End Zone

  “These are subglacial matters,” I said. “I can’t just snap my fingers and decide. Besides I have no real power. He’ll just look away in disgust. All I can do for the moment is think about it. I’ll think about it.”

  “Think about it,” Bing said. “I’ll be in Conway’s room looking at the insects.”

  I went for a walk. It had stopped snowing. The lamps were lit along the straight white paths. It was dinner-time and everyone was inside. I inhaled deeply, feeling the air enter and bite. My right shoulder ached from the game in the snow. I rotated my arm slowly. Then I saw Alan Zapalac coming down the library steps, an enormous yellow scarf circling his neck two or three times and terminating at his kneecap. He made his way carefully, using the heel of his right shoe to probe each step for ice beneath the stacked snow. I waited for him at the foot of the stairs. He wore an armband on which was printed the word TREES, green on light blue.

  “Escort me to the administration building,” he said. “If I fall down and break my leg, I’ll need somebody to tell the others not to move me. If you weren’t here and if it happened, breaking my leg, they’d come along and move me, broken bone and all. If you yourself slip, which I doubt will happen with your athletic prowess and tremendous genetic advantages, make sure you don’t reach out and grab for me. I know that’s everybody’s natural instinct but I want you to fight off the urge because if you take me with you with my delicate bone structure I’m as good as dead. They’d probably use me in one of their experiments with hogs or chickens. None of my organs would be safe. Tomorrow you’d go behind that white building that looks like somebody pinned a surgical gown over it and in that pen they’ve got out back for the inoculated animals you’d see a hog walking along with my kidneys inside it, urinating the last dregs of my life into the alfalfa.”

  “I’m going that way anyway,” I said.

  “Good, good, good. How’s the lady friend?”

  “Myna,” I said. “Myna’s fine as far as I know.”

  “I’m no good at names. My students are catching on. In one of my classes there’s an all-out hoax being perpetrated, supposedly at my expense. They’ve invented a student. His name is Robert Reynolds. After class somebody always comes up to my desk to ask a question. Whoever it is, he makes it a point to identify himself by name. It’s a different boy every day but the name is always Robert Reynolds. I get test papers from Robert Reynolds. Yesterday there was a new attendance card in my bunch, very authentic looking, full of IBM holes. It was Robert Reynolds’ card. So I called out his name when I took the attendance. Naturally somebody answered. Everybody else said here. But the Robert Reynolds person said present. You could sense the laughter being contained, the greatness of their mission, how they had banded together to perpetrate this thing at my expense, the teacher, the so-called font of wisdom. For the moment I’m playing dumb. I’m letting them get away with it. They think I don’t know what’s going on. But there are ploys and there are counterploys. Getting back for a second. Your lady friend. Why is she so fat?”

  “The responsibilities of beauty,” I said. “She thinks they’d be too much for her. They’d cause her to change. I think I tend to agree.”

  “My wife-to-be is a white Protestant fencepost. A very one-dimensional body-shape. She’s rough and tough, a classic Midwest bitch. When we argue she squeezes the flesh on the back of my hand. She really twists it hard, pinching it simultaneously. Her face becomes very Protestant if you know what I mean. A Zurich theologian lives inside her.”

  “I don’t understand why you’d want to marry somebody like that. If somebody like that twisted my flesh, to be perfectly frank with you I think I’d hit her. I’d hate to have my flesh pinched and squeezed on any kind of recurring basis.”

  “I’ve never punched or slapped a woman,” he said. “I like to body-check them instead, like a hockey player. I smash them into the boards. It surprises them. A body-check is something they can’t interpret with their normal uncanniness of knowing exactly how to retaliate, with whatever exact give-and-take, the way only women can do, giving back tenfold but with a genius that makes it seem even steven.”

  “But why would you marry somebody like that?”

