bad news lately I’m worried that there might be something wrong with Roger’s bladder”—and then he clutched with both hands at the small of his back as though he’d just felt a fierce jolt in his own bladder.

“‘I told Mother and Rose what Father had said and we agreed that we had to do something fast. Well, the very next night Mother went up to Father and said, “You know, Earl, Mim and Rosie have given what you said about Roger yesterday quite a lot of thought, and Mim agreed that maybe it’s just too cold for Roger here. We did get him as a pup from that nice man that time we went down to Florida, remember. Anyway, Mim’s decided that Roger might be better off if he lived with her Cousin Ernestine down in Birmingham, where the climate’s not so harsh. We know how tender-hearted you are, Earl, and we didn’t want to burden you unnecessarily with a sad leavetaking, so we’ve already been down to the depot and shipped Roger off.” Well, it caused Father some pain to realize that I’d given up my dog, but after a while, when he saw the thing in perspective, his spirits began to brighten, and the rest of us felt better too because now we could get more sleep. In no time at all we were able to cope and shield Father again from the bad news that seemed to come from everywhere that winter.

“‘It was marvelous to see Father grow lively again. I can’t say that he recovered his health, but not having to hear bad news all the time did restore a certain confidence and vigor to the man. And the winter too seemed to be declining in its fierceness, the back of the cold spell had been broken, and though it wasn’t actually warm, the terrible snow had begun to melt — though here and there there were still high drifts and all the curbs were piled with the stuff. It wasn’t just that we knew how to handle the bad news better now that Roger was off our mind; it was that the bad news itself fell off. One day Father even felt well enough to go out for a walk. It was fun to see him in so fine a fettle — Father was a marvelous man to be with when he was feeling good — and I joined him. He was so cheerful that he didn’t seem to be the same man, and once he even bent over to gather up some snow for a snowball. I thought he might hurt himself doing a thing like that but he was up again as spry as any boy and threw the snowball all the way across the street to hit the tree there a lovely bull’s-eye. This made him so happy he couldn’t contain himself and he just stepped bold as you please into a pile of snow at the curb, but then he got this horrible look on his face, and he dropped down on his hands and knees and began uncovering whatever it was he had felt in the snow. Well, it was Roger’s frozen body and when he stepped on it he’d snapped its neck.

“‘I had to carry Father back to the house on my back, and I think he must have been dead by the time we got there. I took his body in through the back door because I knew Mother and Rose would be in the parlor, and out of habit I didn’t think they should see this.’

“The funny thing is,” Dick Gibson told his audience, “I don’t remember hearing any of this. I mean, I must have or how would I know it, but I don’t recall much of anything that went on in that room the months I was there. Was I silent the whole time she spoke? Was it a monologue? Did I ever drink the bouillon? Did Miriam get into bed with me during her story? Did I fall asleep? What happened?

“I wasn’t in love with Miriam. It’s more probable, though unlikely, that she was in love with me. She made me comfortable, more comfortable than I’d ever been in my life. Perhaps because she was a nurse. Nurses have lousy reputations because of what they do for men. I mean the bedpans, the enemas and the pubic shaves, I mean the deathbed vigils and hearing folks scream. I could be myself with Miriam, vent my gas, kiss with a bad taste in my mouth, grunt over my bowels in the toilet. So when I ask if I could have fallen asleep it isn’t out of fear of not being on my mettle as a lover. I was in a trance, a catalepsy, a swoon, a brown study, a neutral funk. I was languid, gravid, the thousand-pound kid in Miriam’s room, sensitized as human soup. And if I heard her at all it was in my ilium I listened — as deep as that — harkened in my coccyx, my pajama strings all ears, and my buttons and the Kleenex under my pillow.

“‘What is wrong with you, Mr. Desebour, may I ask?’ Doctor Pasco, the Home’s young director wanted to know.

“‘I have the falling sickness, Dr. Pasco,’ I told him lazily, dizzily. ‘I have the petit mal.’ Nor was I lying. I was in the cataleptic’s ‘aura’ state. It must have been something like that.

“Miriam noticed my passivity.

“‘Too many bed baths,’ I told her.

“‘We’ll cut them out,’ she said. ‘Are you bored here? Are you tired of me?’

“‘Christ, no. I swear it. If I didn’t know you I’d tune you in and listen to you on the radio.’

“It was the truth. That was exactly how I listened to Miriam — as if she were some new kind of radio personality. Once I realized this I tried to study her inflections, but she had no inflections. I sank deeper and deeper into my desuetude, the pit of my stomach spreading till I was all stomach pit.

“One night she asked me to leave.

“‘Just like that?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘I won’t leave. I like it here. I won’t leave until I unlock the secret of your voice,’ I told her, yawning.

“‘What are you talking about, Marshall? Why are you so difficult?’ ‘ “Please, Miriam, let’s make love. Then fix us bouillon and tell me a story.’

“‘I am not the Story Lady, Marshall. I’ve told you, I want this ended. You must get out.’

“‘If you make me leave Dr. Pasco will know we’re not married. He’ll throw you out.’

“‘We could say we’re getting a divorce.’

“‘I won’t agree to a divorce, Miriam.’

“‘We’ll see,’ she said.

“I became a laughing stock; Miriam made me a laughing stock. Oh boy, the laughs at my expense, last laughs and best laughs, up one sleeve and down the other. I was their butt, their asshole I was. Miriam’s strategy was simple: she cuckolded me. It probably didn’t amount to much more than washing the private property of a few of the chronics. From the talk I think there may have been some hanky panky with the man who came when she gave him enemas. (He was a nice enough fellow, unremarkable except for a peculiar inability to pronounce certain rs sounds which, in his mouth, came out tch.) The place fed on scandal; it was good therapy for those chronics. I could have blown the whistle on her; I could have gone up to them and said ‘Look here, I’m no cuckold. Miriam’s not my wife,’ but then I would have seemed more pathetic than foolish. It’s one thing to lose control of your wife, but quite another not to be able to handle your mistress. Besides, I hadn’t yet broken the secret code of her voice.

“But it was the strangest thing I have ever endured. For one thing, we still screwed, more than ever probably, for Miriam was determined to make her adultery seem real, and to do that she needed to preserve the illusion of our marriage which could now be maintained only by the further illusion that she was deceiving me. How complicated it all was. For the first time in my life I was involved with someone who actually had motives. I even had motives myself. (How motiveless the world is, when you stop to consider, how unconspiratorial is the ordinary bent of humanity, how straightforward that bent. Drive drives the world, simple inclination is its capstan.)

“Another thing was my standing now with the patients. How they clowned with me, how they made jokes with their joke! For instance, they would pretend that I had this enormous dick. The source of this idea, I suspect, was just the fact that of all the people in the home— patients and staff — Miriam and I were the only two who cohabited, so that even before Miriam made cuckoldry with the enema man, an aura had built up around us. We stood apart from the rest of those lame ducks and can’t-cut-the-mustards, though they didn’t see those bed- baths in the double bed with the hospital sides. The conceits they invented were elaborate and insane:

“‘Ah, Mr. Desebour, pull up a couple of chairs, why don’t you?’

“‘He’s in for rupture,’ one man liked to explain to his visitors, ‘from carrying great weights.’

“‘Is it a fact, Mr. Desebour, that you had a limb amputated in order to accommodate your incredible cock, and that you now wear a pant leg over that cock and fill up your shoe with its foreskin?’

“‘No, that is not a fact,’ I said, and they laughed the harder. Everyone laughed. The man who got hard-ons when Miriam fed him laughed; the Sherpa who had injured his spine in an Everest expedition, and whose employer — a rich Southerner who had taught the Sherpa English — brought the fellow to Morristown to spend the rest of his life in the Home, he laughed.

“‘Down home,’ the Sherpa said, ‘there was this good old boy. Now he had a piece on him and that piece, well sir, it was big but it was cuter’n a speckled pup under a red wagon. Folks down home said he could climb it. Whoeee, have mercy, have mercy. My daddy told me that old boy went up it like a nigger chased up a tree by a li’l ole ghost. I ain’t sayin’ a thing ’gainst Marshall’s here, I’m just tellin’ you all what my daddy reported.’

“‘Down home, down home,’ I hissed at him irritably. ‘You’re from Tibet. Why don’t you say up home?’

“I tell you, it’s quite extraordinary to be laughed at — Bob Hope couldn’t have touched me in those days — quite extraordinary to know that wherever you go you are something less than the least person there. Not to inspire disfiguring envy or fury or hatred but only merriment is a doom. I had the power to change a mood simply by entering a room. At the sight of me, whatever had been the frictions and cross-currents before, there was now a unity. And it didn’t matter what people said to me. I mean this two ways. Many of the patients confided private things about themselves to me, what they regarded as my inhumanity lending me the immunity of clowns — as one fucks one’s wife in front of the dog. You don’t understand this, do you? There have been cuckolds before. Why, right in your own neighborhood, you think, down your street and up your block, and who laughs, who doesn’t go out of his way to be kind to the guy’s children, circumspect with him? I don’t know, perhaps they smelled something on me that was inhuman really or they wouldn’t have acted like that.

“They laughed at me openly but never brought Miriam’s or the enema man’s name into it. As a matter of fact, he was the only one who didn’t find me amusing. He even tried to befriend me. The enema man had had two or three divorces himself and knew the rough weathers of love. He told me that this was why he was in the home, and why he took enemas; his frustration in his marriages had somehow affected his intestines and kept him almost constantly blocked. But he was nice and tried to comfort me. He put his arm about me consolingly. ‘Don’t depend on women, kid. Forget the broads. They’re poison. Put money in your poitch.’

“‘That’s easy for you to say.’

“‘Not so easy, not so easy. They took their toll. Agh, none of ’em are any good. They’re woitch than a coitch.’

“‘All of them?’

“‘Every last one. They’d be better off dead in a hoitch.’ I nodded. ‘Kid, good talking to you. I better beat it back to my room, it’s time for my enema. Hey, did you see the noitch?’”

“I told him where he would find Miriam. I marveled at my helplessness, astonished to recognize that the conventional parameters of character applied, amazed that a person who had been on the radio; who had traveled and lived alone could not handle himself in a pinch. Why, I should have let them have it for laughing; I should have set Dr. Pasco straight or wrung Miriam’s neck. Now I don’t know. Now I am surprised I was surprised, for there I was, sidetracked in Morristown and living incognito with a nurse in a rest home, things too strange for your apprentice personality and one-track soul. How could I have known better who had gotten every idea I ever had from what they permitted to be spoken on the air? Why, my greenness was written in the stars. It’s a wonder I didn’t cry, break out in sweats and pimples, a wonder I didn’t sulk in corners or imagine them all at my funeral. I was little more than a teen-ager. How did I not go mad at that first feel on the bus; what kept me from proposing marriage then and there, the first time I felt her hand on my cock?”

But not all of this was for the warmup. Actually, Dick Gibson got no further than the part where he began to describe the sort of place Morristown was. At that point he became conscious of a stirring in the audience, not a restlessness so much as a new interest. He looked behind him — his instinct unerring here, danger always approaching from the rear — where he saw Frances Langford and Colonna and Bob Hope himself. After a while Langford and Colonna went off to their places behind the curtain, but Mr. Hope remained, politely listening at first but increasingly puzzled to know where this was leading, and then at last visibly concerned that all this talk of invalids and cripples could hurt the show. In a moment he signaled for the curtain to be raised, and there was the band in its places and Colonna and Vera Vague and Miss Langford and the rest of the cast in theirs, and Bob Hope came over to Gibson, whispered something in his ear, relieved him of the warmup microphone and did a fast half-dozen snappy minutes of emergency material.

The reaction of the audience was interesting. It sent up a courteous massed awww of disappointment when it saw that Dick was not to be allowed to finish his story, but then responded immediately and uproariously to the first of Hope’s jokes. But it was Dick Gibson himself who laughed loudest and cheered hardest. As a professional he understood Hope’s problem, of course, but there was something else — not sycophancy, not fear that he would lose his job, but his sense that Hope was racing the clock, up against time, the big one. In all the years he had been in radio he had never quite had this sense of time, had never seen it as a dimension in itself, more, a battleground, the battleground, and not only the battleground but the enemy as well. It was radio that took time on at its own game, scheduling it, slicing it into fifteen- and thirty- and sixty-minute slices, its single master. Forget railroads and buses and planes, forget appointments at the highest levels and the synchronized intricacies of combat and athletics, all you-cut-here, he-fades-there arrangements. Only radio and time were inexorable, and here was a hero who stood up in it, as one stands up in the sea, and splashed about in it, used it, perhaps one day would die in it. Hence he cheered and laughed, little less than literally wild when the director in the control room threw his finger and the red On the Air sign burned bright and Mr. Hope, script in hand, ready behind the stand-up microphone, took his cue.

Afterward Dick Gibson told the rest of his story to Joe Glober and Mel Bell and Jacomo Miller and a few of the people in Skinnay Ennis’s band when they all went out to a roadhouse just outside St. Paul. He was a little in his cups — Hope had spoken to him personally, assuring him that his approach was fresh, and that he had never heard anything like it: “Imagine,” Hope had said, turning to the man who worked the applause sign, “not to glut an audience with jokes, but merely to depress them so that when the laughs come the people are actually grateful and laugh harder”—and so perhaps his voice was just a bit louder than usual. But louder or not, he was at first addressing just the seven or eight at his table. Only later did he shift over and gradually raise his voice so that he could be heard finally throughout the entire roadhouse, doing his own version of a broadcast from the Copa Lounge, Barry Gray sans microphone and guests — closed-circuit radio, the radio of confrontation, the shout network — and in his cups or not, never forgetting time as he now understood it.

“Listen … the old clock on the wall … All right, quickly, then.

“There was a picnic. Patients and their guests, staff and their supposititious husbands.

“By now the whole town was talking. The grapevine of cripples had put out the word on me and Miriam and the enema man. In the drugstore the pharmacist jokingly offered to sell me enema poison.

“‘I have no enemamies,’ I told him, and it was as if I had broken the bank at Monte Carlo, goodsportwise.

“So the day of the picnic finally arrived and all Morristown turned out. The crème de la crème. The blindees, the deafoes and dummies — see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The amputees, the orphans, the folks of ruined blood, as well as your general all-purpose invalids. All of them loved to crash the other guy’s picnic. So that Morristown had a season: summer. The deaf would eat the blind man’s chicken, and see the colors of the blind man’s fruit, and the blind heard the fsst of the deaf man’s beer. The amputees licked the orphans’ candy canes. But our picnic was even more heavily attended than one could have expected, and it may have been our scandal that made the difference.

“I had been blithe for the man at the drugstore, and now I was blithe for Morristown.

“‘Mr. Desebour, I’ve heard so much about you,’ giggled Mr. Latrobe, the blind kennel master of the guide dogs at the institute.

“‘Nice to see you here, sir,’ I told him.

“‘Misrer huff De-se-booorgh, huff huff,’ growled the deaf Mrs. Garish in that machine-like, exhalated voice of the trained mute, ‘I’ve beeenn huff look-ingg forwardt huff to meering you.’

“‘Good talking to you, ma’m. I’ve heard so much about you.’

“‘Hi, Mr. Desebour,’ said Paul the orphan.

“‘Hello, son.’

”I entered all the contests and potato-raced my heart out, finishing in the money. No mean feat, for a lot of these fellows had been born with only one leg and until you’ve potato-raced against a congenital one-legged man in a sack you haven’t potato-raced. I won at chug-a- lug and lagging pennies and swamped them at horseshoes and wheelchair racing, and in the invalid decathlon I was best. Cheating, entered as a patient but using my health, earnest, shooting to kill like a father burning them in to the other guy’s kid in the PTA softball. Flinging off my passivity for once, I pushed past the others in the human wheelbarrow, my hands and arms furious as pistons, nearly pulling the poor guy over who held my legs. Concentrating, concentrating, steady as a surgeon I balanced the peas on my knife as the peas of the spastics went flying off in all directions. There, I thought, dusting my hands, nonpareil at the picnic, take that and that and that.

“Only Miriam knew my real situation — unless, of course, in the throes of passion with the enema man she had disclosed our secret— but the invalids themselves, thinking I was one of them, would have made me their champion then and there. I could have been their Thorpe, I tell you.

“And a strange thing happened. I sensed that they had begun to turn against the enema man, against Miriam. I saw the enema man — I had beaten that constipate in hard-boiled-egg eating — sitting off by himself on a blanket beside the horseshoe pits, a book in his lap, and looking full, stuffed, his face flushed, his skin itself gorged, oppressed by the ruthless satiety of his life. I went over, blithe but burning.

“‘Reading?’

“‘Yeah. Pass the time.’

“‘What have you got there?’ I bent down and read the book’s title. ‘Ah, poetry. A few voitches, is it?’

“I drifted off toward the lake and began to walk round it. Miriam caught up with me. ‘Where are you going?’

“‘All that exercise. It’s hot.’

“‘Yes. You were very determined.’

“‘Give ’em something to talk about.’

“‘When will you leave?’ she asked after a while. This is getting crazy.’

“‘When I unlock the secret of your voice. First I have to unlock the secret of your voice.’

