Do you think the doctor believes any of this junk? Ferguson asked.
Who can say? Noah replied. Then, after a brief pause, he let out another laugh and said: Probably.
In his own best interests, Ferguson supposed he should have gone to a doctor himself and done something similar to what Howard and Noah had done, but as the reader will have observed by now, Ferguson did not always act in his own best interests. On Monday morning, August twenty-fifth, he appeared at the induction center on Whitehall Street with no letter to present to the army medical staff about any real or imagined physical or mental complaints. It was true that he had suffered from hay fever as a child himself, but he seemed to have outgrown it in recent years, and the one condition he did have, which had condemned him to the status of talking mule, was irrelevant to the matter at hand.
He wandered through the building in his white underpants, accompanied by a mob of other young men walking around in their white underpants. White young men, brown young men, black young men, and yellow young men—all of them in the same boat. He took the written exam, his body was measured, weighed, and scrutinized, and then he went home, wondering what would happen to him next.
3) Ho Chi Minh died on September second at the age of seventy-nine. Ferguson, who was on his fourth job for Mr. Mangini since the start of the summer, heard the news on the radio as he stood on a ladder painting the kitchen ceiling of a three-bedroom apartment on Central Park West between Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Streets. Uncle Ho was dead, but nothing would change because of that, and the war would go on until the North conquered the South and the Americans were booted out. That much was certain, he said to himself, as he dipped his brush into the can for another swipe at the ceiling, but many other things were not. Why the letter announcing the date of his physical had been sent to him a full month after Howard and Noah had been sent theirs, for example, or why Howard had already been given his new classification from the board in Newark (1-Y) but after an equivalent length of time Noah still had heard nothing from the board in Manhattan. It was all so arbitrary, it seemed, a system that functioned with two independent hands, each one unaware of what the other was doing as they performed their separate tasks, and now that the physical was behind him, it was unclear how long he would have to wait.
He was preparing himself for the worst, and throughout the summer and into the fall he thought endlessly about prison, about being locked up against his will and having to submit to the capricious rules and commands of his jailers, about the threat of being raped by one or more of his fellow prisoners, about sharing a cell with a violent, shiv-toting con serving out a seven-year sentence for armed robbery or a hundred years for murder. Then his mind would drift off from the present and he would start thinking about The Count of Monte Cristo, the book he had read as a twelve-year-old boy, the falsely accused Edmond Dantès held captive for fourteen years in the Château d’If, or Darkness at Noon, the novel he had read in the eighth grade, with the two imprisoned men in adjoining cells tapping out coded messages to each other on the walls, or the inordinate number of prison movies he had watched over the years, among them Grand Illusion, A Man Escaped, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Dreyfus on Devil’s Island in The Life of Emile Zola, Riot in Cell Block 11, The Big House, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and The Man in the Iron Mask, another Dumas story in which the evil twin brother is choked to death by his own beard.
Jittery, darting thoughts hatched in the dual incubators of uncertainty and steadily growing panic.
Summer had always been a time of intense work for him, but that summer Ferguson accomplished little except to read the first four rejection letters that came in for The Capital of Ruins. One month after Ho Chi Minh’s death, the number was up to seven.
4) Throughout the summer and fall of that year, as Ferguson put in his hours for Mr. Mangini and pondered the uncertain future that lay before him, a man was setting off bombs around New York City. Sam Melville, or Samuel Melville, had been born Samuel Grossman in 1934, but he had changed his name in honor of the man who wrote Moby-Dick, or else in honor of the French film director Jean-Pierre Melville, who himself had been born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, or else in honor of no one and for no reason at all, except perhaps to disassociate himself from his father and his father’s name. An independent Marxist allied to the Weathermen and the Black Panthers but essentially working on his own (sometimes with an accomplice or two, most often not), Melville planted his first bomb on July twenty-seventh, damaging the structure of Grace Pier on the New York waterfront, an installation owned by the United Fruit Company, the age-old exploiter of downtrodden peasants in Central and South America. On August twentieth, he attacked the Marine Midland Bank Building; on September nineteenth, the offices of the Department of Commerce and the Army Inspector General in the Federal Office Building on lower Broadway. Subsequent targets included the Standard Oil offices in the RCA Building, the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank, and, on November eleventh, the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue, but the following day, when Melville went to bomb the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street, where the Panther 21 trial was being held, he made the error of choosing an F.B.I. informant as his accomplice and was nabbed on the spot. He wound up in the Tombs in April 1970, where he organized a strike among the prisoners, which led to his transfer to Sing Sing in July, where he organized another prison strike, which led to another transfer in September to one of the maximum-security facilities in upstate New York, Attica.