  “She loves me. I’m the only person she’s ever loved. Sometimes I think I’m the only person in the whole world she’s capable of loving. She calls me long-distance every other day. I jump with joy every time the telephone rings. She’s three inches taller than I am but why quibble over inches when you’re involved in matters of eternal import. Speaking of tall and short, notice the length of my scarf. Little men like to wear long scarfs. The reason for this is lost in the mists of time. But to return to love. Love is a way of salvation. It makes us less imperfect and draws us closer to immortality. I want to stir up ecstasy in my soul. I want to ascend to the world of forms. Love basically is the suspension of gravity. It’s an ascent to higher places. The very existence of her love will stir me to deep ecstasy. I’ll begin to climb. Notice the selfish element in my scheme.”

  “You mentioned salvation,” I said. “What kind of salvation?”

  “I believe in the remission of sins,” Zapalac said. “The world’s, the nation’s, the individual’s sins. Do penance and they shall be forgiven. Salvation consists in the remission of sins. Whatever penances can be performed. Whatever denials or offerings up.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “The nation’s sins,” he said.

  “That was the administration building.”

  “I’m going in the back way. It’s part of my overall schemata. I like to turn up behind people’s backs. Suddenly there I am, at their shoulder blades, ready to be a friend to the enemies of injustice.”

  I walked back to Staley Hall. In the dining room I saw Bloomberg sitting with Spurgeon Cole. I put some corn flakes on a tray and joined them.

  “How’s Coach?” Spurgeon said.

  “He’s progressing as anticipated.”

  “I have a feeling,” Bloomberg said, “that’s he’s about ready to shuffle off these mortal coils, as they say in show business.”

  “How does it feel being captain, Gary?”

  “I get to go out for the coin toss. I’ve always wanted to be part of that. It’s tremendously ceremonial without being too pompous.”

  “He’s wearing the dark glasses again,” Spurgeon said. “He hasn’t worn them in months. Now he’s wearing them.”

  “I know all about it. I have no comment.”

  “It must mean something, Gary. Dark glasses indoors in the dead of winter.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. Look at Steeples. Steeples is going around with a golf glove on his hand. What the hell does that mean?”

  “Steeples has some kind of infection. It’s ugly as hell apparently. He was exposed to something. It’s a sort of burn plus a sort of infection. He just wants to keep it hidden.”

  “Is that all you’re eating?” Bloomberg said to me.

  “It contains vitamin B, iron and niacin.”

  “I’m up to three-o-six,” he said. “The new mind expands with the old body. I feel more alert every day. I feel revitalized.”

  Bing Jackmin came over and sat down. His tray held baked ham, mashed potatoes, salad and pound cake. He was looking at me intensely.

  “Did you talk to Coach?”

  “Give me time,” I said.

  “There is no time.”

  “Can’t you start growing it and then either keep it going or terminate it when I find out what the word is?”

  “Terminate what?” Spurgeon said.

  “His excess hair. He wants a beard. Does anybody know what the prevailing attitude is on excess hair?”

  “Excess hair is acceptable if it doesn’t exceed accepted standards,” Spurgeon said.

  “There’s your answer, Bing.”

  “I am interested in certain aspects of global violence,” Bloomberg said.

  “Pass the salt,” Bing said.

  “This meat,” Spurgeon said. “T
here’s something wrong with this meat.”

  Bloomberg cleared his throat.

  “I am an anguished physicist. I take long walks in the country. From time to time I have second thoughts about the super-megaroach aerosol bomb which can kill anything that moves on the whole earth in a fraction of a microsecond and which I alone invented and marketed. As I walk the peaceful country lanes of the Institute for Abstract Speculation and Sneak Attacks way out there in an unmarked site somewhere in the Pacific Northeast, a television crew films my every step. The director asks me to gaze up over the treetops and to squint slightly into the late afternoon sun. At such moments I think of my roachbomb and I am filled with a sense of deep humility and also with a feeling of fantastic bloodsucking power. And I am reminded of the comforting words of the famed celestial song of the Hindus. What is this crime I am planning, O Krishna? So you see, my friends, I am not without a sense of history nor of personal responsibility. I have a human side and I love the classics. As I smoke my pipe and play a quiet game of chess with my lovely wife, the mother of three fine boys by a previous marriage, I like to ruminate on the nature of man. What brought us forth from the primordial slime? Whence are we headed? What is the grand design? And pondering these vast questions over cheese and port, I come to the realization that one terminal bomb more or less makes small difference in this ever-expanding universe of ours.”