“‘You keep saying that. What does it mean?’

“‘How you talk. How peaceful it makes me.’

“We had stopped following the lake and had turned on to a footpath that led into the woods. It was very cool among the trees but in a few hundred yards we came to a clearing in the center of which was an enormous stone mansion. It was strange to come upon it like that.

“‘What the hell is that? Who lives there? My God, you don’t suppose we’ve found the leper colony, do you?’

“‘Mrs. Garish,’ Miriam said.

“‘What?’

“‘Mrs. Garish lives there. It’s the Institute for the Deaf.’

“It was very hot in the sun. ‘It looks cool.’

“‘It’s open to the public. Do you want to go inside?’

“I shrugged but followed Miriam into the large central hall of the building.

“Miriam told the woman who came out to greet us that we were from the home. ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said. ‘It’s important to understand the other fellow’s problem. Look around. Be sure to see the dead room. You’ll want to see the dead room.’

“‘The dead room?’

“‘We call it that. We do experiments there. It’s 99.98 per cent free of reflected sound. The telephone company built it for us. It’s supposed to be the quietest place in the world.’

“Miriam and I walked through the various classrooms and poked desultorily at some of the special equipment. Then, at the end of a long, carpeted hallway, we came to the ‘dead room.’

“We pulled open the heavy door and went inside. It was the strangest room I have ever been in. It may have been about twenty-five by thirty-five feet — about the size of a large drawing room — though it was difficult to tell, for no two walls were exactly parallel. The walls and ceiling were broken up in a zigzag pattern and honeycombed with cells of differing shapes and depths like thousands of opened mouths. We walked on a spongy, corklike substance thicker than any carpet.

“The silence was astonishing, a hushed chorus from the mouths of the walls. It was like a darkness. Have you ever been in a room that is totally dark? Late at night, say, and awakened in a strange place, and for a moment you don’t know where you are or how they got you there, and you’re groping for the door? Well, the things you brush past there in the dark — a chair or a wardrobe — these are like blind spots. But you can hear them, hear the blind spots, as if all objects give off this signal, the sonar of material reality felt, sensed in the extinct ear, held in the vestigial eye, prickling across the bone of your forehead like the electric touch of a girl you wish loved you. Well, it was something like that, the silence. Wait, double it!

“For the first few moments neither of us spoke or even looked at each other, as people do who spot a marvel. It was all either of us could do to take it all in, all we could do perhaps to get over the inevitable touch of the sad in the presence of all that black mufflement.

“I spoke first. I don’t remember what I said, but my voice was small, squeezed, not unloud so much as descreet, anechoic, so that sound as such — walking, the noise of our clothes, our breathing — was meaningless, probably unidentifiable, swallowed in the room’s million mouths. Only words, however clipped, maintained their existence in this room of aural blind spots and thick silence, only the ideas behind words. In that sense the room was intellectual, a place for concepts. Here no teacups could ever tinkle, no spoon rattle in a glass; there could be no chatter, no din, and the report of a gun would be as insignificant as the clink of two glasses touching politely in a toast. There was no hacking or rustle or hiss or whoosh or crackle or crepitation or affricative churn, no tocsin, no knock, no thump at the door or rain on the roof. All that was not language died at its source or was reduced to harmless velvet plips. God might have made the place.

“‘Talk.’

“‘What should I say?’

“‘Speak.’

“‘I don’t know what to say.’

“‘Let’s hear it,’ I commanded.

“‘I don’t know what you want me to say. I … Be nice to me. I’m the one they laugh at—I am. They know what I do. I’m the one they’re laughing at. They think you’re a cripple like themselves.’

“‘In the beginning was the Word. Say.’

” I don’t know what you want!’

“‘To unlock the secret of your voice. Just that.’

“‘It will end by my being fired. I’ll lose my job. All I want is to help people. Why won’t you go?’ She was crying, though I didn’t hear this so much as see it.

“I recalled her stories after we made love. ‘Stop. That’s enough. Eureka, I’ve found it. Thank you.’

“‘I wish I never sat next to you on that bus.’

“‘Now I know the secret. I’m leaving.’

“‘The secret,’ she said contemptuously.

“‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I knew you had one. Now I know what it is.’

“‘What is it?’ she asked dully.

“‘You were naked. I’m a sucker for the first person singular.’”

Dick Gibson paused. He leaned back, appearing to rest. “Quick,” he said, suddenly leaning forward again. “Let me see your watch.” He took up someone’s wrist and brought it to his face. “You’re left- handed,” he said disgustedly, flinging the wrist away. “The numbers are upside down.” He grabbed someone else’s wrist, bent down over it so that his nose almost touched the man’s watch, and studying the dial, he figured to himself furiously. “Ah,” he said breathlessly, “one hour and seventeen minutes. I just made it.”

He was in Newark that evening, out on a sleeper that night, did not speak to strangers and arrived in Pittsburgh the next morning.

It was strange to be in a big city again — even stranger than to be home — and he realized that except for layovers he had not been in a really large city since he’d left home. It was fitting. Small towns were the historic province of apprenticeship — villages, townships, county seats, flocculent, unincorporated tufts of population — these backwaters were your unheeding witnesses to your new processes and evolving styles. Just the same he felt expansive, auspicion’s loved object, young Lochinvar come riding out of the west on a round trip.

As he left Union Station and looked up Mellon Boulevard at downtown Pittsburgh, he was tremendously excited. He perceived with a sovereign clarity, shipping impression like a lovely cargo, and what he saw was to stay with him all his life as the very essence of the city. He admired the black, thick buildings, the dark windows like glass postage or framed deep water. There were high projecting cornices at the top stories like the peaks of caps, and he tried to look in under them to the careful scrollwork, distinctive as the flow of a hairline. Shifting his gaze he watched the smooth, shiny trolley rails that, blocks off, flowed into each other like twin rivers of perspective. At a nearby corner a snagged lace of electric lines floated above the traffic. He sighted along a row of canopies that unfurled above the big display windows of a department store in a parade of identical angles, trawling on the bright and windless morning a still fringe of scallops. He looked up the tall, fluted shaft of an iron light standard. It seemed monumental to him, something to light up outer space. He waited for a traffic light to change and crossed the street, moving with a certain awe toward a bank like a pagan temple, its brass and marble ornament engraved like money.

It pleased him to be in this city of just under a half-million, a large American city of the first class with a major league ball club (in a state with three major league teams; no state had more; only New York had as many), three great daily newspapers, and eleven radio stations (all the networks plus KDKA, perhaps the greatest independent in the country). He congratulated himself. Depression or no, soot or no — an industrial pall hung on the buildings like a painted shadow, but it was not unpleasant; it seemed an earnest of the city’s value — it was a magnificent place, as finished and fixed for him as a city in Europe. Yet he felt a twinge too, realizing it was merely his home, that he belonged there only in that sense, that despite his years away from it, he was simply its citizen. No great company had called him there, nor had he, prospector-like, shouldered his way through Indian hazard to seek its veins and work its lodes. In this sense he felt it less his than the last traveling salesman’s off the train with him that morning. By the time he was settled in a cab he was already down a peg or two, and he no longer knew the city well enough to be satisfied that the driver did not cheat him as he turned up alleys and cut through parks.

His mother was standing on the porch when the taxi pulled up. “Och,” she said, recognizing him, “a taxi, is it? Nivver moind that the roof wants fixin’ or cupboard’s bare. Bother all that, so long as himself here can roid about in the cabs.” It was her Maw Green imitation, a doughty Irish washerwoman from the Sunday funnies. He had not thought about it since he’d left home, and was surprised that it could still make him uncomfortable.

“Hello, Mama.”

“Saints presarve us,” his mother sighed. She moved down the steps toward him. “It’s you, it’s really you this toime? ’Tisn’t a ghost or a trick of the wee folk?”

“It’s me, Mama.”

She reached out and touched him, then pretended to wipe a tear from her eye. “La, listen to me blather when it’s probably hungry y’are from yer journey.” She stepped back to appraise him. “Och, and foine it is yer lookin’ too, lad. Faith and begorrah,” she said, shaking her head sadly, “if only yer father were here to see you.”

“Is Papa dead, Mama?”

“No, God love you, boy, but only down t’ the corner fer a pint. Ah, bejazus, where’s me manners?” She took his heavy suitcase from him and would have had him lean on her as they went up the stairs, but he eluded her and walked up them unaided into the house. His mother followed him inside, calling, “Arthur, Arthur lad, ye must guess who’s come. It’s himself, Arthur, it’s young himself himself.”

They heard a rough noise, a clumsy banging and clatter from behind one of the closed bedrooms off the hallway. It was exactly the sound of something outsize and heavy being maneuvered into position, a full steamer trunk, perhaps. He looked at his mother, but she would not meet his glance. Her eyes which had burned with a feverish humor when she had done her imitation had now gone dead; her shoulders sagged.

“Mama?” They heard the noise again and his mother turned away from him. He looked around to see his brother Arthur pushing himself down the hallway in a wheelchair.

“Arthur,” he said. “My God, kid, what is it?” He rushed to the boy’s side.

“I can do it myself,” his brother hissed. “Hands off,” he said sternly. He wheeled himself past his brother and then turned when he was in the center of the living room. He looked at Dick Gibson contemptuously for a moment and then, tilting his head, his eyes so wide it must have pained him, he displayed the utter dependency of love. “Did you make good? Did you, brother?”

“Don’t, lad,” their mother said quietly.

“No, Mama, I want to know. Did you? Did you find your fortune? Oh, you must have done, you must have. God knows our prayers have been with you — Ma’s, anyway. She took money off the table just to buy the damned candles to light for you.”

“Shut up, son. Don’t blaspheme.”

“No, Ma. Tell him. Tell my bigshot brother how you turned the parish into a Broadway with those candles you kept burning for him.”

“He came in a cab, Arthur,” his mother said shyly.

“Did he? Did he now?” Arthur said contemplatively. He seemed to subside, considering his brother, sizing him up as if looking for a purchase before attempting to scale him. Which of his brother’s faces would be the easiest for him, he seemed to wonder. Then, suddenly, he raised both arms, brought his fists down viciously and beat mercilessly at his thighs and legs. “What about me?” he screamed. “What about me?”

“Arthur,” his mother said. “Darling.”

“Shit,” he yelled. “Shit on that.”

Their mother looked helplessly at Dick Gibson.

Dick went to his brother and put a hand on his shoulder. “You say shit to our mama? You’re shit yourself.” With that he grasped the rubber handles at the back of the wheelchair and overturned it, tumbling his brother.

Arthur bounded up quickly and held out his hand. “Long time no see,” he said.

“You had me going at first,” Dick said.

Arthur shrugged. “Ah, it’s a tic,” he said. “Like Mama’s imitations.”

“Beware of imitations,” his mother said, a sybil in a cave.

They were zany, and Dick remembered why his family’s characters oppressed him so. It wasn’t simply that they worked so hard to show off. Rather it was that their divertissements were a delaying action that held him off. In a while they would drop their roles and behave normally. Their masquerades were reserved for homecomings like this one, or leavetakings, or their first visit to a patient in the hospital, say. It was their way of concealing feeling, thrusting it away from them until all the emotional elements in a situation had disappeared. In this way his family life was as sound, that is to say as even-keeled, as any. It was like living with lawyers, with cops who had seen everything. If he were to die right then and there, they would probably make his body a prop in a game, and the game would continue, the show go on until every last atom of their grief had been absorbed — until, that is, real grief would be ludicrous, coming so past its time. Oh, they were hard. He recalled the story Miriam had told about her father, how she’d had to shield him. Why, his family was like that and he hadn’t even known it. Why couldn’t folks take it? Why did they insist upon the quotidian? What was so bad about bad news? Surely the point of life was the possibility it always held out for the exceptional. The range of the strange, he thought.

Dick asked for his father and was hurt when they brought him up to date in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner. It meant that they had already absorbed his homecoming and that their long neutrality had begun.

And it had.

Except for his dealings with his father, whose roles were endless and played with a rabid verve, a hammy, polished vehemence. The man had become a missing person. That is, he had somehow done away with the father Dick remembered — once a heavy smoker, he had even given this up — and had taken on a variety of characteristics which had nothing to do with himself. (And nothing to do with the man he’d asked about, whose situation had been subsumed in a painless generality; “Fine,” his mother had said when he’d asked. Not even “Foine.” Fine, then. But could her placid sketch of the man be another performance? Was neutrality itself a further concealment, a new way of handling the really felt?) His father’s behavior shocked him. In the past his dad’s performances during those momentary seizures of spirit that were an affliction to all his family — Dick, the exception, was their audience, though his bland submission to their moods, like the drowned man’s in a first-aid demonstration, may also have been a sort of performance, as his leaving home may have been, or even his famous apprenticeship — had been strictly amateur, never parodic and thus professional, like Arthur’s or his wife’s. His father’s roles had always been only a sort of graceless variation of his usual condition, as someone with a head cold is said to be “not quite himself” while it lasts.

When Dick Gibson had left home a few years before, Arthur, then a boy just entering high school, had been ferociously exuberant, proud, almost worshipful in Dick’s presence, developing the conceit that Dick had enlisted in the navy and was off to see the world, have adventures, fight the country’s enemies, get drunk in the world’s low bars. He was kid brother to Dick’s hero and bounded about the older boy like an excited puppy. Given Arthur’s superior height, this was quite patently ludicrous, and Dick was actually physically cowed by the broad, satiric slaps and jabs with which Arthur mocked his brother’s shy, serious journey. His mother, on the other hand, called Dick aside and before his eyes transformed herself into the sacrificing mother in a sentimental fable who covertly slips all her life’s savings and most trusted talismans into her boy’s pockets to tide him on his way. She managed to make him feel like someone off to medical school in Edinburgh, say, fleeing the coal mines in which his father and his father’s father before him had worked for years, ruining their healths and blunting their spirits. When he looked in the envelope later he saw that she had given him her recipe for meat loaf. The talisman was no St. Christopher’s medal but only a penny some child had laid on the streetcar tracks.

But his father, an inventor who had had something to do with the development of radio and who was essentially a serious man, had merely joked lamely with him, rather embarrassed, Dick thought, and perhaps a little impatient for the train to leave. “Listen, kiddo,” he’d told him, “good luck. Stay out of jail.” Then he’d made a fist — noticing the fingertips, not tucked into the palm but exposed and almost touching the wrist, Dick was ashamed of his father’s forceless fist — and pretended to clip him sportily on the jaw. He’d hit him with the wrong set of knuckles, and Dick had felt the gentle flat of his father’s fingernails on his cheek. Now he wondered if this might not have been the subtlest turn of all.

The man never let up. There was something driven and fervid and accusing in his narrow postures. He concentrated the full force of his masquerade on Dick alone, and it was always as if the two of them had never had anything to do with each other before, as if the father, now pontificating, now relaxed and expansive — though always abrupt, like someone speaking out at prayer meeting — was seizing some initiative the son had not even known was at stake, throwing him off balance, casting first stones.

“Today, downtown, I bought my paper from the man at the corner of Carnegie and Allegheny. You’ve probably seen him though you may never have noticed him. He is a fixture there — the sort of person of whom it’s idly said, ‘Him? He’s probably worth plenty.’ He’s a cripple, an amputee. His name is Harold, though I don’t know how I know this, we’ve never been introduced, I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning his name to me. He has no arms. He merely stands, sentinel-like, behind his stock of newspapers and administers their sale. Customers count out their change from a bowl of coins and bills beside a greasy iron weight that lies across the top paper in the pile.

“Because it was very warm this afternoon, in the nineties, most people had taken off their jackets and walked the streets in their shirtsleeves. Harold had taken off his jacket too, and one could see the long empty sleeves wrapped about his stumps and neatly attached to the body of his shirt with safety pins.”

What’s all this about cripples, Dick thought. Why cripples? Why always cripples lately?

“Two things struck me. First, that the shirts of such men are almost always blue workshirts. Why is that? Is it simply that Harold, being a member of the working class, would naturally wear denim shirts? Ah, but Joseph, who has a shoe-shine stand on the same corner, wears white shirts. Is Joseph affected, is he ambitious? Would you distinguish between Joseph’s craftsmanship — he deals in a service — and Harold’s mere agency? No. What is that makes blue-shirted Harold an amputee and arms white-shirted Joseph? Isn’t it really a roughness of mind that differentiates between them and tears arms from those who could probably use them most?

“But this isn’t what concerns me. I mean to speak of the shirt, the shirt itself, of the useless sleeving of the armless, the redundancy in their cloth. Why not sewn short sleeves in which Harold might pocket his stumps? Why does a paralyzed man in a wheelchair wear shoes? What use have so many blind men for glasses? Consider the humiliation of the paralyzed man. Consider what must be such a person’s mortification when someone not only has to put his feet into his shoes for him, fitting the dead foot into the dead shoe, but lace them as well, making a lousy parcel of his flesh. And when he is done the man in the chair looks for all the world like anyone equipped for a walk in the park. And the President himself is like that. FDR is. This is how the leader of the most powerful nation on earth begins his day. Regard the doomed, cancer-wizened man whose doctor has given him eight months to live. He wears a tie. Ah.”

