Shiva and Other Stories Page 5
I think not, I said. I think I’ll preside over the Senate.
You too, Huey said. We’ll take a slow boat, bring along some good whiskey and maybe a few friends. We’ll have a nice cruise and we will try to reason with this gent. Maybe he can be persuaded to try reason. If not, we’ll still get some good pictures out of it and they’ll see that the President was willing to go a ways trying for peace.
I think this is a big mistake, I said. I think we ought to hunker down and wait this out.
Wait what out? Think he’s going to stop? His country is leaking Jews. Soon as he’s killed everyone he can there he’s going to turn outward, want to go other places. This guy likes killing, you understand? We wait him out, he’ll be in California.
What can I say? I said. I had another swallow of whiskey. I was always swallowing whiskey in those days. It’s your play, I said. You always wanted it your way, Kingfish, so I’m not going to stop you. You want me to go over on an ocean liner with you, I’ll go; I just hope it’s not the Titanic. What the hell, I said, why don’t we go all the way? Smuggle a thirty-eight caliber into a state meeting and shoot the fucker in the throat. You think that would solve the problem?
Huey gave me a long odd look. You think I haven’t considered that? he said. I am ahead of all you Democrats. But it is not a wise plan. Not at this time.
You think he’s a faster draw?
I think that we’re at the Reichstag when we try it, that isn’t too smart, Huey said. That’s all I think. But it is something to be tabled for future reference.
I should have said something then. But vice presidents are not paid to say things other than in accordance with the Constitution I cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of this resolution. Or, I support our great President. Or, It ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit. Trust a vice president to know protocol.
* * *
After Berlin, Huey put the invitation right out. Come to Washington and we’ll try to settle this thing. But Adolf had other plans, other stuff on his mind about then, and so for that matter did the Kingfish, things were getting cudgeled about in the provinces and Franklin, no quitter, was rallying the Democrats and talking about a people’s coalition in 1940. The basic question, Franklin was saying, had to do with what Huey had done since the Inauguration and aside from going to Berlin to have his picture taken and making some good speeches against the Wall Street capitalists, Huey hadn’t done much at all. These were powerful points and gave the Kingfish pause, or at least kept him preoccupied. So there were some lively times here and about when the food riots started to occur on a regular basis. Business was reviving a little and Hollywood was telling us that things were great but down on the Great White Way or the places where the Commies dwelt, there was a different cast to the situation. And the Commies were getting stronger; anyone, even the Vice President, could see how much real appeal they were finding in the cities.
But by that time it just didn’t matter that much. There comes a time when your destiny confronts you and if you don’t accept it, you don’t begin to work in accord with that destiny, well then you’re just a fool. I wasn’t going to be president in 1940. I wasn’t even going to be vice president by the end of that year; I had been sucked in and served my little purposes and now I was going to be frozen out. The Kingfish had gobbled me up, just a medium-sized fish in the tank. I would be dumped and Huey would run again, maybe win, maybe lose to Franklin this time, but that was going to be the end of it. And by 1940, it was going to be a changed situation anyway. I just didn’t give a damn; I wanted to get back on the ranch, I wanted to see the old times out with as much dignity and as little whiskey as I could manage and the hell with the rest of it. So my accommodation was to simply hang on and go on my way. Huey was going to stay out of local statehouses and he had some pretty good protection. Even Capone or Legs Diamond would have had a hell of a time nailing the Kingfish by that time. No fortunate accidents were going to catapult me to any place that I hadn’t already been.
* * *
But then, just when it seemed settled, it wasn’t settled. After Munich, after he gobbled up the rest of Czechoslovakia, Adolf had Göring pass the word direct to Harry Hopkins. He wanted to take up Huey’s invitation. He wanted to come over, explore a few things, do a little business.
Peace in our time, Huey said. He’s looking for that now, right? Why should the son of a bitch take us up on this now? He’s cleaning out the country, he’s ready for war. What the hell does he have in mind?
Why are you asking me? I said. I haven’t been in here twice in nine months, Huey, I got nothing to tell you.
Don’t sulk, Big John, Huey said. I got you in mind all the time, it’s just that I’ve been preoccupied. This is a big country, you know, and there are lots of problems. Maybe we’ll get that redistribution working, maybe all of this stuff will come out in the long run, but it isn’t going to be nearly as fast as I thought when I was a young man. Got to cultivate patience, that’s all.
I have lots of patience, I said; I had it a long time ago. You were the one who was going to turn things around, make it all different by 1940, remember? I didn’t say that it was going to happen.
Huey said, you’re taking this too hard, John. You’re taking it personally. Sit back and help me through this. I want you to meet the guy when he comes off the boat in New York, I want you to escort him around. The Statue of Liberty, maybe Liberty Square in Philadelphia on a day trip. Then you can bring him here and I’ll meet him at the White House and we’ll talk over things. But I need your support here, I don’t want to go trotting out for him, it doesn’t suit my purposes.
I’m not a messenger boy, I said. I’m the Vice President. You got to take the office seriously even if you got no use for me.