  “Would somebody please pass the salt,” Bing said.

  “I am interested in the violent man and the ascetic. I am on the verge of concluding that an individual’s capacity for violence is closely linked with his ascetic tendencies. We are about to rediscover that austerity is our true mode. In our future meditations we may decide to seek the devil’s death. In our silence and terror we may steer our technology toward the metaphysical, toward the creation of some unimaginable weapon able to pierce spiritual barriers, to maim or kill whatever dark presence envelops the world. You will say this seems an unlikely matter to engage the talents of superrational man. But it is precisely this kind of man who has been confronting the unreal, the paradoxical, the ironic, the satanic. After all, the ultimate genius of modern weapons, from the purely theoretical standpoint, is that they destroy the unborn much more effectively than they destroy the living. We can go on from there to frame any number of provocative remarks but we will resist the temptation. We all know that life, happiness, fulfillment come surging out of particular forms of destructiveness. The moral system is enriched by violence put to positive use. But as the capacity for violence grows in the world, the regenerative effects of specific violent episodes become less significant. The capacity overwhelms everything. The mere potential of one form of violence eclipses the actuality of other forms. I am interested in these things. I am also interested in the discontinuation of contractions. Medial letters are as valid as any others. I have already begun to revise my speech patterns accordingly.”

  We were all laughing, not knowing exactly why. Maybe we thought Bloomberg was crazy. Or maybe we laughed because it was the only reaction we could trust, the only one that could keep us at a safe distance. Anatole, replying to the laughter, tapped his spoon against the plastic tray to his right. I finished my corn flakes and proceeded, as arranged, to the library.

  Myna was sitting alone in one of the rooms downstairs. Her table was covered with books, all abandoned there, many left open (a breach in their solemnity), massive volumes in tiny lines of print. Beyond the table were long high stacks, reeking a bit of perspiration (presumably human), the 900 series, history in its smelliest caparisons, each dark aisle booby-trapped with a metal stool or two. It was fairly pleasant to be there, the library as womb, fluorescent refuge from chaos or rain. Myna was reading Zap Comix. I sat next to her, then reached across the table and pulled a book toward me. It was a dictionary, opened to facing pages that began with Kaaba and ended with kef. Myna looked different somehow. I hadn’t seen her in about a week and it took me a couple of seconds to realize that her face was much more clear, almost completely blotchless. She leaned toward the dictionary. We read the definitions to each other for a while. Some of them were extremely funny. Then we selected certain words to read aloud. We read them slowly, syllable by syllable, taking turns, using at times foreign or regional accents, then replaying the sounds, perhaps backward, perhaps starting with a middle syllable, and finally reading the word as word, overpronouncing slightly, noses to the page as if in search of protomorphic spoor. Some of the words put Myna into a state of mild delirium; she thought their beauty almost excessive. We kept reading for half an hour. The words were ways of touching and made us want to speak with hands. We went into a far corner of the high stacks. There I started taking off her dress. The great cumulus breasts came rolling out of hand-beaded blue Victorian velvet. We laughed loudly, then tried to quiet each other with soft punches to the arm. A button fell to the floor, rolling unsteadily into a distant corner. I made bubbling noises, rubbing my face in her breasts, scratching an itch just under my eye with her left nipple. Together we got the dress down over her hips, hitting each other lightly to warn the laughter off, and in time it was at her feet. I made strange noises of anticipation (gwa, gwa) and this made her hit me with both hands, but weakly because of the laughter rocking inside her. We heard something at the doorway and made faces at each other, exaggerated fright-masks, and I looked past her and through the slightly tilted rows of books, tilts and counter-tilts, angles commenting on other angles, centuries misplaced by slumbering hands, the entire self-contradictory mass looming humorously over my darling’s epic breasts. There was no one in the doorway. I plucked a chord or two on the tense elastic of her iridescent panties. Sign of tiny pink ridges, wave-shaped, about her buoyant waist. We kissed and bit. She tickled certain vulnerable areas below my ribs. We touched, patted and licked. It may be impossible to explain why it seemed so very important to get her completely naked. Our hands rolled the pants past her hips and thighs. To mark the event I brought new noises to the room, vowel sounds predominating. Myna stepped away from the clothes, aware of the moment’s dynamics, positing herself as the knowable word, the fleshmade sigh and syllable. She was beautiful, broad as a many-sectioned cubistic bather, conceptually new, cloud-bosomed, ultimate. To be forever loved in ways unworthy. In seconds we would be ingathered, amassment of hair and limbs, unbrokenly focused, hunting each other in the melting cave. Some one or thing at the doorway’s edge. No: closer. A woman lurking in the stacks. I could see her, four rows away, shoulder to nose between the shelves. I gestured to Myna of the danger nearby. Then I tried to help her get into her clothes, accidentally bumping her once with my knee so that she fell forward over a stool. We looked at each other, not knowing whether to be alarmed by the approaching footsteps, or amused, or merely indifferent. I directed her toward a small alcove in which was placed a bust of some unnamed immortal. Then I opened a book and began to read in a soft voice a number of reflections on an ancient war I had never even heard of until that moment. The woman was Mrs. Berry Trout, an administrator of some kind. She gave me an unloving look.