Is he saying he loves me? Dick Gibson wondered.

“Decorum, decorum’s the lesson even when decorum flies in the teeth of reason. Decorum preserves us from the fate of fools even while making us foolish. Would you like to see a section of the paper I bought?”

He isn’t, Dick Gibson thought. He’s saying something else, but I don’t know what.

On other occasions his father might deliver himself of a political speech which Dick felt had been prepared, actually written down in advance and memorized. But the word “occasion” is wrong. These were not occasions; indeed, a few times when something might actually be expected from his father nothing was forthcoming.

He and his father went to the movies together. It was a love story, and during one of the romantic scenes a man who was sitting in the same row with them suddenly leaped up from his seat and stumbled past Dick and his father and down the aisle toward the stage.

“Look, Dick,” his father whispered dreamily, “I hadn’t noticed it before but the first seat across the aisle from us has one of those concealed lights at just about calf-level. What are those for anyway? They seem to be staggered in alternate rows on either side of the aisle. Do you suppose they’re meant to give a shape somehow to the theater?”

Meanwhile the man had scrambled up onto the stage, where a portion of the film was to be seen projected on his white shirt. Is it Joseph from the shoe-shine stand, Dick wondered. Carole Lombard’s hand flashed in an embrace around the back of the man’s shirt; because the man stood forward of the screen, the hand seemed introduced into the movie house, a projecting presence that would draw him up into the screen, more real than the great undefiled remainder of the image, realer too than the drifting shards of image sprayed like a pale tattoo across the madman’s neck and ears and hair and dark pants, as if the pictures reached him on the other side of thick aquarium glass. The man, his head turned in angered, twisted profile toward Carole Lombard’s enormous face floating above him, was heard to scream, though what he might be saying was lost, drowned out by the soft but amplified sigh of the kiss’s aftermath and the suggestive crackle of the characters’ clothing.

His father had nothing to say.

The next day they saw a woman run over just outside their house. His father had nothing to say.

Then, for no reason, or none that Dick could see, his father, unchallenged, would seize upon an issue and explode into opinion. The man would harangue against low tariffs, then against high; now he would condemn Wall Street, now defend free enterprise; now he would blast the Jews, now Hitler, in see-saw postures of a loggerheads passion. In a way it was easier to deal with his father’s set-pieces — if only by letting the man run down, or treating what he’d said as a joke (which seemed to delight him), both of them pretending that whatever position he’d taken had been satirically meant, a rebuke — than with his silences, and easier to deal with his silences than with his moods. In these moods, frequently pantomimed, his father, normally a fastidious man, might undertake to go about in his underwear, say, scratching abstractedly at his belly hair or even plucking at his genitals. Or he might suddenly come up to his son while Dick was reading and slap him abruptly on the shoulder. “Come on,” he’d say, “I feel mealy, let’s go down in twos and threes and toss the ball around.” That they had no ball, that it was almost dark anyway, and that if they were to go through with the idea they would first have to find a drugstore that was still open where they could buy a ball, seemed to make no difference to his father. Indeed, the journey on the streetcar to the drugstore was an extension and deepening of his performance, his father nudging him in the ribs with his elbow and winking, or making two parallel, descending waves with his hands to indicate the female shape whenever a pretty girl — or even an ugly one — came on board. Or he might pointedly take a cigarette from a pack he carried for just this purpose and light it in full view of the motorman and the No Smoking signs posted about the car.

What could have been in the man’s mind? Was he insane? On the way to a nervous breakdown? Dick Gibson might have thought so had his father not taken pains to be only selectively mad — mad, that is, merely in his older son’s presence. Dick was reminded of the premise behind entertainments like the Topper stories, where the ghosts appeared only to Topper himself. In this way he was pulled into the plot, felt himself, despite his laconic stance, essential to it, a bit player magnetically drawn toward center stage. It was not unflattering that here, perhaps, was a clue to his father’s intent.

So he came to associate his father’s actions with his recent experience with Miriam, his vain attempt to unlock the secret of her voice. (He’d lied when he’d told her he’d found the secret, though the fact was he’d come to believe it.) That is, he saw them as in some way related to his testing, more grist for his ongoing apprenticeship.

How weary he was of that apprenticeship! How ready to round it off where it stood, declare it finished! He read the trade magazines— Broadcasting, Variety, Tide—and saw with an ever more painful anxiety that men as young as himself, a few of them young men he’d worked with, were getting on in their careers. A two-line notice in the “Tradewinds” column of Broadcasting about someone he’d worked with in Kansas— “Harlan Baker, formerly with WMNY, Mineola, New York, has accepted a job as junior staff announcer with WEAF, New York City”—was enough to plunge him into the profoundest depression. Baker was a hack with no style and only the most ordinary experience, and here he, who had worked in almost every facet of radio, was jobless and with no leads. Recently he had even begun to bone up on the technical aspect of radio, reading with difficulty the most scientific disquisitions on the subject, studying the diagrams (and in Morristown getting one of the X-ray technicians to explain what he couldn’t understand). There were forty million sets in the country, five thousand announcers on more than four hundred and fifty stations, and the FCC was granting more licenses daily. Soon there wouldn’t be a town of more than two thousand people that didn’t have its own radio station. Though he wanted radio to flourish, he grew jealous as a lover of its success, and uncomfortable the way a lover sometimes inexplicably is in the presence of his beloved.

In the light of his feeling that perhaps his father somehow meant his performances to be a contribution to his apprenticeship, he introduced the subject himself.

“I haven’t spoken much of my work in radio.”

“No,” his father said.

“I’ve tried … you know, to get experience.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ve had — I don’t know — maybe a dozen jobs since I left home.”

“A dozen jobs in five years. That’s a lot of moving around.”

“Yes, it is. But I wanted to do as many different things as I could. I have this idea about apprenticeship. It’s how I see myself — as an apprentice.”

“It’s best to get a good background,” his father said, wantonly indifferent.

“The personalities,” Dick said, “I don’t know if I can explain this, but they’re part of our lives, not even a trivial part either because we grow up to their jokes, we tell time by their voices. And what voices! Broadcast. Broad cast. Personality like seed, a part of nature, in forests and beside streams, and high up the sides of mountains, higher than the timber line.”

“There’s good money to be made,” his father said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

“I change jobs and bone up because I want to make myself worthy of my voice.”

His father yawned, swept his fingers up under his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and gently rolled the loose skin on the bridge of his nose back and forth. It was another act. The generation gap. A pantomime of stolid misunderstanding. Though he resisted, Dick felt himself drawn deeply into the performance. By his father’s gesture — his face had now gone blank and he was vaguely chewing, sucking his cheeks and exploring the flaws in his teeth with his tongue like a nightwatchman aiming his flashlight at doors — the two of them had become partners in some nightshift enterprise, men in a boiler room, say, among complicated machinery, in a mutual vacuum of the night and labor, a half-hour till one of them has to check the dials again. He could get no further with his dad, and was embarrassed that he had exposed himself as much as he had.

In the next weeks he thought about his apprenticeship a great deal, and wondered if this might not be just the effect his father intended. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was. His dad’s routines had been meant to embarrass him because the man sensed that this sneaking shame was Dick Gibson’s weak spot—Dick Gibson, that name that had come to him out of the air, the best inspiration of his life, consolidating in its three crisp syllables his chosen style, his identity, a saga, a mythic body of American dash, and that he had used just once, keeping it secret since, unwilling even after five years to give it up, saving it, as one preserves the handsomest pieces in his wardrobe and meanwhile goes shabby and ordinary, a miserliness not of money but of strategy, a military notion of reserves or a coach’s of bench, an Aladdin idea of one wish left in the lamp — and wanted to purge him of it. He had never been completely unembarrassed while speaking on the radio; this was a fact (his mike fright was something else). He had always felt just a little silly announcing, introducing, selling, describing, interviewing, giving the time and telling the weather, doing local color, acting and reciting bed-time stories, holding up his spokesman’s end of the conversation — which in radio was the only end there was. For the truth of the matter was that radio was silence as well as sound; the unrelenting premise was that the announcer’s voice occurred in silence, in the heart of an attentive vacuum disposed to hear it. Whereas he knew this was untrue. Didn’t his own mind wander, wasn’t it inattentive? Nothing was worthy of violating such silence; nothing yet in the history of the world had been worthy of it. That’s why he was embarrassed. So what his father was doing was meant to demonstrate how easily self-consciousness could be shed. Some such lesson must have been intended. So, he thought sadly, the apprenticeship isn’t finished. This thing remained: he had to become immodest, to learn to move dispassionately into the silence. His experience thus far was nothing; it would be a long time before he would be as good as he was meant to be. That was that.

He made plans to leave Pittsburgh, to take up the burden of his apprenticeship a second time.

The day he left home and bid his family goodbye he had expected a scene. But there was none; they did not offer to come to the station with him, and his mother used her mad, broad dialect only once. “A mither’s kiss,” she said automatically when she kissed him.

Arthur shook his hand and winced in pretended pain. “Yipes, champ, you don’t have to break a guy’s fingers, do you?”

His father was even more silent than when Dick had left home the first time, but he seemed on the verge of tears. Dick stuck out his hand but his father ignored it and embraced him. His beard felt strange against Dick’s, trailing sensation like a scent, as if he’d been rubbed with something dusty and valuable, scraped by flesh in a ceremony. Dick submitted to the embrace and thought it remarkable that his father’s eyes were red.

In the next years you might have heard Dick Gibson’s voice a hundred times without knowing it, certainly — so much had it willfully become a part of the generalized sound of American life — without thinking to ask whose it was, no more than you would stop to wonder at the direction of the wind from the sound it makes in the street. He went about the country restlessly, always lonely now and ignorant of time, his beautiful but anonymous voice the juggler’s humble affair before some imposing altar, a town crier of the twentieth century.

“Leeman Brothers directs the attention of shoppers to its White Sale now in progress in the Linens section on the fourth floor. For a limited time we will be offering genuine first-quality percale sheets for single, twin and full beds at discounts of up to 40 percent. We are also featuring a wide selection of slightly damaged printed cambrics at 75 percent off. Please take the elevators at the State Street entrance.”

“Attention! Attention please! There has been a change posted in the results of the fifth race. Please hold on to your pari-mutuel tickets. Jimson Weed has been disqualified for crowding on the turn. Repeat: Jimson Weed has been disqualified for crowding. The Maryland Racing Commission has declared the official results. It’s Your America is the winner, Martin’s Muddle has placed and Crybaby has finished in the money to show.”

“Will everyone please stand clear of the firetrucks? Will you stand clear of the firetrucks, please? These men can’t work. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

“Welcome to the General Motors Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair, ‘The World of Tomorrow.’ The General Motors Company wishes to apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced during your wait on the line. Please sit far back in your comfortable chairs so that you may the better hear through your personalized headsets. The Company wishes to remind any of you who may be wearing sunglasses to please remove them now so that you may the better see our exhibit.”

“Kibbidge batting for Medwick.”

“‘The Congressional Limited’ leaving on track fifteen for Newark, Trenton, North Philadelphia, 30th Street Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore and Washington. Passengers holding chair Pullman reservations will please go to the south end of the platform. All aboard. All aboard please.”

“Will the owner of the green, 1940 Pontiac bearing Texas license plates G479–135 please report to the attendant at gate number twelve?”

“On your left is the historic old Cotton mansion built in 1847 by Emmanuel Cotton, to plans drawn up by the distinguished American architect Lattimer Michael Hough. The expression ‘King Cotton’ is not, as many suppose, a phrase describing the pre-eminent position of cotton in the Southern economy, but a nickname directly referring to Emmanuel Cotton’s life-long obsession that he was the pretender to the Hanoverian throne. The pillars you see are the only standing examples of Virginia marble — not a marble at all, actually, but a processed quartz made to resemble the less expensive stone.”

“There will be a half-hour wait for seating, a half-hour wait for seating at all prices.”

“A lost child, about four or five years old, wearing a brown snowsuit, brown mittens and answering to the name of Richard, is waiting to be picked up at the ranger station just below the ski lift.”

“Front. Front, please.”

“Is there a doctor in the house?”

“How do you do, ladies and gentlemen, this is Dick ‘Pepsodent’ Gibson. I’m very happy to be here in Minneapolis tonight. Bob Hope will be with you in a few minutes, but first. …”

One day in Chicago’s Loop he was coming out of the Oriental Theater on Randolph Street when suddenly the heavens opened and he was caught in what could have been a cloudburst. One moment the skies were clear; the next the rain was pounding the street in the heaviest downpour he had ever seen. He was only fifty feet or so from the shelter of the marquee when it began to rain, but even if he had attempted to run back to it he would have been completely soaked. So he ducked into the stairwell entrance to an underground cafeteria called Eiler’s. He had coffee and a sandwich, but even after he had finished the rain had still not let up. If anything, it was raining even more heavily than before; the water was coming down the stairway and under the doors and had already formed a considerable pool, which the busboys were trying to clear away with pails and mops. Many people — mostly middle-aged women, afternoon shoppers — had come in from the street and were gathered at the bottom of the stairs.

The basement cafeteria in which they were all standing was low- ceilinged and crowded with rounded arches. Obviously it was meant to support the great weight of the building above them. Dick Gibson thought of the London blitz, the underground shelters there, where, according to what he’d heard, people whose homes had been blasted sometimes stayed for weeks at a time. As he often did when he was caught in something like an emergency situation, he began to look about for a girl, someone with whom he might talk, or, in some end-of-the-world abandon, kiss, hold, fuck. But there were very few likely prospects. Two pretty girls of perhaps twenty sat not far away, but these he discounted because there were two men clearly more handsome than himself with whom in all probability they would pair off when the time came. This left only a small, sweetfaced, pleasant- looking young woman. The more he looked at her the more feasible the idea of loving her became. Soon he found her plumpness sexually exciting and even the submissive gentleness of her expression, daring. He began to imagine her willing passion, and to project the wonderful things she might do for him. Before long he began to consider himself lucky to have her rather than the two girls whose beauty had probably made them selfish and cold. As he was thinking of his girl and imagining what it would be like to have such heaviness at his disposal, perhaps even gratefully blowing him, she looked up and saw him staring. Maybe she had felt his concentration; at any event she smiled widely as if she recognized him, or as if they were already lovers. Dick blushed and looked away at once, fixing his features in a stern, indifferent mask. Though he knew she was still watching him, he did not dare look up.

In a while the rain stopped and they were free to go. The girl passed in front of him and Dick could see the bewilderment on her face as he failed to acknowledge her stare. He realized that it was the same expression he himself had worn when his father had bewildered him.

My God, he thought suddenly, all it was was love. All it was was love and shyness. Oh Jesus, he thought, oh shit, I do not know what my life is.

The next day he called off the apprenticeship.

3

Which was impossible. He was already too far into it. It would have taken a major revision of his character, a rehabilitation, real eye openers. We are what we are. Dick Gibson went back into radio; the quest continued.

By now he had enough experience in radio to handle anything. He was an accomplished announcer, a newsman, an MC, an actor. He could do special events, remotes, panel discussions. He had a keen ear for which songs and which recordings of which songs would be the hits, and was even a competent sports announcer. Though he had not yet broadcast a game from a stadium, he had done several off the Western Union ticker tape, sitting in a studio hundreds of miles from the action and translating the thin code of the relay, fleshing it out from the long, ribbony scorecard. More than anything else this made him feel truly a radio man, not just the voice of radio but radio itself, the very fact of amplification, the human voice lifted miles, beamed from the high ground, a nexus of the opportune: See seven states! And everything after the fact so foreknown, the game itself sometimes already in the past while he still described it; often the afternoon papers were on the streets with the final box score while he described for his listeners the seventh-inning stretch or reported a struggle in the box seats over the recovery of a foul ball — his foreknowledge hindsight, a coy tool of suspense: “DiMaggio swings. That ball is going, going — oh, it’s foul by inches.”

He was able to perform even the simpler feats of engineering, and had a good working knowledge of sound effects. (Strangely, he would sometimes reveal these, giving up his privileged information not so much with a gossip’s delight as a betrayer’s, enjoying his sense of ruining illusion, fixing forever in the minds of those who heard him that fire was only handled cellophane, rain stirred pebbles on a piece of paper, thunder a tin sheet shaken — so that even afterward that was what they heard, cellophane, pebbles, tin sheets, the metaphors undone, turned, the things they stood for become the things that stood for them.) He was good at all of it.

He no longer experimented nor changed jobs, and though he still had not used the name Dick Gibson, it was not because he was saving it, but merely because he had eschewed the idea of his apprenticeship and with it the idea of his destiny too.

But he must have had a destiny. He had traveled much in the past and was registered with at least fifteen draft boards across the country. One month in the winter of 1943 he received notice from five of them that he had been called up.

It was like being arrested.

He did his basic training at a camp in western Massachusetts. There he experienced the total collapse of civilization. To Dick the army made sense only if one considered the ultimate objectives of the war, but he waited in vain for his superiors to remind him of the Fascists or to outline the goals which he himself had so passionately endorsed in his own pleas to his listeners to buy bonds and save paper and conserve water.