Ah, nonsense, John, the Kingfish said. You’ve said yourself what you think of this job and you were right all the time. I got a crazy plan, John. I think we’re going to save the world twenty years of agony and maybe a few million lives. I think we’re going to arrange to plug this guy, if not at the dock then maybe when he’s walking down Pennsylvania Avenue. We’ll have an accident arranged for him.
That’s crazy, I said. Our own lives won’t be worth shit. A head of state killed in our protection? They’ll go to war the next day.
Göring and Himmler? Goebbels? You think these guys want war? They just want what we have, John, they just want their part of it, that’s all. They won’t do a goddamned thing. They’ll be relieved, they think this guy is crazy too. Every synagogue in the country will have the lights on all night the day he dies. Even Chamberlain will thank us. We’ll be treated like heroes. I think the world will fall down and give us everything we want, we get the deed done. That’s what I think and your own part is clear. You’re going to help me, John, and that’s the end of it.
And then what? I said. It’s a crazy plan, Huey. And even if it works, can we deal with the consequences?
Well sure, Huey said. I’ve been dealing with consequences all my life. I love consequences, they’re all we got. We don’t know what causes, we only know what happens, you understand? I love these talks, I want you to know that. Just the two of us in a room with a bottle, beautiful, I don’t know what I would have done if we hadn’t had that. Have a drink, John, it’s too late.
Too late for what?
Too late not to have a drink, the Kingfish said. So set them up.
* * *
So what was there to say? The rest seems very fast in memory although of course it was agonizingly slow in the development, waiting all through it in a suspended anguish, waiting for that heavy thud that would ejaculate us into the latter part of the century. Meeting the prancing, dancing little dictator and his company right off the boat, doing the ceremonial thing, then whirling them through Jimmy Walker’s glittering, poisonous city. The Staten Island Ferry, Radio City Music Hall. Two Rockettes flanked Hitler, put their arms around him at my direction, mimed kissing his cheekbones. He glowed, seemed to expand. There was supposed to be a
mistress but there was no woman in the party, no woman close to him. Just Himmler, Göring, and the impossibly fat Streicher who always seemed to be confiding something to the Führer. We had a private dinner at the Waldorf, talked through the interpreters of cattle and of conditions in Austria during the World War and of the shadows in Europe. Grover Whalen poured wine. I mentioned the Sudetenland, just to have it on record, but the interpreter frowned and I could see that there was no translation. Later, the dictator wanted to see Harlem at midnight. We drove there quickly in covered cars, then back to the Waldorf. At the corner where Father Divine had embraced the Kingfish, women looked at us indolently, poking knees through their skirts. The Führer rumbled in the car but said nothing. We wheeled down Fifth Avenue until the lights glowed softly again, then back into the underground garage. I felt something like a blow at the back of my neck and the thought Like the Statehouse. These were the conditions. If it was going to happen, the place would be here. It would be now.
Seated next to the dictator I leaned over to whisper—what? What would he have understood? I had no German. Nor did I know what I would have said. Dead Jews, Gypsies, burning bodies in their graves, the awful aspects of war. I thought of this and leaned back. There was nothing to say. We stopped, the door came open. I got out first and then the guard in the jump seat and then Streicher from the front, panting in sweat, and then Hitler. Hitler came last of all, straightened, looked at me with those strange, focused eyes, that face like a claw. Raus, he said in a high voice, raus—
His head exploded. One eye seemed to expectorate, fall to the stones of the garage, then fragments of him were cast upward. In the heavy embrace of someone I could not see, I stumbled back. The grasp was enormous, absolutely enfolding, it felt like swaddling, like death, like ascension. The dictator was floating. The dictator, in pieces, was floating in the air.
Now we can begin the business of living, I thought I heard Huey say, his voice enormous in my head. Except of course, that there was no Huey there, only that stricken embrace, and then the broken screams in the garage, the sound of gabbled German, hysteria—
Hitler sifted over me in the sudden darkness.
Under the silt of Hitler, I fell.
* * *
The Kingfish sent shocked condolences and offered to accompany the body back to Berlin. But the party and their coffin were already on their way before the announcement at the press conference and then in the dawn, the first reports came of the attacks upon the Embassy. The declaration of war followed by noon.
Chamberlain was furious with us.
But the Kingfish was at the top of his mood, the happiest I had ever seen him.
I always wanted to be a war president, he said. I guess that this was what I was aiming for from the start. We’re going to save them, John, he said excitedly, we’re going to get them out, we’re going to stop the machine. We’re going to save them all, Huey said. We’re going to save them all.
Salvation from the parish.
Playback
Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It’s a scream. It is written like this: “I checked out with K 19 on Alabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirius Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was ice-cold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltext. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right.” They pay brisk money for this crap!
—Raymond Chandler,
letter to H. N. Swanson,
Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler,
edited by Frank McShane
I CHECKED OUT WITH K 19 on Alabaran III. On the portico, moving slowly against the cracked and ruined spaces of the enclosure, watching the slow, dangerously signatory implosions from the outer ring, I could feel not only the collapse of the project, but my own, more imminent ruin. Ruin will not be enough, Google had warned me. If it were only a matter of ruin, it would have been accomplished a long time ago. They want to smear us, they want us utterly defaced.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I said. “What do I do now?”