By all accounts, Melville’s growing radicalism had been spurred by the events at Columbia in the spring of 1968. On the night of the April thirtieth bust, the thirty-four-year-old ex–plumbing designer turned up on campus to lend his support to the students, and in the mayhem of one thousand swarming T.P.F. grunts and seven hundred arrested students and the innumerable assaults on the green-bands and white-bands, Melville urged the students to push back and fight the police. With a small gang of protesters, he started hauling fifty-gallon garbage cans made of tempered, vulcanized steel to the roof of Low Library to drop down on the cops below. The younger students were afraid, not at all prepared to take part in such a reckless action, and scattered into the night. Before long, Melville was discovered by the police and dragged into another building, where they pounded him with clubs and left him tied to a chair. Some days after that, he joined up with the local Community Action Committee (C.A.C.), a group opposed to Columbia’s policy of evicting poor tenants from university-owned buildings, and at one of the C.A.C. demonstrations in front of the St. Marks Arms on West 112th Street, he was arrested along with several other members of the group.
Columbia had lit the fire in him, and by the next year he had begun his bombing campaign throughout the city. So skillfully did he pull off the first attacks that he remained at large for three and a half months, undetected and untraceable. The tabloids called him the Mad Bomber.
Ferguson had never met Sam Melville and had no idea who he was until his arrest on November twelfth, but their stories crossed with the fourth and most destructive of the eight bombings, crossed in such a way as to alter the direction of Ferguson’s life, for it was all but certain that the fit and healthy college graduate would have been classified 1-A by his draft board, which would have opened the path to a trial in federal court and a term in federal prison, but when Melville blew up the Army Induction Center on Whitehall Street in early October, Ferguson still had not received any word about his classification, and when no word came for the rest of that month, nor any word throughout November, Ferguson cautiously advanced the theory that his army records had been destroyed by Melville’s bomb, that he was, as he liked to say to himself, off the books.
In other words, if Ferguson was indeed off the books, then Sam Melville had saved his life. The so-called Mad Bomber had saved his life along with the lives of hundreds if not thousands of others, and then Melville had sacrificed his own life by going to prison for them.
5) Or so Ferguson imagined, or so he hoped, o
r so he prayed was true, but whether he was off the books or not, there was still one more bridge to cross before the matter could be settled. Nixon had changed the law. The Selective Service System would no longer be depending on the entire pool of American men between eighteen and twenty-six to fill the ranks of the army but only on some of them, the ones who would be assigned the lowest numbers in the new draft lottery, which would be held on Monday, December first. Three hundred and sixty-six possible numbers, one for every day of the year including leap year, one for the birthday of every young man in the United States, a blind draw of numbers that would tell you whether you were free or not free, whether you were going off to fight or staying home, whether you were going to prison or not going to prison, the whole shape of your future life to be sculpted by the hands of General Pure Dumb Luck, commander of urns, coffins, and all national graveyards.
Absurd.
The country had been transformed into a casino, and you weren’t even allowed to roll the dice for yourself. The government would be rolling them for you. Anything below eighty or a hundred would spell danger. Anything above would spell: Thank you, massuh.
The number for March third was 263.
No exaltation this time, no thunderbolt or electric current in his veins, no purple crocus jutting through the blackened snow, but a sudden feeling of calm, perhaps even resignation, perhaps even sadness. He had been ready to do the defiant thing he had promised to do, and now he didn’t have to do it anymore. He didn’t even have to think about it anymore. Stand up and breathe, stand up and move around, stand up and take in the world, and as Ferguson stood up and breathed and moved around and took in the world, he understood that he had been living in a state of paralysis for the past five months.
Father, he said to himself, my strange, dead father, your boy will not be going to live behind bars. Your boy is free to go wherever he wants. Pray for your boy, father, just as he prays for you.