He had brought his portable radio with him and it became his habit, now that he was in it himself, to listen to all the war news, taking particular comfort from Edward R. Murrow’s bravely resonant “This is London.”

One evening he had just settled back on his bunk to listen when Private Rohnspeece picked up the radio from the window sill.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m breaking your faggot radio,” Private Rohnspeece said, and threw it out the window.

“What’s wrong with you?” He grabbed Rohnspeece’s sleeve, but his comrade-in-arms pulled a switchblade knife out of his pocket and an enormous blade clicked brightly into position. Then the man calmly cut a piece out of Dick Gibson’s hand. Dick screamed and a sergeant came running into the barracks.

“Who the hell’s making that goddamn noise?” the sergeant demanded. Dick sucked blood, swallowing it back as fast as it came out of his wound, thinking in this way to preserve his life’s precious juices. (At that instant it somehow seemed related to the war effort, like turning off lights and saving tinfoil.) Between mouthfuls he continued to scream, and again the sergeant, apparently myopic, demanded to know who was making the noise.

Rohnspeece pointed to Dick Gibson. “He is,” Rohnspeece said.

“He cut me,” Dick said.

The sergeant looked without enthusiasm at Dick’s hand. It was as if he had been auditioning bloody hands all day and this was just one more in a pretty thin lot. “You’ll bleed worse than that once Jerry sticks his bayonet in your gut,” he said, but Gibson was scarcely relieved that someone in authority had at last mentioned Hitler’s forces.

Afterward he went outside to see if he could salvage his radio, but it was gone. He did not see it again for two days, when it suddenly turned up on top of Private Fedge’s locker.

“Where did you get that radio, Fedge?” Gibson asked.

“I found it.”

“It’s mine.”

“You saying I stole it, cocksucker?” Fedge reached for the M-l he had just finished cleaning.

“That’s not loaded.”

“The fuck it ain’t,” Fedge said.

“Are you going to listen to Charley McCarthy tonight?” Dick asked without hope.

“What’s Charley McCarthy?”

“Fedge, you asshole, Charley McCarthy’s the orphan. He lives with Mr. Bergen,” Private Laverne said.

“Eat my dick, Laverne.”

“Whip it out and I will,” Laverne said.

Fedge whipped it out and Laverne ate Fedge’s dick. While Fedge’s eyes were still closed Dick Gibson seized the opportunity to lift his radio off the top of Fedge’s locker and take it back to his bunk. Something had happened to it when Rohnspeece had thrown it out the window, and to hear it at all, Dick had to stick his right foot in his locker and let the radio rest on his neck, steadying it with his hand. He felt this made him look rather like the woman of Samaria toting her water jug back from the well, but he hoped no one would notice. There was a good chance no one would since a crowd had gathered to watch Private Laverne eat Private Fedge’s privates.

But Corporal Tuleremia came up to him.

“Who are you supposed to be?”

“Shh,” Dick Gibson said. “They just introduced W. C. Fields. He’s the guest star.”

Tuleremia smashed Dick Gibson in the stomach. “I’ll show you stars, you pansy.”

Dick decided he would have to listen in the dayroom from then on. There, with the radio page from the Sunday paper spread out before him, he carefully logged an entire week’s programs, checking them off with a pencil and starring those he was particularly interested in. On Monday he was listening to Lux Presents Hollywood, with Ginger Rogers as Kitty Foyle, when Blitz came into the dayroom. Blitz turned off the lights, walked over to the big console radio, fiddled with the dial and tuned in a yodeler. Then they listened to polkas for an hour in the dark.

Dick turned amiably to Blitz. “Why don’t we share?” he suggested.

“We can share your balls,” Blitz said neutrally.

We’re going to win this war, Dick Gibson thought. We’re going to whip the Axis powers, the cunning Japs and vicious Nazis, and then we’re going to conquer the world.

He had never known such men existed. For all the imagination that had enabled him to flesh out full-fledged accounts of ballgames from the flimsy data that came in over the wire, he could not have imagined men like Laspooney and Null. These two would wait until the men were seated on the boothless toilets and then come into the john, running amok, goosing and grab-assing.

“Hey, Null,” Laspooney would shout.

“What is it, Laspooney?” Null called back.

“Don’t you just love these horseshoe toilet seats? A man can just shove his hand down the opening and grab,” he’d say, shoving his hand down the opening and grabbing.

“Yeah, Laspooney,” Null answered, “there’s no place to hide.”

Dick thought it odd that the army would take homosexuals, but as it turned out they weren’t homosexuals; indeed, off post, they beat up homosexuals. They just thought that grabbing people’s cocks was a good joke, almost as good as farting. Laspooney could fart a strong unbroken string for twelve minutes. They were real stinkers too. The men just fanned the air in front of their noses and laughed. Only Private Rohnspeece did not fan the air. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you guys,” he’d say, “I like the way it smells.”

Late one night when Dick went into the crapper to polish his brass, Null was seated on the toilet. Though he was in the act of squeezing out a turd, Null grinned and waved. “Hey,” he called out. “Listen to this. Look. Look here.” He pointed toward the opening in the toilet seat, grunted and there was a splash. “Well, don’t you get it?” Null asked.

Gibson shook his head.

Null grinned and squeezed out a big one. “Now do you get it?”

“Get what?” Dick asked.

Null did it again. “There. That. Don’t you get it?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Null voids, you jerk,” Null said, exploding in laughter.

Dick Gibson looked at him.

Still smiling, Null got up off the pot. It was outside the range of possibility that he might flush the toilet, but he didn’t even wipe himself. He came over and wrapped his arm about Dick’s shoulder. “You know what’s wrong with you, soldier?” Null said. “You don’t get no fun out of life. Tomorrow me, you and Laspooney’ll go out for a night on the town. We’ll do things up brown.”

Dick gagged. “Will we have to beat up queers and roll drunks?” he asked weakly.

“Nah. Live and let live.”

Dick was terrified, but he went with them. Null kept his promise and they didn’t beat up any queers or roll any drunks. They found a willing high school girl named Sheila and took her to a motor lodge and gang-banged her, Dick holding back when it was his turn and he was alone with the girl. “It’s nothing against you personally, Sheila, but I’m married and anyway I have too much respect for you.” He did not tell her that it was the smell of Null’s underwear, which seemed to be everywhere in the room, that inhibited him. “Could you kind of moan a little for their benefit, Sheila? They think I’m a grind and don’t get much fun out of life.”

“Then you moan,” Sheila said.

When Laspooney and Null returned, it was late and time to get back to the base. Sheila could sleep there and pay for the room, they said. Sheila said she didn’t have quite enough money to cover it and asked if they could let her have four dollars.

“What are you, Sheila, some goddamned hoo-er?” Laspooney said.

“Yeah, Sheila, is this one of your fucking slut hoo-er shakedowns?” Null wanted to know.

“Come on, you guys,” Laspooney said, and began to slap her around. Null joined in and together they beat her up pretty bad.

When they had finished Dick Gibson looked down at her helplessly. Sickened, his features had somehow formed a sort of grin.

“What the fuck are you grinning about, Soldier?” Null said.

Dick Gibson looked at him. “Don’t you get it?” he said.

“Get what?”

Dick pointed to the girl lying unconscious at their feet. “Don’t you get it? She’s bleeding.”

“Oh yeah,” Null said, laughing, and slapped Dick Gibson on the back.

Radio had badly prepared him for his new life. He had never suspected the enormous chasm between the world of radio with the sane, middle-class ways of its supposed audience and the genuine article. Only the officers — to the shame of his democratic instincts — were at all recognizable to him. Whom had he been speaking to over the air? he wondered. Was anybody listening? Was he the last innocent man? He was sure that he was not innocent, just less brutal, perhaps, less reckless, more hygienic than the next man. Who broadcasts to the brutes? he wondered ardently. Who has the ear of the swine?

He asked permission to speak with his commanding officer.

Captain Rogers, a railroad man in civilian life, pressed his tented fingertips in the classic position of executive consultation when Dick said he wanted to explain the reason behind his request for transfer out of the artillery and into special services. He might better serve the army in a slot for which he was better qualified, he said.

The captain noted that Gibson had done well in artillery work and shouldn’t sell himself short.

Dick allowed that that was true, and went on to use other phrases and arguments which he would no longer have dared to use with someone other than an officer. He reminded the captain that Joe Louis was in special services. Had the army made a mistake? Someone like Joe, with his superb physique and physical endurance, would make a splendid infantryman, but wasn’t the army and the country better served by using him to raise the men’s morale with his boxing exhibitions?

“You’ve got a point there,” the captain said, “but what of the terrific boost to morale if Louis were an infantryman? Wouldn’t that be just the thing to show the men what democracy is all about? Wouldn’t it? I mean, when you take a world champ and treat him just like everybody else, well, something like that might be just the ticket for demonstrating the sort of country we are.”

Dick Gibson considered. “Yes, Captain, that’s true in Louis’s case. But I’m already just like everybody else.”

They were in the office of the man who had been the golf pro for the Berkshire resort which the army had taken over for a training camp. The room still had the wide glass display cases that had once housed its former inhabitant’s trophies, and this, together with the rug — Dick, used to the heavy, absorptive carpeting of radio studios, always felt more sure-footed on rugs than on bare floors, or even on the ground itself — lent a pleasant donnish quality to the room. It was conducive to horseshit, Dick sensed.

Well, that was all very well, the captain said at last, but how could he recommend Dick for special services when he knew nothing about Dick’s talent?

Thereupon followed Dick’s strangest audition. Without a microphone or script and with only the captain for an audience he did what amounted to an evening’s mixed programming. He introduced records, paused five seconds, and pleasantly recapitulated the name of the song and the singer. He made up news. He did an inning and a half of a ballgame and then, guessing from the captain’s expression that he was no sports fan, rained it out and went back to the studio for a talk on first aid. He re-created this and he re-created that, all the time watching the captain’s face for cues to his tastes. For a few minutes he did a creditable job of reproducing an emergency at the transmitter, requesting the audience to please stand by, and had the pleasure of seeing the captain smile, a reaction he was at a loss to account for until he remembered that the man had been a railroader and must have experienced similar breakdowns in his line of work. Thereafter he hit the railroad angle pretty hard, doing all he could remember of the opening of Grand Central Station, a half-hour drama, and Tommy Bartlett’s Welcome Travelers, an interview show with people who had just gotten off the Twentieth Century Limited.

Even in auditions he had been by himself, separated from the sponsor or the station manager by at least the plate glass of the control booth, and there was something so strange to him in this confrontation that soon he forgot why he had come. Each show he re-created now became an end in itself, something to be gotten through, and he had a heavy, hopeless sense of a truck mired in mud, of branches and rocks shoved beneath tires for a traction that would never be attained. He had forgotten that his aim was to capture the consciousness of the brutes, and here he was being polite, elegant and glib. At ten o’clock, an hour and a half after walking into the captain’s office, exhausted, he signed off, appalled to realize that what he had been doing was a frightening reenactment of his career.

Shaken, Captain Rogers looked at him for two minutes before finally speaking. “You’re a regular show,” he said at last. “Request for transfer approved!” He slammed the blotter on his desk three times, left, center and right, with the fatty side of his fist in a mime of someone stamping documents submitted in triplicate.

But it was no different on Armed Forces Radio. Dick’s show was broadcast on Sunday afternoons — that traditionally gray and sober time on American radio, after church and before the family-comedy programs of the early and mid-evening — and was called The Patriot’s Songbook. Though it went out on shortwave wherever American forces were stationed and to virtually every theater of combat, Dick was not pleased with it; he found the rigidity of the format and the endorsed quality of the sentiment burdensome. (Ironically, his audience had never been larger. The program was taken not just by the military but by dozens of independent stations across the country.) He had no illusions that he was reaching the brutes, for the program, thirty minutes of service and popular war songs, was something of a joke even at the London studio from which it emanated. The staff, most of them professionals like himself in civilian life, referred to it as “The Flag Wavers’ Songbook,” “Uncle Sam’s Lullaby Hour,” or even worse. The single thing he had to show for it, and this at the beginning, was his promotion to sergeant, an honor that simply reflected Armed Forces Radio’s fashion of having several of its programs hosted by noncommissioned officers.

To Dick it seemed absurd to play recordings of rah-rah songs to men who had actually been in combat. He had heard too many vicious parodies of these songs; they were sung in comradely funk in every London pub, so he could imagine the words the men on the actual firing line might put to them. He made efforts to broadcast some of the milder of these parodies — though there were no recordings of them that he knew of — but every request was refused. Indeed, how could it be otherwise when even the innocuous remarks with which he introduced each record (“This next song, ‘Semper Paratus,’ is the beloved anthem of the generally unsung seadogs in the mighty United States Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is one of our nation’s most trusted services. In peacetime it has the responsibility of enforcing maritime laws, saving lives and property at sea, operating as an aid to navigation generally, and preventing smuggling. In war it is a valued adjunct of the navy itself. A ‘Patriot’s Songbook’ salute to the Coast Guard!”) had first to be checked and approved by his superiors?

Despite, then, his knowledge that Rohnspeece and Fedge and Laspooney and Null and Blitz and the others — if, in fact, they were still alive — had probably heard him, AFR being the only English-speaking radio they could pick up in most of the places where they could be, Dick had no hope that he had changed their opinion of him. He had the brute’s ear, but the brute was probably laughing. The brute may even have been pissing into the speaker cone or firing bullets at it or whipping someone’s ass with the aerial. He was a celebrity for the first time in his life—Stars and Stripes had interviewed him — but it had never seemed less important. In his interview with Stars and Stripes the one remark he had really wanted them to print— “Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose are much more effective. As a radio man I envy them both”—had been omitted, and he had sounded as bland as ever he had on the radio.

The show was recorded on Tuesday nights in Broadcasting House, the BBC facility in London. Busy during the day, a few of its studios had been set aside for the use of the Americans late at night. One Tuesday, shortly after the appearance of his interview in Stars and Stripes, Dick was making an electrical transcription of Songbook when he saw the flashing red light that indicated an air-raid warning. He had been through other air raids in London, though one had never occurred when he was broadcasting. Seeing the light, he gathered together the pages of his script, switched off his microphone and rose to go the shelter. He was almost out of the studio when his engineer and director, a first lieutenant named Collins, called to him over the loudspeaker from the control room.

“Sit still, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said. “There’s no telling when they’ll sound the all clear. I’m tired. The damn BBC won’t give us the goddamn building at a decent hour. We’re soundproofed, so I don’t think we’ll pick up the noise of the bombers in here. Hell, we can’t even hear the blasted sirens. Why don’t we just go ahead and finish the broadcast?”

Sergeant Gibson looked nervously toward the signal light, which had now gone into a new pattern — a series of four short flashes followed by three long, indicating that the bombers were over the city. Except for the lights they would have had no hint that the bombers were overhead; in their windowless studio they might not have heard even a direct hit, and would have known that they were dying only when the flames had begun to lick at them.

“Damn it, Sarge, sit back down,” the lieutenant ordered. “We’ll be okay. Watch the On the Air sign. When the sign comes on you cue in again after ‘Wing and a Prayer.’”

Dick returned sullenly to the microphone and the lieutenant put the song on the turntable. The signal lights and the insane bravery of the music made Dick more nervous than ever. He wondered if men had ever gone into battle burdened by such themes. It was impossible, and he had a certain knowledge of the impossibility and inanity of comfort, suddenly realizing what must be the enormous irritation to the dying of all brave counsel and all fair words. Such must forever have tampered patience and ruined death.

When the record finished the On the Air sign beamed on. In the brief moment before he began talking Dick strained to hear the bombers. He thought he could detect a buzz or hum, but it might have been only the electric engines in the studio. The lieutenant rapped on the glass with his graduation ring and pointed furiously to the sign. Shaken, Dick lost his place, then found it again. “Fellas, that was ‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,’ as sung by the Mello-Tones.” He heard the alarm in his voice and longed to be in the bomb shelter, where he could hear the bombs when they exploded and feel the slight fleshly shift in the sand bags. He looked toward the booth but the lieutenant had leaned down to pick up the next recording and he could not see him. For all he knew he may have been the only person left in the building. His hand rattled the pages of his script and he lost his place again. “‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,’” he repeated, stalling. Again he found his place and introduced the next song. It was “When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World,” and as he listened to the lyrics (“Jimmy will go to sleep in his own little room again”) he became furious. If he’d had a pistol he might have taken aim and shot the lieutenant right then. Why, he thought, surprised and not displeased, that’s how the brutes think, the ones who treasure their grudge and then, on patrol, calmly shoot their lieutenant in the back. Was he a brute? Good! So be it!

He felt himself swell with power, a savage surge. “Bullshit!” he roared into his open microphone over the lyrics of the song. “Bullshit!”

