The Book of Daniel

  Daniel Isaacson boarded an American Airlines 707 bound for Los Angeles. He wore his fleece-lined jacket, prison shirt and pants, and sandals. His beard was full, his long hair tied around with a headband of red cloth. His steel glasses shone. His teeth were large and white and shining and his toes, always rather large, looked immense in sandals—they were crude toes, prominently knuckled with thick yellow nails not entirely clean. He waved a big chilled toe at the fascinated lady across the aisle who looked up at him, blushed, and turned away.

  A good many of the passengers believed Daniel was there to hijack the plane. He considered the possibility. Two businessmen conferred on the length of his hair. The stewardess found it difficult to maintain her smile when she passed him the lunch menu. In fact she seemed to be angry with him. But she gave him that practiced eyeflick.

  After a lunch of sliced steak and small green peas and apple cobbler Daniel received from the stewardess some sort of stethoscope in a plastic bag. For which The Foundation paid a dollar. It is to listen to the fantasy breathing. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, with Richard Burton. Burton, an English intelligence agent, or spy, is manipulated and finally betrayed by his superiors in an involved plot designed to protect a double agent in East Germany. His innocent girl friend Claire Bloom is killed on the Berlin Wall and Burton chooses to die with her, standing up in turn to be shot. Life is never this well plotted but the picture is meant to be appreciated for its realism. It is photographed in black and white, always a sign of sincerity. Burton walks around like a man with a realistic load of shit in his pants. And The Wall itself is there, with its guard posts and striped gates and floodlights. But is it realism to show the Berlin Wall as a wall? The Berlin Wall is not a wall. It is a seam. It is a seam that binds the world. The entire globe is encased in lead, riveted bolted stripped wired locked tight and sprocketed with spikes, like a giant mace. Inside is hollow. Occasionally this hot lead and steel casing expands or cracks in the heat of the sun, and along the seams, one of which is called the Berlin Wall, a space or crevice appears temporarily that is just big enough for a person to fall through. In a world divided in two the radical is free to choose one side or the other. That’s the radical choice. The halves of the world are like the two hemispheres of Mengleburg. My mother and father fell through an open seam one day and then the hemispheres pressed shut.

  Daniel stood at the curb in Los Angeles International Airport waiting for the Low Dollar Rent-A-Car Courtesy Cab. Looking down on the traffic the fringe tops of scrawny palm trees. Here he was in Southern California. The air a strange drink of balmy poison. The sky hazy blue overhead, solid phlegm toward the horizon.

  Daniel thought renting a low dollar rent-a-car was a good idea. The courtesy cab came along with its big low dollar sign on the roof and a young black guy got out and came around to the curb and looked for the customer.

  “It’s me,” Daniel greeted him. “I called.”

  “You? Just you?”

  “Yeah.”

  The black guy took off his hat and put it back on. “Well, no offense, but they’re not going to give you a car.”

  “Oh shit,” Daniel said. He scratched his beard.

  “That’s right. I mean I’ll drive you down there, it’s all the same to me, but I’m just saying what’s true.”

  “OK, I appreciate that.”

  “They’ll just hassle you, you know. Till you get the idea.”

  “Right. Well, can you give me a lift someplace where I can thumb a ride?”

  “Sure, which way you going?”

  Daniel stood at Century Boulevard just before the turn to the San Diego Freeway. He stood with his bag between his feet and his thumb out. His chest hurt. Finally a VW camper pulled up. The driver was a blond kid with long mustaches and no shirt. The kid had a bed in the camper, a mattress with a sleeping bag on top of it, curtains on the windows, books in a bookshelf.

  “Where you goin’?”

  Daniel looked at his map. The wagon sped down the Freeway whining its way in the grey sun past oil refineries, billboards, power plants, industrial parks, furnaces, trailer parks, junkyards, storage tanks, ramps, cloverleafs, shopping centers, tract housing pennants flying, and on south into the country.

  I don’t know what to write to convey the temperature change of the book. Take your coat off, it’s warm here. A headache passes through the eyes. It has to do with the atmosphere, the light. The light burns you. The sun warms you tans you but doesn’t burn you. The light burns you, chars the back edges of the vision. The sun has to be out in this part of the book. It is a chemical sun. It shines through a grey haze. It shines through a balmy stillness of air which lacks all natural smells. And to think all this was once only orange groves.

  It was all together so much of itself, so completely what it was I reveled in it. I was exhilarated, I took deep breaths of the balmy air. Power lines were strung through the sky. Sulfurous smoke rose over the flatland. Steel cities vibrated the earth. It was the country of strontium children.

  LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT

  Daniel realized that though he’d come three thousand miles to a place he’d never seen before he felt right at home. That is the way it is. Everyone who lives there has just arrived. It’s a place you recognize immediately. On the Freeway we pass a convoy of army trucks. Helicopters cross the highway overhead. Gnatty jets loop in the sun high over the ocean. Electronic plants nestle in their landscaping. A highly visible military-industrial complex. Everything in the open in the wide spaces and bright light of California.