  “What’s your name, young man?”

  “Robert Reynolds,” I said, slipping into my southern accent.

  29

  ONE NIGHT THE MAJOR and I played a crude form of war game in his motel room. He sat facing me, about four feet away, a small table between us. On the table were pencils, pads, maps, and a chart that I was having a great deal of trouble trying to read upside down. The major said that one of the big problems with war games, whether they were being played at the Pentagon, at NORAD or Fort Belvoir, at a university or think tank, was the obvious awareness on the part of all participants that this wasn’t the real thing. (What we were playing, he added, was barely the simulated thing; we had no computer, intelligence reports, projection screens, and only a few numerical estimates of troop units, missile inventories, production capacities.) The gaming environment, as he called it, could never elicit the kind of emotions generated in times of actual stress; ther
efore gaming was probably just a second-rate guide (hopefully not too misleading) to what might be expected from governments when the armies were poised and lithe missiles were rising from their silos. As I sat there, listening, I wondered why we were meeting in a motel. It seemed to me that the major’s house should have been ready for occupancy by this time and that his family should have joined him. However it did not seem appropriate to comment.

  He looked through the material in front of him, then glanced around the room before spotting what he wanted, a world atlas. It was on the bed, about eight feet away. He asked me to get it for him.

  “Now this scenario is premised on futuribles,” he said. “The basic situation as I’ve set it up for us is definitely in the area of what we know to be projected crisis situations. It could happen. Tensions. Possible accidents. Unrelated hostilities. Or maybe not so unrelated. Precedents: one act of aggression tending to legalize another. Then finally a showdown between two major powers. That’s the basic situation, the starting point or premise as I’ll conceptualize it for you in a minute. What happens after that is up to us. Now, before I forget, the two major powers are just who you might expect them to be except I’ve changed their names slightly, just to make them a little less appealing or distasteful to our emotions, as the case may be. COMRUS is one and AMAC is the other. It’s not supposed to fool anybody and it just gives you a glimpse of what we might be able to do in the future in terms of totally our own situations, not depending on existing bodies or preconceptions. So it’s just to neutralize our emotions a little bit. In fact I haven’t bothered to change much else, just a designation here and there since I’m just beginning to get into this. So we’re a little bit disorganized and inconsistent this first time and we’ll probably have to improvise as we go along. But to get back, what happens after I introduce this thing is up to us. We might become wildly implausible or we might run right through the crisis game from escalation to escalation with absolutely traditional military logic — if there is such a thing and I’m not sure there is. We might not even get to the point of using nuclear weapons. Or we might start pitching right off.”