She said nothing looking back at me, the high panels of her face drawn tightly as if to prohibit speech, block it at the source. They will respond to direct questions but are no good on abstractions, on open-ended cries of despair. As I well know. That should have been all right; all my life the abstract has been well dismissed. “How much longer?” I said, trying again. “Enough time to get clear?”
K 19 shrugged. In this guise she was a tall and intense young woman, her brain packed with deadly secrets which one by one her mouth would promise to impart . . . but no such knowledge would issue, that was not the program and I would hammer again on those panels to no outcome. “I do not understand the concept,” she said. “What is time? What is your conception of that?” A horrid precision now in her step, she moved toward an unshrouded viewplate. “Out there, in here,” she said, pointing. “No difference.”
She froze in that position. I could see the slow enclave of psychic ice glazing her and then she was silent. In my side pocket the heat bar ticked faintly, sent slivers of warmth through the thin fabric, but I was still fixated on K 19, still touched by the possibility that somewhere in her closed and deadly face there would lurk the answer, an answer to take me from the portion, silence the Brylls. Not the heat bar or the poltext, then. A true answer.
“Do you remember?” I said. “You made a promise—”
“I remember nothing. There is no memory, there is only this.”
Looking at her so, locked to that lesser desire which still intimated possibility, I could see that this was truth, came to understand in that concentrated moment that all along there had been nothing else, no imminence, grandeur, possibility, or disclosure, only this denial. And knowing that at last, I felt the beginnings of release, the snap of that fine and tensile emotional rope that bound us. Testing the force of that insight, I moved away from her, ducked under the refractory bands cast by the high binding rings, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch, seized instantly by the vacuum that snapped and skulked at the perilous enclosure.
Now, against the blurred firmament itself, undefended by the thin expanse of the dome. I could feel the half-forgotten swaddled in those caverns we make, I could feel the awful power of the heavens, understand that what stood between us and retrieval was little more than a set of assumptions, assumptions which at any time could be blotted as thoroughly as K 19 had destroyed whatever compact we had. Knowing this did not strengthen nor change a thing but the acceptance was in itself a kind of control. The Brylls have come a long way, worked hard, dedicated themselves, applied all of their awful technology, but that cunning of effort has not yet succeeded in taking from us all recollection. So we are sport for the trajectory of the Brylls’ conquest.
Now and then there are these pure moments of recovery, and outside the enclosure, K 19 still behind, I had another, turned the power on my 22 Model Sirius Hardtop, watching the sheaves of light curl from the element, now drawing pure solar heat at reversed amperage, seeking the internal source that we had dragged from the vacuum.
What joys we had from the cosmos before the Brylls! Our Sirian hardtops, galactic entertainments, bustling travel, our dolefully comic cries: oh, cascades of stars, nebulae of grandeur thus informing our spirit and possibilities until those Brylls came to show us the real force of universal law and to illustrate the limitations of our own condition. Crammed in the vehicle, feeling the tremors of the en
gine, I thought too of the easy, gliding weight of the hardtop when it had made fast passage from Peking Festival to the port of Macon, the wharfs of Brooklyn to the Empyrean Tower. Times when I had chanted mantras of speed to the hardtop, before the change, the emergence, the debarkation of the Brylls . . . and these shards of memory were knives, slaughterhouse of memory. I cocked the timejector in secondary and felt the rush, the sense of distances opening and then as the hardtop lifted—
* * *
I waded through the bright blue manda grass toward the beckoning Bryll, feeling the pull of the mud as I tried to clamber away, retain balance. This more than anything else they enjoy, taking our dignity, making us cartoons, yanking from us the solemnity of our distress and placing us on a flat and colorful map where we deal with pale, exploded forms who may or may not be representative of the Brylls themselves. We do not know if it is submission or some parody of conquest. My breath froze into pink pretzels as I squeaked.
Beyond the rise, the ape snickered and pointed; the Sirius fell with a whoop and I could hear the ape’s chuckling. “So little,” it said in that mechanical voice, as refractory in its burning as the fire beyond the portico. “So little and so strong, so ugly and so nice, so nice and so distressed. What do you want?” They toy with us; if this is our vision of purgatory I think that it must be theirs of transcendence. Here is where they want to go when they die, one might have said, and now all of them through the eons are dead. “Nice!” the ape said and I bounced, then fell to ooze. Stumbling for balance, I flicked on the heat bars. They had not plundered before the transfer; in their eagerness to bring me to the pink pretzels they had left weaponry behind and suddenly it was in my hand, the feel of it steady and reassuring.
Yes, I thought. I can at least take the ape. If this is my purgatory, then perhaps I can block their transcendence. We live in small snatches, now and then we are granted a glimpse of recovery. The ape waved with a scanty claw, winking, and then there were others, jolting presences. No longer alone. The Brylls ran swiftly on five legs from all directions.