The lieutenant’s face appeared white and enormous behind the control room window. He seemed not angry, nor even astonished; he looked as bland and mild as a ship’s captain just relieved of command by his men. Dick saw his mouth move and his lips form words, but no sound came out; he had forgotten to depress the speaker button in the control room. Dick felt a triumphant flush of heroism, Horatio at the bridge, the Dutchman at the dike, the man in the radio room sending out his S.O.S.’s as the others lowered the lifeboats and leaped into them, all men covering all other men’s retreats — the guerrilla achievement. “Ah boys,” he cried, exultant, ”we’re the ones who pay. It’s us who bleed, buddies.”

The lieutenant’s eyes widened. He was livid now, his face contorted with the bitter, contrary exercises of grief and grudge. Gibson knew he had to hurry. Ignoring the officer, he grasped the microphone still more tightly and drew it closer to him, as if the only way Collins could stop him would be to pull the equipment out of his hands. “We’re meat, we’re meat,” he cried passionately. (He saw his listeners come alive, one soldier beckoning the other to approach the radio, crawling out of foxholes in the jungle, gathering together around the Lister bag. He saw snipers leaning down from the trees to which they were tied. Thinking of the bombers that were even now zeroing in on Broadcasting House, fixing its roof between the crosshairs of their bombsights, he began to chatter ferociously, not calling as he might have to a panicky audience falling all over itself to escape a burning theater, “Calm down, calm down,” but a sub-articulate commiseration that cut through the traps of language, dispensed with hope and went abruptly into mourning. “Ah,” he said. “Oh my. Gee. Hmn. Yuh. Ah. Oh. Tch tch. Whew. Hmph. Boy.”

Behind the glass in the control booth the lieutenant was leaning so far forward that his nose was blunted by the glass. “Tag,” Dick said. “We’re it. Boom boom.”

“You’re crazy if you think I’m going to permit any of this stuff to get by,” Lieutenant Collins’s voice boomed out over the speaker. “What do you think you’re doing? Who do you think you are? Not a syllable of this will ever be broadcast! I’m stopping the transcription!”

“They’re moving in,” Dick Gibson said, “I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. I’m by myself. The bombs are falling.”

“Hah!” the lieutenant cried. “I’ve shut you off. You’re just talking to the walls.”

“I don’t know if you can still hear me, boys. I may just be talking to the walls, but I’m sticking to my post. Let’s have some music, what say?”

“I won’t put it on for you!”

“Over hill, over dale,

Hell, they even read our mail,

As those caissons go rolling along.

In and out, hear them shout,

I can’t wait till I get out,

As those caissons go rolling along.”

“Well, ex-sergeant, are you proud of yourself? Are you, ex-sergeant?”

“There’ll be bullshit over

The white cliffs of Dover,

Tomorrow, just you wait and see.”

“On second thought I am going to record this. It will make very interesting listening at your court martial.”

“Anger’s a way, my boys,

Anger’s a way,

Why should we take their noise,

Why don’t we run away — ay — ay — ay?”

“That’s evidence. Right there. That’s evidence.”

“This is the Army, Mr. Jones,

They’ll shoot some bullets in your bones,

You had your breakfast in bed before,

But you dum la de dum in a war.”

“You’ll get yours, Mister.”

“Oh-hh say can you see

How the powers that be

Keep us down, in the groun’

With the lie that we’re free?”

He pushed his microphone away and leaned back. He was exhausted. The lights had ceased to flash. The air raid was over. Dozens had died, hundreds were wounded, but the rest of them were safe till next time.

“You didn’t sign off,” the lieutenant’s voice croaked over the loudspeaker.

“Right,” Dick Gibson said. He pulled the table mike toward him again and held it in his lap. “Fellow animals,” he said, “grr whinney whinney oink oink roar. See you at the crap table, catch you guys ’n’ gals in the bars, keep a candle in the whore’s window, meet you in the alley. Dick Gibson”—he hadn’t meant to use the name, but it slipped out— “signing off.”

MP’s came. Before they arrived Dick had to be guarded by the lieutenant. They had nothing to say to each other, and he was embarrassed that the man had no gun; it would have been simpler for them both if he had. As it was it may have appeared to Collins — Dick was the larger of the two — that Dick was doing him a favor by not resisting. More probably, he may have thought that Dick was seeking favors. That was what brutes did; time and again, in difficulty, he’d seen them go boyish, go soft, presuming upon their deprivation to toady — brutes turned housepets. Dick couldn’t be sure that he had not intended this last possibility. Perhaps he meant to underscore a new strain in his character. Certainly when the MP’s came they didn’t seem to see anything strange in arresting him, or in leading him out of the building under armed guard. He was pleased in one way, not so pleased in another. He wasn’t sure he knew what to do next. In a sense he looked forward to his conviction, to some actual ruling on his status, a documentation of sorts of his character. Then he could be genuinely what they said he was. (To divide men into officers and enlisted men was a superb idea; he didn’t know how he had lived without it.) He was even impatient for the time when he would be turned queer by the absence of women (or the presence of men), impatient to learn their desultory violence and terrifying indifference. He yearned for the debasement of his taste and fastidy — it was a way of being free. Already he was astonished by his freedom, the liberties he took with his guards, for example— “Give us a smoke, chief”— affronts, gaucheries that bordered on risk, swagger the other side of his scruple, swinging from cringe to contempt as though character were nothing more than hinged mood. It was strange and exhilarating to live by the rule of whim.

At the guard house — the British government had set aside a portion of the Inns of Court for use by the Americans as a detention center, and he had the fearful suspicion that the prisoners had been left in London to be bombed — he acted like a guilty man (that is, he behaved as if having committed one crime he could commit another), thus frightening many of the other prisoners, AWOL’s, the deserters for love, the careless missers of trains and buses, the cowards. Another prisoner remembered that he had been interviewed in Stars and Stripes and this seemed to induce awe, as if there could be no offense like the offense of the respectable. The prisoner, himself an accused murderer, pressed Dick to discover why he was there. It was when Dick admitted that he’d “told them what to do with it” that the man became deferential, words and will to him the ultimate violence. Dick decided that though the man had killed he was not one of the brutes at all.

He stayed in the guard house for a week. After he had cleaned up his room each morning there was not much to do and he listened to the BBC. It was satisfying to him chiefly because of its clear classifying of its audience — even more meticulous and useful than the distinction between officers and enlisted men. During the week he also had three interviews with the captain who was assigned to be his defense counsel, a man who was a dentist in civilian life. Dick thought him too earnest, but in fairness he had to admit that he thought all dentists earnest. Only a very earnest man would be able to stand the sight and feel of an open mouth. (It was probably their excess earnestness that kept them out of medical school.) He was certain the dentist would not be able to get him off — certain also that only the dentist’s earnest objectivity kept him from expressing then and there his opinion of Dick’s actions.

He learned that his trial was set for the end of the following week. When he was taken from the guard house four days before that date and conducted in a closed car — there was no one to guard him — to a castle in the English countryside, he was terrified. Angrily he asked his driver — a man of lower rank than Dick who, despite the protests of his lieutenant and engineer and director, was still a sergeant until proven guilty — why the dentist was not with him. “Is it a trick? My whole case rests on that guy’s arguments. If they’ve yanked my mouthpiece I’m sunk.”

“Gee, Sarge, I don’t know a thing about it,” the driver said.

Dick saw that the driver was not himself a brute (and where were they all, incidentally?) but just another poor innocent as Dick himself once had been. He watched the man’s cautious negotiation of the left side of the highway, an effort that obviously still strained him.

“So you don’t know a thing about it?”

“That’s right, Sarge.”

Dick leaned forward, almost pressing his lips against the driver’s neck. “Cut that Sarge shit, Mac,” he said levelly, “or you and me are gonna tangle assholes.” They rode on for a while in silence; then Dick became offensive again. “Fucking left side of the road,” he said brutally. “This whole fucking country is eaten up with faggotry and fuckery because the cocksuckers drive on the left side of the road. La la la. Why don’t you drive over on the right, you simple bastard? Let these assfarts know the Yanks are coming.” He leaned forward abruptly and jerked the driver’s arm so that the car swerved to the right. “Ha ha, the Yanks are coming!” Dick screamed. The driver recovered control of the car and Dick sat back, pretending to chuckle at his joke for the rest of the ride. Every once in a while he would glance at the terrorized driver. I must get used to meanness if I am to live in the world, he thought. Otherwise I won’t last, I’ll never make it.

At the castle he was met not by MP’s but by three men in suits, big anonymous-looking men with the blunt faces of U.S. marshals or secret servicemen. Their very business suits suggested magicians’ costumes, bulging with what he took to be concealed pockets and trick linings, even their hatbands reversible perhaps, in emergency becoming signal strips seen for miles. Two of the men frisked him objectively, touching him heavily about his body, yet with a rapidity that made it all seem routine. They might have been checking him out to see if he was transporting fruit across a state line.

Afterward they led him through the first floor of the castle, which had been renovated and was honeycombed with offices. The women who worked in these cubicles probably knew more about the war and what was going on, Dick thought, than even old Ed Murrow back in London. Two of his escorts left him at a small elevator and he rode up with the third. He was surprised to see the man push the button for the nineteenth floor; he was quite certain that there could not be nineteen floors in the castle. Probably he was in some terrific nerve center and in reconstructing the building they had put in secret floors between floors and beneath ground level, like the extra pockets in the secret servicemen’s suits. They stepped out into a richly carpeted hallway that looked more like the corridor of a first-class hotel than it did of either a castle or the offices below (above?). The man led him toward a large door at the end of the hallway, where he made Dick stop and lean against the wall to be frisked a second time. This took longer than the first frisking and was not nearly so objective.

“Okay,” the man said finally, “you’re clean as a whistle.” Then he winked. “Incidentally, if you don’t mind my saying so, soldier, you’re mighty well hung.”

“You must be some security risk,” Dick said.

The man shrugged and knocked on the door. A voice that sounded vaguely familiar told them to come in. The secret serviceman opened the door and saluted. Dick gasped and saluted along with him; he was looking right into the eyes of a famous general. Like Dick’s guard, the general was dressed in civilian clothes and wore nothing to assert his identity save his famous face and a cluster of four small stars formed by diamonds and pinned to the breast pocket of his suit.

The secret serviceman was dismissed and the famous general narrowly studied Dick’s salute. “Pretty loyal all of a sudden, hey, young fella?” he said. Dick remained braced and continued to hold his salute. “By golly, you’re a regular West Point cadet. Off the record, lad, are you sure you’re the same fella that tells my people they’re just meat?”

Dick continued his salute, his chin so tightly drawn in toward his neck that the tendons began to quiver. “I can’t hear you, son,” the famous general said.

“Yes, sir,” Dick said. “I’m he, sir.”

“Ha. He admits it,” the famous general said, turning around. For the first time Dick noticed that several high-ranking officers from various services were also in the room. He was despondent with panic. What did the chiefs of staff — if that’s who they were — have to do with his case? Was he to be made an example? Suppose they charged him with treason? They could shoot him.

The famous general chuckled. “Child, that was sure some swell dodge your signing off that way. I’ve certainly got to hand it to you … At ease there, soldier … Yes sir, pulling all that traitor crap and then saying you were Dick Gibson instead of your real name. Of course, that wouldn’t win you an acquittal, but it’s lucky for you just the same that you thought of it. Isn’t it, boys?”

Several of the officers grunted.

“You know, my boy, your program is my favorite. Did you know that, youngster?”

“Is it, sir?”

“Hell, I’ll say so. Positively. That’s a fact. My favorite. Those songs. Stirring, absolutely stirring.”

“I’m very pleased you think so, sir.”

“Oh, I think you do a terrific job. If I have any objection at all I guess it’s that you don’t play enough golden oldies.”

“Golden oldies,” Dick said.

“Well, those were some pretty good songs they had back there in the first war,” the general said. “Not to take anything away from the stuff they’re doing now, of course,” he added quickly.

“He doesn’t play any cavalry tunes,” a colonel in the tank corps objected glumly.

“Do any of you fellows know ‘She’s the Mistress of the Quartermaster’?” another asked.

“How’s that one go, Bob?” a two-star general asked.

“You’re a lucky kiddy, son,” the famous general said, breaking in.

“I am, sir?”

“You’re mighty well told you are. Why, it’s only because I like your program so much that your case came to my attention at all. You know, it’s funny; I don’t really care all that much for music. My lady can never get me to go to a concert with her. I’m not even all that fond of a military band. I guess that as much as anything else it was you I was listening to. There was something about your voice. It reminded me of an experience I had, oh, back a few years now. Anyway, when there was a substitution for you on Patriot’s Songbook last Sunday I had to find out why. That’s how I heard about what you’d done. Well, naturally once I found out I just had to hear that record Lieutenant Collins had made. I can tell you one thing — you made me mad as hell. Why, I was all for hauling your ass up before a firing squad or something. Then, when you signed off saying you were Dick Gibson, why it suddenly came to me why I’d always been so fascinated by you.”

“I don’t understand, sir,” Dick Gibson said.

“Why, I guess you don’t. Well, of course you don’t. But I’ll get to it, son, I’ll get to it.” The general put his arm about Dick’s shoulder and led him toward a chair. “Do you recall a few years back working for a station in Nebraska?”

“KROP,” Dick Gibson said, “the Voice of Wheat.”

“Yes, that’s it, that’s the one. Well, sir, my first wife’s people live out in Atkinson, Nebraska, and when I was running the Fifth Army headquarters in Chicago, I sometimes had occasion to take old Route 33 to go see them. Well, I use the radio a lot when I drive. I kind of depend upon it; it helps me to stay awake. You see, I don’t like to stay in motor lodges or hotels — most of them aren’t very clean, you know; ’s ’matter of fact, the only place I like to stop is some army camp where they train inductees; I know that sort of place will be clean enough for any traveler to lay down his head — so usually I drive through. That’s where you come in. I was near the Iowa — Nebraska border, I remember, and suddenly I picked up this program, with this fella talking. Well, sir, as I already told these gentlemen, there was ice on that highway, and it was getting dark and I was tired — but I mean tired — and I’d already dozed off for a fraction of a second and only the sudden swerve of the car jolted me awake again. That’s when I picked up this program. Well, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard before. Something about the voice … but not just the voice, what the voice was saying … I was fascinated. It woke me up. I didn’t want to miss a word. That was you speaking, lad. I remembered the name soon as I heard it again on Lieutenant Collins’s record—Dick Gibson. I don’t even recall now what you said back then. All I know is that whatever it was, it helped. I followed your voice all the way to Atkinson.”

“There was something wrong with the equipment,” Dick Gibson said.

“No sir. It came in perfect. Perfect. Best reception I ever had. Funny thing about that too, because I’d borrowed the car, and up to the time I picked you up the radio had been giving me trouble. But you came in perfect, no static or anything. It was as if you were right there in that car with me.”

Dick remembered how good he’d been, how he had thought even at the time that he was in a state of grace. His chest heaved, and he felt tears coming. Whatever the general might tell him now, he knew that it was over; his apprenticeship was truly finished, the last of all bases in the myth had been rounded, his was a special life, even a great life — a life, that is, touched and changed by cliché, by corn and archetype and the oldest principles of drama. In ignorance and absent- minded goodness of heart he had taken a burr from the general’s paw. And the general had turned out to be the general and would now repay him. This was no place for it, but he began openly to cry, simultaneously congratulating and commiserating with himself. Good work, Dick Gibson, he thought. Poor Dick Gibson, he thought. You paid your dues and put in your time and did what you had to. You struggled and fought and contended and strove, and many’s the time your back was against the wall, but you never let up, you never said die, even when the night was darkest and it seemed the dawn would hold back forever. You showed them. You, Dick Gibson, you showed the dirty motherfucking fartshits and prickasses. You showed them good. Poor Dick Gibson.

The officers, embarrassed by his weeping, looked away. Only the famous general watched him. He’s letting me cry, Dick Gibson thought. He’s letting me get it all out. Poor Dick Gibson, he blubbered silently.

The general waited a few moments, then stepped forward. There was a war on. “Feeling better?” he asked gently.

“Yes sir,” Dick said, his nose filling.

“Calmed down?”

“Sir, I am,” he managed forcefully.

“Talk business?”

“Business as usual,” Dick said, and took out a handkerchief and emptied his sinuses.

“That’s the spirit,” the general said when Dick, his nose clear once more and his eyes dry again, looked at him brightly.

“What’s up, sir?” Dick asked.

“We’ve been playing the transcription,” the general said. “Remarkable. You were hysterical. Fear brings things out in you.” Dick blushed. “No, you don’t understand. We want you to do the same for us.”

“We want to hear the war,” one of the other officers said.

“Yes,” the general said, “this place—” He indicated their surroundings with his arm. For all the fullness of his emotion, Dick understood exactly what the general’s gesture meant. It took in the false floors and new walls, the elevator and desks and typewriters and secret pockets of the secret service. But more than anything else Dick understood his gesture as an indictment of the chairs.

For all the precision of his understanding of the moods in the room, it was a long time before he could concentrate on what they were actually trying to tell him, however. Only a certain sharpness and impatience in the general’s tone impelled him to put it all together.

He was to be sent to the most terrible war zones of all, and from these incendiary landscapes he was to send back reports, transmitting them the thousands of miles to headquarters over special equipment. They were interested not in military information as such, but in the feel of the campaigns. He was, in short, to do the color on World War II. Lieutenant Collins was to be sent along with him as his engineer. Except for the incident during the air raid, they worked well together.