  I sit in a trailer in a great plain surrounded by hills. In the great plain below the hills of the south a dark green helicopter rises and beats across the sky. It passes over the trailer, its compressions beating the white air till it’s thick. The helicopter flies down the sky toward the hills to the north. There, in the great plain, it sinks to a landing. It is a marine helicopter. I’m told all day and all night it rises and flies and sets in the great plain. Nobody knows why. All the students here look ragged and wizened. They wear shredded pants held up with rope and no shoes, and torn shirts and coolie caps of tented straw, tied with a string under the chin. Water is beginning to fill the plains. We are abandoning cars for bicycles.

  The trailer belongs to the kid who gave me the lift. He’s a teaching assistant, a TA, and he shares this stationary trailer with three other TA’s. He has western ways of quiet self-attention. In the new life-style you value yourself and your feelings. You don’t ask questions. You don’t even ask a dude’s name if he doesn’t tell you. It doesn’t matter. There is a counter-world for us all to deal with. Let him use your office. This is the new University of California at Irvine, in Orange County. It is a ring of great concrete egg boxes with roofs of orange tile, recalling Spain. It is still under construction. Lesser faculty have offices in trailers.

  “Hello?” A feminine voice.

  “Phyl?”

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes, I got a lift from the airport.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. It’s hot as hell out here.”

  “How weird. It just started to snow.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “She’s holding her own.”

  “Come on, no bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit. I saw her myself. She looks the same.”

  “Are the Lewins still there?”

  “Just your father. We came home to fix dinner. Then your mother’s going back to the hospital to pick him up.”

  “Is the baby all right?”

  “Yes. We’re all fine.”

  “But?”

  “What?”

  “You said we’re all fine as if something’s the matter.”

  “Well, your mother keeps asking me what you’re doing. She wants to know why you aren’t here.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “It’s not easy.”

  “You think it’s weird, don’t you?”

  “No—you know I don?
??t.”

  “Well it is. The whole trip is insane. I don’t know if it can do any good even if I get what I’m after. But what else can I do? Can you tell me what else there is to do?”

  “I’m not criticizing, Daniel.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said: ‘Is the truth something you can give someone for pneumonia.’”

  “Oh shit. No. The answer is no. But what the fuck does she expect me to do—sit the deathwatch with her?”

  “You want to talk to her? She’s in the kitchen.”

  “No. Tell her I called and that I’ll be back as soon as I can. It’s very rough for them. Do what you can.”

  “I am.”

  “Don’t let them wait on you.”

  “I’m trying not to. But I think she wants to keep busy. She doesn’t confide in me, Daniel. Your father barely talks to me. He barely pays attention to the baby.”

  “Well, their own baby may be dying, Phyl.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “All right—I’m sorry. Don’t you lose your cool. Do I hear crying?”

  “No. But I’m doing the best I can.”

  “I know you are. I hope to be back late tomorrow. I’ll call you. OK? Phyllis, OK?”

  “OK.”

  2ND PHONE CALL—NOT COLLECT

  “Hello?” A feminine voice.

  “Is this the Mindish residence?” A silence. “Hello?” “What?”

  “Is that you, Linda?”

  Another silence.

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

  “No come on, listen, this is Danny Isaacson. This is Linda, isn’t it, Linda Mindish from Weeks Avenue?”

  A hand covering the phone. A silence. A sense of someone listening with her hand over the mouth of the phone. Here is this sudden connection, this sound-hole. She’s falling.

  “Hello? Hey, are you there? Isn’t this you?”

  “This is not the Mindish residence. You have the wrong people.”

  Daniel smiled. “Well, what residence is this?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you.” She is hanging up.

  “Wait! I’ve got your address, 1099 Poinsettia, right? See? I’ve got your phone. You might as well talk to me.”

  “It’s nothing,” I hear her answering someone, hand muffling the phone.

  “Linda?”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “Hey, Linda, you remember the way you used to poke me in the ribs? You remember how we used to bend each other’s fingers? Only you usually won because you were older. You were a strong girl, you had strong hands for a girl.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Hey—if you hang up I’ll dial again. Or I can bang on your door. So what’s the point?”

  “You better learn there’s a law against bothering people.”

  “But we know each other. Can’t you talk for a second, is it going to hurt you to talk?”

  “I have nothing to say to you. Just stay away. Leave us alone.”

  “I happened to be in the neighborhood.”

  The soft cup over the phone. “It’s nothing, a friend,” he hears her muffled voice.

  “Linda?”

  “What?”

  “I happened to be in the neighborhood. I mean no harm. Honestly. I’ve known where you people were for a long time. I’m seeing friends at, um, UCI and I decided to call you. Is that so terrible?”

  “We read about you in the paper. I know what you’re trying to do. If you think I’m afraid of you, you’re wrong.”

  “I don’t think that. That story exaggerated, the guy misunderstood the purpose of the Foundation.”

  “We have friends out here. We have loyal friends who know our real name. We don’t have anything to hide. So don’t think you can scare me.”

  “I just want to talk to your father.”

  “Well, he doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “He used to like me.”

  “I’m going to hang up now. If you bother us anymore I’ll call the police.”

  “Linda, be civilized. What’s wrong with my talking to him?”