Dick asked if the enemy wouldn’t be able to pick up his broadcasts.

“Negative,” a naval commander from research and development said. “We’ve perfected this transmitter and receiver that work on a band below three kilocycles. Your standard broadcast band begins at 550.”

He was given to understand that the assignment would be dangerous. He expected to be told this. They would understand if he turned it down and chose instead to be court-martialed. He expected to be told this. His infraction wasn’t actually treasonous. The Judge Advocate representative told him that his punishment wouldn’t amount to more than an eleven-year sentence and a reduction in rank. He expected this. They wouldn’t force him. This wasn’t unexpected. No man would look askance if he didn’t “volunteer,” and of course there was some good-natured laughter at the use of the word “volunteer.” Did he understand, then, what was required and that they weren’t trying to push him into a corner? He expected to be asked.

“Affirmative.”

Did they understand, then, that knowing the risks he was still willing to go through with it?

He anticipated that one too. “Affirmative, sir.”

Indeed, after the general’s speech, he expected everything, all of it. He understood that the exceptional life — the one he had been vouchsafed to live — was magnificent yes, but familiar too, unconventional but riddled with conventions of a different, higher order. The full force of it descended on him; he could almost plot it. There would be— success. And lurking in the success, danger, suffering different from that he’d already endured, which was merely niggling loneliness and his apprentice’s uncertainty. Now the loneliness — God, the women he’d have — would exist inside power. Poor Dick Gibson, he thought; poor little rich boy. Now there would be tantrum and flaw, which he would try to guard against, learning to take advice from trusted advisers. And at the apogee there would probably be betrayal and slowish death. (Unless his end came suddenly, stylishly, à la mode — in a private plane he flew himself, perhaps.) But for now he was safe, snug as a bug in their lousy war zones (though he was a little nervous for Lieutenant Collins).

So, he thought, pledging himself, I am ready for things to happen to me. Let the clichés come. I open myself to the great platitudes.

The generals indicated he could leave. They would be in touch with him soon.

He paused at the door and looked at the famous general.

“What is it, son?”

“You saved me too,” he told him. “I don’t mean the court-martial. I thought I belonged with the brutes. But I feel pride. A brute doesn’t feel pride.” He saluted, and the general returned it, and Dick left.

“Ah,” said the famous general when Dick had closed the door behind him, “but he’s the only one who does.”

4

FROM THE ARCHIVES: TRANSCRIPTS OF DICK GIBSON’S BROADCASTS OF Fabulous Battles of World War II: Mauritius.

“Dick Gibson talking low on the low band.

“We’re on Mauritius. Formerly Ile de France. Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Breasting the twentieth parallel like a runner breaking the tape. Sister isles, all volcanic — Réunion (a French possession), Rodrigues and the St. Brandon group. Who’s St. Brandon, patron of what? Sounds English to me. How did he get those spic brothers Réunion and Rodrigues for sister isles? What miscegenous, nigger-in- the-woodpile history went on here, anyway? Who, wanting something for nothing, looking for what trade routes, asking the way east from the way west like those other old junkmen of science, the alchemists, found this place? Who charted it on maps, informing the old cartographers so they could erase their ancient lame finesse, Hic sunt leones? It is the world, real as Paris.

“The light is terrible, and I have no smoked glasses, though Collins, an officer, does. There’s not much here. Lieutenant Collins agrees. Wait, I have my map. Hmn. Well. Hmn. Oh. Mnh hmn. Say, let’s try that. Here’s how I read it. I see from the Miller Cylindrical Projection that we are the last island cluster of democracy in the Tropic of Cancer, a short hop from the Tropic of Capricorn border. We are the Gateway to the Antarctic, a key cog in the bitter battle to control the glaciers. Am I getting warm?

“When I was a boy I imagined war as a cataclysm, an extended chaos. I puzzled where soldiers slept, when they ate. After a while I came to believe that wars had no silences save those of ambush. War seemed to be some eternal fire, sourceless and undying like a nasty miracle. Just a hint of the undisrupted was more exotic than the fiercest massacre. What, the mail goes through? The lottery isn’t stopped? The restaurants are full? Imagine. Now I perceive something of the thinness of cataclysm and know that more bombs fall in the sea than on the city, but a piece of my terror hangs on. In neutral Lisbon, where uniformed Germans and uniformed Americans walk side by side and buy papers at the same newsstands and ask the same questions of the hotel porter, and wait behind each other at the gas pumps, and no one draws his gun and there is less skulduggery than in Cleveland, my flesh crawled and I had bad dreams. Collins flew in first class and I in economy on our commercial flight here, and sitting beside me was a Japanese soldier who helped me recline my seat because the button was stuck. Neutrality is the miracle. I do not understand how forces can swirl and swarm and elude each other.

“Unless Collins has secret orders — he swears he hasn’t: our proximity has made us neutral; already he swears to me — I don’t understand what’s happening here, or why we came. There’s nothing to report. There’s a garrison of British soldiers, here since before the war. These men, never rotated or reinforced, seem residents of the place, as much its citizens as the Chinese, Dutch, Indians, French and Africans who live here. Occasionally there are reports that the Japanese have put troops ashore on one of the nearby islands, and then there is a flurry of military activity as the men go out on patrol. There’s some evidence that there are Japanese around, a few but at no greater than patrol strength, and as they make no move to threaten the garrison at Port Lewis, the island’s principal city, the British don’t try to engage them.

“It’s pretty much a planter culture here — no industry and a rattan feel to life. I guess at its essences. Mauritius would use its barks and leaves and boles. Commerce blooms from its rangy stalks and thorny brush. There are goods in its grasses. I smell high-grade hemps and queer cocoas. I sniff deck tars, caulking syrups and narcotics in the island’s fibers — hashish and bhang and cannabin. And there is something brackish and briny in the tangled mat of the growth, as though the vegetation were merely the dried top of the sea.

“As per our orders, Collins and I protect the equipment. One of us is at the transmitter at all times. Off duty I either drink with the British or roam about the place, sometimes climbing the grassy slopes of the volcanoes that acne the landscape. I’ve exhausted Port Lewis, seen its single museum — a curious place which in addition to its limited collection of paintings, mostly by the planters themselves, holds the largest collection in the world of the skeletons and reconstructed bodies of the extinct dodo bird which, for some curious reason, once thrived on Mauritius and Réunion isles.

“Is this the sort of thing you want?”

“A tip of the Dick Gibson cap to the High Command. You knew what you were doing, all right. Increased activities among the Japanese. A few small landing parties spotted by some of the planters. They disappear quickly into the jungle. No real alarm at the British garrison yet, as there is no evidence that they are bringing any heavy equipment with them.”

“Still more landings reported. They seem to be concentrated on Réunion, though one or two have been seen on the beaches of Mauritius itself. Yesterday a cache of armament, though of a strange sort. Primitive. Perhaps for jungle warfare. The British colonel here says the stuff looks almost like traps. One interesting sidelight: some of the Japanese accompanying the soldiers are dressed in civilian clothes.”

“A Japanese task force has been spotted steaming toward Mauritius, about two days off. Vichy France has sent troops to Réunion. The garrison here has been placed on alert. All Asians are under strict scrutiny. The buildup on both sides is terrific now.”

“By now there seem to be as many Japanese as British about, though both forces have thus far managed to stay out of each other’s way.”

“The Royal Air Force is here.”

“It’s a collision course, all right, though no major engagements yet. One of the Japanese civilians attached to the Jap army was captured and interrogated. He turns out to be a scientist — an ornithologist.”

“The report has come back. It’s official. HIC SUNT DODOS!”

“The dodo is an extinct species of ungainly, flightless bird of the genus Raphus or Didus. Its incubation ground and later its world was the island of Mauritius. It was closely related in habit and aspect to a smaller bird, the solitaire, also extinct but once indigenous to the island of Réunion. It has long been held by ornithologists that the dodo — both the dodo proper and the solitaire henceforward will be subsumed under the pseudo-generic term ‘dodo’—was related to the pigeon, but this is only an hypothesis since the bird has not been available for study since 1680, the year that the last known dodo died. Although the dodo was sent to European museums, no complete specimen exists, and today only the foot and leg of one specimen are preserved at Oxford. The representations one sees, even in the Mauritius Museum of Art itself, are merely restorations, little more than cunning dolls constructed on skeletal frames. Nevertheless, the skeletons, the scattered bones of which are to be found abundantly even today in the Mauritian fens and swamps, have been painstakingly reassembled by Mauritian dodo artisans — the best in the world — and give an accurate picture of what the bird was like.

“He was large, slightly bigger than the American turkey whom he in no mean way resembles. In silhouette the dodo is not unlike a great scrunched question mark. For detail we may refer to the paintings from life that have been made of the bird, many of the best of which are still here in the Mauritius Museum of Art and Dodo Reconstruction. Most of the artists seem to be in agreement that the animal possessed an enormous blackish bill which, together with the huge horny hook in which it terminates, constituted the shepherd’s crook of the question mark. Its cheeks, partially bare, seem oddly weather- beaten and muscular, like the toothless cheeks of old men who have worked out in the open all their lives. Black except for some whitish plumage on his breast and tail and some yellowish white the tint of old piano keys on his tail, the dodo was somewhat formal in appearance, if a trifle stupid looking. This formal aspect is attributable also to his wing, foreshortened as a birth defect, which in repose flops out and down from his body like an unstarched pocket handkerchief.

“Dodos are said to have inhabited the Mauritian forests — this is the style of information, of certain kinds of fact; I find it relaxing — and to have laid a single large white egg which they mounted high in a setting of piled grass. Hogs, brought in by the settlers, fed on the dodo eggs and on the dodo young, and in one or two generations the birds were extinct.

“By now you have the reports, the action paced off in the war room, set pin for pin like surveyor’s stakes in alignment, the lines drawn in a terrible cat’s cradle of possibility. This, what I do, is something else.

“The buildup was flawless. Men came from the sea, from the air. They peeled off the landing craft and ran up the beach like barbarians. Paratroopers bloomed in the sky like flowers and grew into the ground. The trade routes are really open. I celebrate the Department of Deployment, reinforcements, fresh troops. (There’s something virginal in the sound: showered, shaved, their fight untapped, blossoming in their pink skins. ‘Fresh troops’: it sounds pasteurized.) And cooks to feed them and clerks to count them. And the Japs the same, as good as you in producing populations out of thin air.

“But you know. And who am I, Dick Gibson, to be telling you all this? You know what I think, High Commanders, Chiefs of Staff? This broadcast of mine is a little like prayer. Well, not prayer exactly, but still, there’s a soupçon of reverence and a touch of review. That’s what you want to hear, right? Am I getting warm? That’s why the low band was invented, High Commanders on High.

“I’ll tell you what happened. History is good experience for me, the itinerant radio man.

“Collins is the officer and must command me to rise. Yesterday he came to my room to wake me but I was already up. I’d awakened before dawn. I’d heard some noises and couldn’t fall back to sleep. At first I thought the engagement had begun, but when I went to the window there were just some trucks and black shapes moving in the street. I assumed they were more reinforcements for the garrison. Then it occurred to me that they might be Japanese, but when I called down a British voice yelled up at me, so I went back to bed.

“Then something that has always been undeveloped in me — I mean my sense of place — suddenly surged up and overwhelmed me. Why, here I am, I thought, on Mauritius, one of three or four places on the globe which merely to have seen qualifies a man as a traveler, I mean a wanderer, one of those whose fate it is to be troubled by laundry, mail months old, irregular bowel movements, a certain ignorance about time and a taste gone crotchety through nostalgia for things eaten long before. How did I get this way? I wondered. It can be no accident when one finds himself sizing smooth pebbles on the cold coasts of Tierra del Fuego. To see a desert is to scorn a city, and to lick a finger that has once been in the Weddell Sea is to eschew the ordinary salts forever. What had earned me distance? In America I had crisscrossed the country, leaping in and out of landscape, stitching my wild, erratic journey. The mile is a measure of madness too, and a map is hot pursuit. (This is still the war news.) Gradually the room grew light and I could perceive the objects in it — the four-bladed fan that hung from the ceiling like a great spider, the cane furniture like petrified vegetable, the huge wardrobe, big as a piano crate, the white mystery of the mosquito netting. They were the solid evidences of my own strangeness. Why am I far afield?

“I rang for my tea and porkchop — think of that, a porkchop for breakfast — and the little half-naked native brought it up on a tray. Still standing beside my bed he kneaded the warm half-baked dough they use here as rolls and pinched the last counter-clockwise swirls into it. How does he live? He is fourteen and already married and a father. My 15 percent service charge which must be divided with the chambermaids and hall porters and laundry people and maintenance men cannot keep them all. This hotel has been practically empty since the war began. What strange arrangement goes on here?

“As I was finishing my breakfast Collins came for me and we drove straight to the garrison. It was deserted. The troops I’d seen were not reinforcements. They’d been pulling out.

“‘Where could they have gone?’ Collins said.

“I stood with all my weight on one hip, the deferential stance of one waiting for someone else to make a decision for him.

“‘Something may be up,’ Collins said. ‘We ought to find out where they’ve gone. There’s probably someone around.’

“We found a man in the infirmary who told us the garrison had gone off to make contact with the Japanese at the southeastern edge of the island, about a half-day’s trip over rough terrain.

“‘Looks like the real thing,’ Collins said. He did not seem very happy. ‘What the hell is this about anyway, Dick? How’d a couple of old radio men like us get involved in all this?’

“In a way he was thinking the same thoughts I had earlier, but I only shrugged.

“‘You believe all that shit about the dodo bird?’ I didn’t answer. ‘Bird extinct two hundred and fifty years suddenly shows up. Damned island extinct for about the same length of time, and all of a sudden it’s a major theater of operations. It must have something to do with that bird. That’s what the talk is, but no one knows. What do you make of it?’

“‘I don’t know, Lieutenant.’

“‘You said they’ve got some stuffed dodos at the museum.’

“‘Representations, cunning dolls.’

“‘Let’s take a look at them, see what all the fuss is about.’

“We went to the museum. Collins treated. I knew the collection pretty well by now and I started to take him through. He wasn’t really paying much attention; he barely glanced at the glass cases. ‘We could still be in London, you know that? You had to go haywire.’

“‘No excuse, sir.’

“‘No, hell, water under the bridge. Boy, it sure spooked me when I learned you were so highly connected. What did you have on that general, anyway?’

“‘I once took a burr out of his paw.’

“‘Yeah. Ha ha. You know something? I don’t think this war can last much longer. You going back into radio when it’s over?’

“‘Yes sir.’

“‘Not me.’

“‘No sir?’

“‘Television.’

“Oh.’

“‘That’s where the money will be. Radio’s had it.’

“‘I’ll stick to radio.’

“‘Will you?’

“‘Yes sir.’

“‘Well, it’s all a matter of what you’re comfortable doing, I guess.’

“‘It’s been pretty good to me,’ I said.

“Soldiers had been talking this way for hundreds of years in the respites before big battles. I don’t think Collins saw me, but I began to cry. A chill went through me. Something about our voices, the sound of our dropped-guard friendship, told me that something terrible was going to happen. As he spoke hopefully and confidently about the future, I expected to see Collins die, to be hit by a grenade, his head torn off. Before long, I thought, he’ll be dead at my feet, his neck broken. I wanted to tell him to hush, but of course I couldn’t.

“Then something odd did happen. We were in the picture gallery. All about us were the dark oils of the early settlers — pictures of dodo hunts, the excited Dutchmen ruddy and breathless from the chase, the dodo cornered, maddened perhaps by its ordeal; other paintings, still lifes of Mauritian feasts, tables spread with the island’s fruits, halved cuchacha melons white as moonlight, tangled wreaths of the fruit vines that trellis the cones of the volcanoes, the dodo birds prepared for cooking, split, the guts, like long, partially inflated balloons, tossed into a slopbucket, their long necks limp, the beaks open in death and their bare, old men’s cheeks flecked with blood. I had thought we were alone, but suddenly I heard a low bark of heartbreak. We both turned. It was the captured Japanese civilian, sitting on one of those benches that they put in the middle of picture galleries. There was a strange rapt expression on his face, and he was weeping. Probably he didn’t see us.

“‘How did he get loose?’ the lieutenant whispered. I shook my head. Collins drew his service revolver — since that time in Broadcasting House when he’d placed me under arrest he always wore one— and pointed it at the man. ‘Hands up,’ he commanded. The scientist appeared not to have heard and Collins walked closer. ‘I said hands up.’ Still the fellow did not acknowledge us. ‘Hands up and stop crying.’ At last the Japanese turned to Collins. He seemed very tired. He raised his arms wearily.

“‘What are you doing here?’ Collins demanded. The Japanese just stared at him. He looked like someone in touch with something really important who was suddenly forced to deal with the ordinary. I was glad I wasn’t the lieutenant and didn’t have to ask the questions. ‘Come on, fellow. You don’t have to speak our language to get our meaning,’ Collins said. He waved the pistol at him. He shook it in his face. ‘Move out smartly … I said move!’ The man merely looked away from Collins again and stared across the room at a large painting of a dodo bird. He rubbed his eyes. ‘And you can cut out that sniffling,’ Collins said firmly. ‘We’re not barbarians. We’re American soldiers and you’re a prisoner of war, subject to rights granted you under the Geneva conventions. You’re our first prisoner and we aren’t exactly sure of what those rights include. We’ll have to look them up, but anyway we’re not going to hurt you. You have to come along with us, though.’

“‘I am not afraid,’ the Japanese said calmly. ‘And I will go with you. But first, can you please give me one moment alone in here? As you can see, this is the last gallery. Obviously I have no means of escape.’

“I must confess something. I was very excited at the prospect of taking a prisoner. ‘Don’t do it, Lieutenant — it’s a trick,’ I said.

“The man looked at me contemptuously. ‘Please, Lieutenant,’ the Japanese said, ‘you can see that there is no escape.’ He patted his pockets and opened his palms. ‘I am unarmed.’

“‘How come you talk such good English?’ I asked threateningly. He seemed disappointed in me. I didn’t blame him; I felt my sergeant’s stripes sear themselves into my arm.

“‘I am a scientist,’ he explained coolly, looking at the lieutenant. ‘English is the official language of ornithology.’

“‘Hmph.’

“‘Please, Lieutenant, I will go with you now. My meditations’—he looked at me—‘are over.’

“He rose, his eyes downcast, his body just visibly stiffening as we went by each of the paintings. In the gallery showing the environments of the dodo birds he would not look up, and once, when his hand accidentally brushed against one of the glass cases, he jumped back as if flung. ‘Pretty odd behavior for a so-called scientist, wouldn’t you say, Lieutenant?’ I whispered in Collins’s ear, regretting my style even as I spoke. My stripes lashed me, driving me to feats of clown and squire.

“Once outside the museum the Japanese seemed more comfortable. We took him back to the garrison and let ourselves into the guardhouse.

“‘How did you escape?’ the lieutenant asked our prisoner.

“‘I didn’t. I was abandoned. They forgot about me.’

“‘What were you doing at the museum?’

“‘I’m an ornithologist.’

“‘You’re the one who discovered the dodo.’

“‘No. I identified him.’

“I was still smarting from all the things I’d said up to now. ‘Listen, Lieutenant,’ I whispered, ‘I think there’s more going on here than we appreciate yet. Give me a few minutes alone with him.’

“‘Why? What good would that do?’

“‘I think I know some ways of getting him to talk.’

“‘He’s a prisoner of war, Sergeant.’

“‘Yes sir, but our buddies are out there. I think this gook knows more than he lets on.’ The scientist rolled his eyes.

“‘Many hundreds of years ago—’ he said.

“’Talk,’ I hissed.

“‘Many hundreds of years ago, during the dynasty of the Emperor Shobuta—’ the man said.

“‘That’s it,’ I said lamely, ‘keep talking.’

“‘ … there suddenly appeared in Japan, on the island of Shikoku — your Indian word “Chicago” derives from this — a single specimen of the genus Raphidae Didus, what you call dodos. How it got there is unknown, for Japan — this was in the thirteenth century, three centuries before the discovery of Mauritius — was an insular nation which had no dealings with the rest of the world. The bird was flightless. Ceramics from the era show that its wing development was even less than the Mauritian representations. Naturally, the bird was a curiosity. The curator of the Shikoku Zoo — we are not barbarians either, Lieutenant; Shikoku had a zoo long before one was ever dreamed of in Europe — did not know how to classify it and was inclined to put it with the animals rather than in the aviary.

“‘Now at this time Japan was plagued by warlords. One in particular, Zamue, a Shikokuan, was a threat to the emperor himself, a man of mild manners and ways whose paths were peace. Zamue, in contrast, was a fierce samurai who, in the course of events, had left a trail of bloody victories from the island of Yezo in the north to Kyushu in the south.

“‘Now it came to pass — you have this idiom in your country? — it came to pass that a court counselor, one Ryusho Mali, recognized the need to instill courage in our emperor, and when he heard about the strange wingless bird that had alighted in Shikoku he sent for it in order to examine it for its qualities as an omen. He had expected something like a peacock, perhaps, or a cassowary — both rare in Japan but not unheard of — or even a parrot, but when he saw the specimen he was extremely disappointed. How could so foolish-looking a bird bode well for the state? Nevertheless, setting aside his prejudices, he proceeded to examine it closely. Perhaps it enjoyed some of the properties of the parrot and could be made to mimic human speech. Ryusho Mali recalled how a predecessor of his had once done something notable for his country through an ordinary crow, and so he closeted himself with the bird and examined it. He tried to train it to say “courage,” thinking that perhaps the hard k sound might be natural to it, but, alas, he quickly discovered that the bird had no voice at all. It was mute as a turtle. He wondered if something cheering might not be done with the feathers, but there was little inspiration to be had from the lusterless black and dingy yellow with which the bird was covered. In the end, Ryusho Mali put the bird away from him, commanding that it be sent back to the zoo in Shikoku to be stared at by the multitudes for the pointless novelty it was.

“‘The Emperor Shobuta — whose very name means compassion— was himself an animal fancier, no hunter but a lover of beasts. Perhaps he saw that they had qualities which he himself lacked. It is often the way. We have an expression: “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” At any rate, it is well known that fish and birds are the most fascinating animals to man for that the one can live in the sea and the other in the air. Be that as it may, it was Shobuta who had decreed that there be a 200—for the two hundred distinct animal types; the z in the word “zoo” is a corruption of the 2—and every day he would visit there, consoling himself with the mysteries of creation.

“‘No sooner was the bird returned to its pen in the 200—as I’ve said, the curator did not know how to classify it and had ordered that it should be put in with the hogs—’

“‘But hogs—’ I said.

“‘Yes,’ the ornithologist said. ‘Exactly. No sooner was the bird returned to the 200 than the emperor, who had been away at his summer palace when the bird was first discovered, saw the dodo and was furious — as much as it was possible within the terms of his sweet nature for him to be furious — that it had been classified with the animals. He had recognized it immediately for what it was. Oh, I don’t mean he knew that it was Raphidae Didus, but he saw that it was a bird. He was, as I say, furious. His exact words were: “What iniquity is this? To break off the wings of a bird”—for that is what he thought had happened— “merely to indulge the crowd’s appetite for the grotesque! I will not have this! A nation which stoops to the barbarity of a Zamue the samurai does not deserve to be sustained. What, are not wings marvelous enough?” We have an expression in Japan: “to gild the lily.” It is to situations like this that such an expression applies.”

“‘It was the first time anyone had ever seen the emperor so angry, and though it was explained to him that no one had tampered with the bird, he would not believe it. He ordered the bird released and brought it back with him to the palace. There he anointed the nub of its wings with precious balms and unguents. I said before that man admires and loves those qualities which he does not himself possess, but he loves also to recognize in other species those which he does. Both things are true. Perhaps the emperor’s heart responded to something like his own winglessness in the bird’s; at any rate, it is known that he cherished the bird as he had cherished nothing before it, and that he kept it with him always.

“‘Now something must be said of the warrior Zamue. Remarkable as it may seem for one so successful, he had no followers. He permitted himself none. The fact is, he was not so much warlord, or even samurai, as he was assassin. He was a man of a thousand disguises and wreaked his havoc through the art of murder, which he had perfected. He had murdered men by drowning them and murdered them with poisons. He’d done murders with knives and murders with clubs. He murdered them awake and he murdered them asleep, and he murdered the sick as well as the well. He had great strength and murdered them by lifting heavy objects and then letting them fall on the tops of their heads. He shoved men off cliffs and lured them from the sea to the rocks with false signal lights. He murdered by loosing beasts and by cruel degrees of torture. He pushed them against walls and squeezed them to death. He murdered with gunpowder and murdered with strangling, by forcing sand up their noses and holding their mouths. He murdered them by repeatedly kicking them hard.

“‘Zamue preempted whole kingdoms by killing the leaders, and had worked his wicked way up the chain of proprietorship till all that stood between himself and the sandal — we say sandal instead of crown in Japan — was the life of Shobuta the Tender. Him he had saved for last, just as one reserves the sweetest morsel of a feast.

“‘Shobuta knew Zamue was coming. He doubled his guards, tripled them, but in his heart he had no faith that he could escape the assassin’s depredations. Zamue, as has been said, was a master of disguise. The chances were excellent — better than excellent — that one of his own men was Zamue, and so he reasoned that by increasing their number he had correspondingly increased the chances of Zamue’s being among them. He reduced the guard by a third, by a half, by three-quarters. In the end he relieved all but his most trusted attendant and made him his entire guard. I know what you’re thinking.

“‘Zamue was a fate — in our country we have a saying: “What will be will be”—and all that the emperor could do in these last days was care for the bird, minister to his new pet’s winglessness. “I will be your wings,” Shobuta whispered to it. “Surely you are not so high as once you soared,” he would tell it — he carried the dodo everywhere — and then add, thinking perhaps of his own circumstances, “We all come down.” In this wise the emperor continued for months. Each night as he laid his head on his pillow he could not but wonder if he should ever see the morning.

“‘It is well known that birds tuck their heads under their wings when they sleep, but what of wingless birds? Shobuta took the poor dodo to his bed with him. “I told you I would be your wings,” he reminded it softly, and raised his elbow. With an uncanny instinct, the bird nuzzled up to Shobuta’s armpit, and the emperor put his arm gently down over the dodo’s head. In this wise they remained all night.

“‘As the great feast days approached, Shobuta thought that Zamue would soon make his move. In our country, as in most, there is the old saying: “Strike before the feast days if you would have victory.” Each day now he peered outside the door of the imperial apartments and glared accusingly into the face of his most trusted lieutenant. Should not the suspicion that has occurred to you occur also to the greatest scholar of his time? Every afternoon at exactly the same time Shobuta the Tender would step out just as the circle of his tour brought the man before the doors to the imperial apartments and, at the precise moment when the eyes of the “trusted lieutenant” met his own, he would whisper softly, “When, ‘Lieutenant?’ How?” In my country we have the expression “battle of nerves.” That’s what this was. The man never answered, of course, for that is against the basic rule of guard duty.’

“‘Why didn’t the emperor—?’

“‘Discharge the lieutenant? Zamue was a master of disguise. Sergeant, a master. With his great strength and fabulous muscle control he could alter not only his size but even the actual features of his face. If only he had used his powers for good …

“‘The feast days came and the feast days went and still Zamue had not put in his appearance. “So,” the emperor thought, “he did not abide by the venerable saying. How clever the fellow is! How clever and how wicked!” Yet troubled as he was … Oh. I forgot to mention something. The emperor had little feeling for his personal safety, but very delicate negotiations were going on in Japan at this time, negotiations which the emperor himself had initiated and that required his leadership if they were to succeed. Also, he was disturbed by what would happen to the dodo when he was no longer there to care for it … As I started to say, troubled as Shobuta was, he never let on to the dodo bird that he was concerned with anything more serious than the dodo’s winglessness. No. With the dodo he was always careful to seem gay. He took up singing and sang for the voiceless bird with apparently unflagging spirits. If the dodo appeared to tire of a particular song Shobuta the Tender immediately removed it from his repertoire and learned two new ones for the one he had discarded. He noted which songs appeared to give the dodo especial pleasure and had the court musicians compose new ones along the lines of these. Only during that brief moment during the day when he went outside to confront his lieutenant did his anxiety surface — and this, thank God, was a moment the bird was not permitted to share.

“‘Things continued in this wise till the next feast days, and still nothing happened. Then, one day, after completing a new song that the dodo had never heard before, Shobuta walked down the hallway at the other end of which stood the huge double-thick ivory entrance doors to the imperial apartments, first, of course, setting down the bird and giving his customary admonition that it remain there until he returned.

“‘The emperor went down the long hallway, his tender anger building as he thought of the duplicities and treasons of him who had so long kept him waiting for what he still thought of as his fatality. But then the knowledge that he had recently completed the delicate negotiations softened his heart toward his malefactor. Indeed, by the time he arrived at the enormous doors it was all this tender, gentle man could do to fix his features in a scowl. Though he was now quite empty of hostility, he felt he owed it to his enemy to present a scowling face — since he knew, you see, that the cruelty of a Zamue thrived on such gestures and the tender Shobuta did not have it in him to disappoint even Zamue.

“‘What was his surprise, then, when he opened the door and saw his “trusted lieutenant” laying dead at his feet, his neck broken and his chest struck quite through with a sword! His first words were typically Shobutian. “Hurrah!” he exclaimed. “The bird was spared seeing this!” Then he began to grieve that his “lieutenant” had come to such a dreadful end. He kneeled by the man’s prostrate body, his eyes misting over with tears. Only then did he see that he was not alone. He found himself staring at a pair of the largest feet he had ever seen. Horned they were, and scaly. He looked at the grayish shins, hard as broadswords, and up the cutting edge of the thighs, and all the way up the rest of the long, thick body until he was staring directly into the face of — the assassin Zamue!

“‘ “But—” the emperor said.

“‘ “It is I. I come undisguised.”

“‘It was the real face of Zamue, the powerful muscles relaxed for once, collapsed in the fierce pile that was his natural aspect. It could be no one else. Aiiiee, the emperor thought, he means to kill me with his ugliness. I must not look.

“‘Zamue reached down, pulled the emperor to his feet, and was just about to kill him by biting his jugular in two when suddenly he released him and began to laugh uncontrollably.

“‘ “Ho haw hoo hoo haw ho ha!” laughed the assassin, pointing to something behind the emperor’s back. Shobuta had forgotten to close the door behind him, and when he turned he saw that what Zamue had been laughing at was the wingless, ungainly dodo waddling down the corridor toward them. Shobuta — he did not want the bird to see what Zamue was about to do to him — immediately made to close the doors, but Zamue restrained him. “No, let him come,” he roared. “I have never seen anything so ridiculous. Look. He has no wings. A bird with no ho haw hoo hoo wings!”

“‘The bird continued to approach them, his waddle more graceless than ever. In his haste to be reunited with his friend he appeared to stumble, to fall, to pitch, to buckle, to drop to one knee. Zamue thought he had never seen anything so comical as this fat bird, bigger than a turkey, with its glazed, bulging eyes that made it seem so stupid. “Hoo haw haw hoo. Just look at that booby, will you? If you want to know, I think it’s drunk.”

“‘But when the bird had reached our emperor and was nuzzling against his knees, Zamue recovered himself. He drew the sword from the lieutenant’s chest and raised it high above his head. “Say your farewells to your clumsy friend, Shobuta, for now I am going to split you two in two!” Zamue shouted. So saying, he raised himself up on the powerful balls of his enormous feet and made to chop with his sword on the emperor’s crown — we say crown and not sandal when we are referring to the head — when suddenly the bird appeared to float up into the air. The wingless bird had risen!

“‘Zamue’s eyes widened in horror. “Yeeeeeghch!” he screamed, and still stretching for leverage with the sword above his head, his fright and his imbalance and the weight of his weapon toppled him backward. Moving quickly and almost without thinking, Shobuta recovered the sword and plunged it into the assassin’s heart. The giant writhed and thrashed. His throes were terrible, but it was all up with him; in minutes he was dead. Interestingly enough — so evil are some men — he had actually lied to Shobuta when he said he had come undisguised, for his features changed still another time, and as death relaxed them his muscles flowed like currents to create a final tidal wave of horror beneath his skin. Only now was he undisguised.

“‘In the excitement Shobuta had lost track of the bird. Now he looked around and found it some yards away, squatting in a corner. It seemed clumsy and stupid as ever. It had flown but one moment— in the instant of its dear friend’s need — and now it was as it had been before.’

“‘That’s quite a story,’ Collins said after a while.

“‘It isn’t finished,’ the Japanese said.

“‘Keep talking,’ I said.

“‘The news of Zamue’s end spread throughout the empire, and all at once, in the vacuum created by the death of the assassin, many vicious men began to struggle for power. This was a terrible disappointment for Shobuta and for all those others in the empire whose paths were peace. But — the Japanese have an expression: “First one thing, then another—” terrible as it must have been for him, Shobuta knew that he could no longer sit idly by while the empire was being torn to shreds by contending forces. He was a changed man. From Shobuta the Tender he became Shobuta the Jealous; wherever there was insurrection, there too was Shobuta. He met each challenge forthrightly and with all the force at his command. And this force was now considerable. Reports of the bird’s miraculous flight had traveled the length and breadth of the empire, and bit by bit its strange powers were transferred to the emperor. Shobuta had become irresistible, rosichicho—invincible. His enemies, and there were many, fell back before him as grain before the wind. Before long almost every pocket of resistance had either been defeated or else dissolved of its own accord. Only one man, the shogun Korogachi, the most powerful of all Shobuta’s enemies, held out. A wily warrior, he pretended to encourage a belief among the people in the emperor’s new powers. In this way he thought to let the emperor do his work for him, and to inherit a docile Japan once he and the emperor — you say “locked assholes”?