  “He’s an old man and he’s sick. He wants to be left in peace. Do you understand?”

  “Well, of course. I’d like to come by and pay my respects. I’ll only stay a few minutes.”

  “You must be crazy.”

  “I was a kid when it happened, Linda. You think I can carry a grudge all my life? That’s a waste. I’ve got my own thing.”

  “Oh God, that figures, a hippie. I believe that.”

  “We were all hurt. OK? It was terrible. But it happened to all of us. None of us can forget it, but we were all very close. I feel the need to see you people. Is that so very hard to understand?”

  She has begun to cry. “How did you find out where we lived?”

  “I don’t know. Some guy told me a long time ago.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t even remember who. What difference does it make? I haven’t told anyone, not even my sister. I didn’t even ask him, he just told me. I was sorry at the time. But Linda, things change. What seems clear isn’t so clear after a while. What seemed a matter of right and wrong.”

  “I see.” Silence on the line. She sniffs. “You think you’re privileged to forgive my father, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “That’s arrogance, all right. That’s the arrogance of the Isaacsons. So high and mighty—”

  “Well look, it’s not that way and I don’t think the phone is the place to talk about it.”

  “How dare you call us! How dare you!”

  This time I was silent. Let her think I thought I’d blown it. She pinches her nostrils with a Kleenex. She swallows. She listens at the other end. She waits.

  “Of course there are resentments, different viewpoints. How can I deny that? I don’t even know why I called you. I guess I hadn’t considered that it might be a shock to you to hear from me. I’m sorry. Maybe I should have thought twice. But I’m out here and it suddenly seemed to me the thing to do. I wanted to see your father, that’s all. How is he?”

  “How is he? Fine. As well as can be expected.”

  “Good, good. And your mother?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Is there some way we could make an appointment? I’ll only be out here through tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have to go back east. I came out on a job interview but I don’t think they want me.”

  “You teach?”

  “Yeah. I just got my Ph.D.”

  “I see. Congratulations.”

  “Well, it was a struggle.”

  I laughed with a wry note of self-deprecation. I let the images settle. Jack P. Fein really delivered. “Don’t mess me up,” he said when I told him thanks. Then he broke the connection.

  In 1949, the year the Russians got the bomb, C. G. Jung spun three coins and asked the I Ching, a book of ancient Chinese prophecy, what it thought its reception would be in the United States. The I Ching was just about to be published in the United States and nobody here besides Jung and a few Sinologists knew much about it. The I Ching answered that it thought it would make its way very nicely.

  I’d concluded the phone conversation with a sense of having triggered in Linda Mindish the beginnings of joy. I would describe it this way: You live for many years, certainly for as long as you can remember, in a menacing state of unfinished business. The phone rings. You realize your intimacy with what you fear. Or this way: Suppose the person who has been fucked is calling on you to ask no more than to be fucked again, A new life proposes itself. You are aroused to that purring eroticism that comes when you understand you’re going to get away with something after all.

  The house was a small pink stucco model on a palmy side street of cottage-cute houses. It was a half-block off the Pacific Coast Highway, which is a kind of Boston Post Road of the west, a thoroughfar
e at this point in its journey of gas stations, real estate offices, portrait photographers’ studios, supermarkets, taco drive-ins and ivory-white mortuaries. I rang the bell. The novel as private I.

  Linda greets me with a thin smile of distaste. She wears a blouse with ruffled sleeves and a high ruffled neck. Her skirt stops just above the knees. She’s a thin girl with pale hair cut very short and feathered up, the kind of fair skin that blotches with emotion, her father’s grey eyes set too close, a big nose, a long face. Flat-chested but with surprisingly good legs. Not as tall as I thought she’d be. On the other hand she’s more mature. More grown-up than she sounded on the phone.

  I am led into a small living room, everything neat as a pin, modest and well cared for, the Sears American Maple series with selected bric-a-brac from other shores. A room that has never seen the likes of me. A man in a dark suit and tie stands up from the couch. His hair is cut like a brush and flat on top. We are introduced, and shake hands. He hands me his card. His name is Dale something and he’s a lawyer.

  The thing is people don’t experience revelation. Linda had had too many years to adjust and conform her life to the demands of her father’s career. He’d been let out of prison in 1959. They had taken him to Orange County. The mother, Sadie, was an ignorant woman. Linda, at eighteen, had picked out the place, chosen the new family name, talked to the lawyers. She had worked, gone to school, gotten a degree in dentistry, and now had her own practice in a shopping center in Newport Beach. I learned this from Jack Fein. She supported the old people. She ruled the roost. It is not something you give up easily.

  “Linda did the right thing,” the lawyer tells me. “You can’t expect people to see you under circumstances like this just because you call them on the phone. She had no way of even telling if you were who you said you were.”

  “No, it’s him,” she says. “It’s Danny Isaacson.”

  “So your father isn’t here,” Daniel said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Does he know I called?”

  “Let me ask the questions,” the lawyer said. “What do you want? Why are you here?”

  Daniel sighed. “Does he?”

  “I decided not to tell him until I made up my mind if he should see you or not. So if you think for one moment that he’s afraid of you, you’re wrong.”