“‘Only when there were no more seditionists save himself did Korogachi declare that he disbelieved the emperor’s story about the wingless bird. He let it be known that he thought the bird was a hoax, a desperate fabrication of the emperor’s counselors — for example, he presented proof that the bird had been with the cunning Ryusho Mali long before the emperor had ever laid eyes on it — and that when he and Shobuta met on the field of combat, man-to-man, no crippled— ha ha — bird would have any bearing on the outcome. He intimated that the real miracle was the so-called “character change” of the emperor, and declared that he had no more faith in Shobuta the Jealous than he’d had in Shobuta the Tender. “If you want my honest opinion,” Korogachi was wont to say, “that mother should be known as Shobuta the Showboat!”

“‘When Shobuta the Jealous heard what the shogun had been saying about him, he was so furious that he insisted on setting out at once for their confrontation, and he ordered that the bird be brought from the temple where it had been kept for safekeeping and religious observance ever since the day of its fabulous flight. “We shall just take the wondrous bird with us this time, since Mister Korogachi proclaims not to believe in its powers! Perhaps it will show again what it can do. Who knows but what it may fly in his face and peck out Mister Korogachi’s eyes?”

“‘In this wise, feeling himself invincible, and now singing martial airs to the bird where once he had sung lullabies and poems and love songs, Shobuta set off with his army, the bird waddling along beside him.

“‘I shall not dwell much longer on this history. Shobuta’s forces were met by an enormous army. The holocaust raged for three days and three nights. The noise of battle was fantastic; the clank of armor intermingled with the screams of the dying and the bangs and booms of the gunpowder, which had only recently been invented. The racket was simply terrific.

“‘As you know, in nature there is a law of compensation. When a leg is injured or lost, an arm grows stronger. He who has not the sense of sight is frequently preternaturally blessed with the sense of touch or smell. In the bird world it is the same. For some reason, winglessness may be compensated for by a particular acuity of hearing. Historians speculate that Shobuta the Tender had a lovely voice, one particularly well suited to accommodate the soft nuances of gentle love songs. We scientists think it may have been particularly amenable to the sensitive hearing of the miraculous bird. The martial, fervent stridencies of patriotic petition were something else, as were the harsh noises of that awful battle. They were more than the sensitive auditory threshold of the bird could accommodate. It went mad. There is no other word for it. It dashed its poor head to pieces on the shield of a just-fallen soldier. Perhaps, in its confusion, it had identified the shield with the noise of the battle and sought to stop the sound by breaking its ears upon it. Or perhaps both the historians and the scientists are wrong. Perhaps we have all along paid too much attention to its winglessness and not enough to its voicelessness. Perhaps voicelessness is a choice — the choice of silence. Perhaps winglessness is one. Perhaps there are birds who reject the air and choose the earth. Perhaps even extinction is a choice of sorts.

“‘When Shobuta the Tender saw what had happened, his poor heart cracked. Suddenly he remembered those gentle days when he had been closeted with the bird in his apartments. Laying down his sword, he took the bird up in his arms. “Come,” he whispered, his voice broken, “once more I shall be your wings,” and he began to croon the bird’s favorite song. No longer conscious of where he was, he drifted through the field of death among the fallen bodies of his foes and followers. It was such a touching sight that Korogachi, seeing it, began himself to weep. Blinded by his tears, and following now only the sound of the emperor’s voice, he did not notice one of the emperor’s warriors creeping up behind him. It was Earaki, a deaf samurai who, since he had not heard the sound of battle, could not now hear that it had ceased. Seizing the opportunity of what he saw only as the momentary lapse of the leader of the enemy, he struck from behind and felled the shogun Korogachi for his emperor. Once again the bird had saved Japan.’

“It was a while before either Collins or I could speak.

“‘You’re here for the bird,’ I said.

“‘We are losing the war. Only a miracle—’ His voice trailed off.

“I nodded. His story had unsergeanted me, dissolved the chevrons from my arms. Silence is golden, I thought, and kept quiet, as grateful to the Japanese as I had been to the general. I looked from one to the other. Collins’s eyes shone. ‘He knows where it is,’ he said suddenly.

“‘Sir?’ I said. I knew enough to be fearful.

“‘He knows where it is. Don’t you see? They’ve already got it. Or maybe they haven’t, but they’re close. Anyway, it’s still on the island. That’s why he told us — so we can get word to the troops not to shoot. Can you think what it would mean if we could capture that bird?’ The Japanese smiled. ‘You see?’ Collins said, pointing at our prisoner and talking fast. ‘He wants us to try. They haven’t got it. They haven’t got it because he’s the expert; he knows its ways and its lairs. The bastard is challenging us to try. He’s teasing us to try. That’s what he was doing in the museum — studying it. Then he was going after it. but that’s when we showed up. Right? Am I right, you?’

“‘All correct,’ the scientist said. He was still smiling.

“‘All correct.’ Collins laughed. ‘You bet all correct. He couldn’t tell the British because there were too many of them, but there are only two of us. So he wants us to try. We bring him along so he can find it for us, then the Japs grab it back. That’s it — that’s what it’s all about.’

“‘But that would only make sense if there were a million Japs around to guarantee that he could get it back,’ I said.

“‘All correct, Sergeant,’ Collins said.

“‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘it’s a trap.’

“‘A beauty,’ Collins said. He turned to the Japanese. ‘We have a jeep. How long till we get to the area?’

“‘About nine hours,’ the scientist said. ‘I’m judging by the time it took the patrol to bring me here after I was captured.’

“Collins had risen and was moving toward the door, the Japanese right behind him. ‘But there’ll be all those Japs!’ I said.

“Collins turned to me. ‘They can’t shoot for fear they’ll madden the bird. We’ll stay out of their way. You’ll see. Even if they get the dodo first they can’t shoot because of the noise. He won’t let them. That’s our chance.’

“Collins got on the jeep radio and told the story to the British. He asked them to hold their fire, to give us twenty-four hours to try to find the dodo. He wanted Sansoni — that was the scientist’s name — to give him the position where we’d be so he could tell the British. The Jap refused. When Collins drew his gun the man just grinned. ‘It’s better, Lieutenant, that they don’t know,’ he said. ‘They’d be drawn to the area. Something could go wrong.’ Collins nodded, and put the gun back. I had been cast adrift among brave men. It is always the case with squires.

“Though I’m not a good driver, Collins made me drive the jeep and Sansoni gave directions. To avoid the British we stayed off the main roads, and after a while we even avoided the secondary roads and were cutting across plantations and through fields. We left Port Lewis in the afternoon, and it was already dark, about ten-thirty or eleven o’clock, before we saw our first Japanese. They were under orders not to shoot, of course, but they signaled us to stop. Collins drew his gun again and pointed it at Sansoni’s head. The soldiers recognized the scientist, and when he spoke to them calmly in Japanese they giggled. ‘I’ve explained the situation to them,’ he told us. ‘They’ll inform the others on the walkie-talkie — that is an interesting English orientalization, “walkie-talkie,” don’t you think — that we’re coming. We won’t be interfered with.’

“‘Excellent,’ Collins said.

“‘Bully,’ I said. ‘Why were they giggling?’

“‘Oh well,’ Sansoni said patiently, ‘they expect that you two stand to lose our little contest.’

“It was fantastic. Every few minutes now we passed great clusters of Japanese troops. When our headlights picked them up they would simply turn and smile and wave us on. Soon we were in a forest, squeezing the jeep between the trees. Here and there we could see soldiers crawling along on their hands and knees. Collins was very excited. ‘It’s true,’ he said hoarsely, ‘they haven’t found it yet.’ By now it was almost impossible to drive. The crawling soldiers took up so much of the space between the trees that there was no longer any clearance.

“I honked the horn to make them move. ‘Don’t do that again,’ Sansoni said fiercely. ‘We’re almost there. Do you want to madden it? Lieutenant, please do something about this man of yours.’

“‘He’s right, Sergeant. Calm down.’

“‘Further,’ Sansoni said, ‘just a little further.’ We drove another half-mile or so. ‘Now,’ Sansoni said.

“‘Lieutenant?’

“‘Do what he says. Sergeant. Stop here.’

“The three of us got out. We had passed all the Japanese soldiers and were alone in the forest. We walked through the woods for a while, and finally came to a bowl-shaped clearing, perhaps two hundred feet across. Though it was very dark — there was no moon — and I’d never seen the place before, there was something familiar about it. Then I realized that it was the landscape of many of the pictures in the museum. Collins was having the same thoughts. ‘The glass case,’ he said. ‘The environment they built for the reconstructed dodo. That was like this place.’

“‘Shh,’ Sansoni said. ‘Now it is necessary that we do not talk.’

“The grass was strange, leathery, and there was a fierce smell to the ground. It was an odor neither ripe nor rotten, life nor death. It was as if we smelled the molecules themselves, things outside time and form. I turned to see if there were any Japanese behind us, and when I looked back again I had lost the Jap. I moved toward the lieutenant to tell him, but he shushed me before I could speak and pointed to Sansoni. He was down on his hands and knees in the dark. Collins and I both halted. Then Sansoni suddenly began to croon strange songs in a high soft voice. I knew they were Shobuta’s thirteenth-century carols.

“‘Lieutenant,’ I whispered.

“‘What is it?’ The lieutenant was whispering also.

“‘He’s seen the dodo.’

“‘We know that.’

“‘He’s an ornithologist.’

“‘We know that.’

“‘Even if he only saw it through field glasses—’

“‘What?’

“‘ … he’d have made … observations.’

“‘Yes. What of it?’

“‘He knows its lairs, its habits.’

“‘Yes, we know that.’

“‘He can do its signals.’ I shuddered.

“‘Will you be quiet?’

“‘He’ll find it.’

“The lieutenant shook me off, moved toward Sansoni, and as I watched, went down on his hands and knees. In the dark I lost them both. I was not alone, though; the Japanese had caught up with us and I could hear their creaking movement all around me. I sank down on my hands and knees. There we were, Americans and Japanese, crawling around in that queer grass, soundless as Indians. We could have been cats and birds observing some petty detail of a mechanical neutrality, a breach in nature like a child’s ‘time-out’ in a murderous game.

“A match flared suddenly in the darkness, its light rolling across the face of the Japanese who had been on the plane with me, the one who’d helped me with my seat. He grinned and blew out the match. Someone laughed. It sounded like Sansoni.

“‘Lieutenant?’ Perhaps they’ve already killed him, I thought. I stopped crawling and waited till I could no longer hear the soldiers. I leaned against a tree, but the bark was thorny and I moved back into the leathery grass. I rooted about in it and suddenly came on something soft. I laid my head down and closed my eyes, and something warm and feathery brushed my face. I didn’t have to see it to know it was the dodo bird; I’d invaded its nest. I felt the bird’s body stiffen and move backward. No, stay, I thought, I’m no hog. Then I grabbed its legs and pulled it to me for a hostage.

“In the dark, directionless, I traveled with the bird for hours. Several times we passed Japanese, but the bird was hidden under my shirt, next to my skin. As I crawled by the soldiers I made the exploratory pats of one searching for something under a bed. Over the old rough ground we went, a trade route of the extinct. I thought of dinosaurs and mammoths and the saber-toothed tiger, and here was I, Dick Gibson, with that other loser, the dodo. Back, I thought, cursing it, back to history, you. And felt its shape against my skin, its useless, resisting wing that whipped at me percussive as a terrorized heart. It scratched me, it pissed on me, and shit on me. I gagged, and my vomit covered the bird’s stench and saved me from the Japanese. When the sun comes up, I’ll be killed, I thought.

“Then I heard Sansoni’s voice. He was perhaps a hundred yards off, but I could hear him talking to Collins — or to me, perhaps, if Collins was already dead. ‘It’s useless in the dark,’ he was saying. ‘Most likely it’s asleep. We’ll have to wait and look for its nest in the morning. I’ll tell them.’ He spoke briefly in Japanese, and I heard the men laugh. For all I knew, he had told them to kill us. I froze where I was, and forgetting that the bird was mute, I reached inside my shirt and grabbed its beak. This only made it thrash the more. I think it bit me. Quietly as I could I removed the bird and set it down on the ground. ‘Go,’ I whispered to it, and shoved it away. I heard the soldiers taking off their packs, and after a while their heavy breathing as they slept.

“The bird wouldn’t leave me — don’t ask me why — so I sat with it in my lap and waited till morning, and all that night I could think of no plan.

“Just after dawn I heard the soldiers getting up and Sansoni organizing them, telling them what to look for. There was a heavy mist and I couldn’t see them very well. I examined my chest where the bird had bit me and thought of the dodo’s extinct germs working in my blood.

“Finally I stood up. The bird was in my arms. ‘The search is over,’ I shouted. ‘I have it. It’s mine.’

“A Japanese came out of the fog and smiled and called out to the others. I could hear the word go round the forest. They were about two hundred feet from me when Collins pushed through the vanguard. Though I had thought him dead, I was not surprised to see him. I was very detached about everything.

“‘You found it?’ he yelled.

“I held it up.

“‘They’ll take it. Run. Go on — get going.’

“‘They can’t shoot. You said so yourself.’

“‘Run!’

“The Japanese were still coming toward me. They were only twenty-five yards away now.

“‘They’re going to take the bird!’ Collins screamed.

“They were fifty feet off.

“‘Kill it,’ he yelled.

“‘What?’

“‘Kill the damn thing. They mustn’t have it. Kill it!’

“‘What good will that do?’

“‘That’s an order, Sergeant.’ Collins was pointing his pistol at me. ‘Kill it or I’ll kill you.’

“‘It bit me,’ I said lazily.

“‘Kill it.’ The Japanese had stopped where they were. They were looking first at Collins, then at me. ‘Kill it, Goddamn you. Kill it!’

“‘I have no gun.’ The loudness of my voice surprised me.

“Sansoni began to plead with me. ‘If you let it live we’ll treat you as a prisoner. My word. Geneva conventions. My word on that. Sergeant.’

“‘Kill it,’ Collins screamed. ‘Kill it, or I promise I’ll shoot you.’ He reached into his pocket, pulled out something black and threw it toward me. He was very excited. ‘Here,’ he shouted. ‘Pick up the knife. Wring its neck. Cut its throat.’

“‘Please, my dear Sergeant,’ Sansoni said. ‘We’ll let you off. We’ll allow you both to return to the garrison. All we want is the dodo.’

“‘I’m going to count to three, Sergeant,’ Collins yelled. ‘I’ll shoot you. I swear it.’

“The knife had landed at my feet. ‘One …’ Collins shouted. ‘Two …’

“I bent down and picked up the knife. I turned it in my hand and examined it. I opened it.

“‘Good,’ Collins said. ‘They mustn’t get their hands on it. Remember what we’re fighting for.’

“‘It’s only a bird. Everybody. Hey, it’s only a bird.’

“‘Kill it!’

“I slit its throat. I heard them gasp. It was as if I’d pressed the blade to their own throats.

“‘Ah,’ Collins sighed.

“I looked down. Its blood was all over me. The Japanese were weeping. Holding the bird against my breast, I started walking toward them. ‘It’s only a bird,’ I said. ‘Don’t you see? It’s just a bird.’

“Then the bird was in the air! They fell away from me. Collins was shrieking, they all were. The bird was in the air and the soldiers screamed. Some tried not to look at me, but they couldn’t turn away their heads. The bird came down against my breast and then rose again — higher this time. And then, falling again, it rose a third time. The Japanese were keening with grief and ecstasy. I moved toward them and they hid from me.

“‘It’s the miracle!’ Collins screamed. ‘Oh, my God, it’s the miracle! I didn’t want them to have it. I didn’t want them to have their symbol. I never thought … Oh, Jesus, it’s the miracle.’

“Now the bird fell. I reached out my arms and it settled against my breast for the last time. I carried it to its nest and placed it inside the spongy ring. When I turned I saw that the Japanese had lined up on two sides, making a sort of aisle in the forest. I walked through them. Collins fell in beside me, crying. The soldiers threw down their weapons and I could hear them murmuring. Rosichicho, they were saying. Invincible — I was invincible. When we were a few hundred yards past, I heard a sudden burst of machine-gun fire. It was the garrison. They charged into the forest and killed them all — every last Japanese. They’ve been clearing them out on the other islands too; the battle’s been raging for two days now. Casualties are enormous, on the British side as well. I, of course, am rosichicho.

“Oh, by now I think I’ve pieced together what’s happened here. Why Collins and I were assigned to Mauritius. It was the equipment, wasn’t it? It was a test of the equipment. Am I getting warm? You wanted to check its range, and you picked a place where not much was happening in the event these broadcasts were intercepted. They were meant to be meaningless. It was our presence on the plane from Lisbon that attracted the enemy. They sent men to check up on us. That’s when they discovered the dodo and sent for the ornithologist. Then they sent out more men because they figured we knew about the bird too. Then we built up our forces to match theirs. But it was all meant to be meaningless. But that’s very hard, you know? Meaning is everywhere, even in Mauritius.

“Collins is dead. Everyone is. ‘Dead as a dodo.’ We have that expression. I, of course, am rosichicho.

“Only don’t bet on it. I tossed the bird. I flung him up myself. With my wrists. It’s all in the wrists.”