Ferguson sat back down at his desk and scanned the newspaper for June sixteenth, Noah’s birthday.
Number 274.
And then Howard’s, which was January twenty-second.
Number 337.
Late the following afternoon, Noah hitched a ride down from New Haven, and at seven o’clock Ferguson and Howard met him at the West End to begin the evening with a round of drinks before going off to a celebratory Chinese dinner at the Moon Palace, just two blocks south on Broadway. Feeling comfortable in their front corner booth, however, they lingered at the West End and never made it to the restaurant, dining on their favorite bar’s abominable pot roast and noodles and then staying on until two-thirty in the morning as they slurped down vast quantities of alcohol in several of its best known forms, mostly scotch for Ferguson, mediocre blended scotch that led him on a bumpy ride to the nethermost bowels of drunkenness, but until he dissolved into a slurry, blotto, double-visioned torpor and was lugged by his two wobbling companions back to Howard and Amy’s apartment on West 113th Street, where he spent the early morning hours passed out on the sofa, he remembered that Howard and Noah had ganged up on him at one point and had criticized him for a number of things, some of which he could still remember, some of which he couldn’t, but among those he could remember were the following:
□ He was a fool for not touching the money his father had left him.
□ With help from the money he still hadn’t touched, he should wave good-bye to America, cross the Atlantic, and spend a minimum of one year in Europe. He had yet to go anywhere in his sorry little life and needed to start traveling now.
□ Forget that Mary Donohue had found her Señor Magnifico and was talking about marriage, for even though Mary was a remarkable woman and had held Ferguson together through some rough times, they had no future together because he wasn’t what she wanted or needed and had nothing to offer her.
□ Twelve rejections from New York publishers was nothing to lose any sleep over, and even if the book was rejected by twelve more publishers, it would eventually be published by someone, and the only thing that mattered now was to start thinking about his next book …
As Ferguson remembered it, he had agreed with them on all their points.
6) Because he was a conscientious employee, and because he didn’t want to let down his fellow crew members by coming in late, Ferguson showed up for work the next morning at nine sharp. He had slept for four and a half hours on Howard and Amy’s couch, and after drinking three cups of black coffee at Tom’s Restaurant on the corner of Broadway and 112th Street, he walked over to the job site on Riverside Drive between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets, a gigantic four-bedroom apartment he had started painting a few days earlier with Juan, Felix, and Harry. The air was freezing that morning, and Ferguson was badly hungover, with bloodshot eyes, a cracked head, and an iffy gut, stumbling downtown with his face buried in his scarf, which began to reek of the booze still permeating his breath. Juan said: What happened to you, man? Felix said: You look wasted, kid. Harry said: Why don’t you go home and sleep it off? But Ferguson didn’t want to go home and sleep it off, he was perfectly fine and had come to work, but one hour later, as he stood on a tall, expandable ladder painting yet another kitchen ceiling, he lost his balance and fell to the floor, breaking his left ankle and his left wrist. Harry called for an ambulance, and after the doctor at Roosevelt Hospital had set the bones and put the wrist and ankle in plaster casts, he looked over his work and commented: A hard fall, young man. You’re lucky you didn’t land on your head.
7) Ferguson spent the next six weeks at the house on Woodhall Crescent, gorging himself on his mother’s good cooking as his bones knit together again, playing gin rummy with Dan in the evenings after dinner, sitting around the living room with the two Schneiderman men on the nights when the Knicks games were on television, his mother and the pregnant Nancy off by themselves in the kitchen talking about the mysteries of womanhood, home life, the comforts and pleasures of being at home for a little while as he took his compulsory breather (Dan’s words) or simply took stock (his mother’s words) and thought about what he was going to do next.
Mary was gone, soon to be married to an intelligent señor named Bob Stanton, a thirty-one-year-old assistant district attorney from Queens, someone far more settled than Ferguson would ever be, not an unwise decision, he felt, but nevertheless an ache that would require more time to mend than his broken bones would, and with Mary gone now there was nothing to hold him in New York, nothing that compelled him to go on working as a housepainter for Mr. Mangini, for Howard and Noah had finally talked some sense into him on the night of their drunken binge, and he had reversed his thinking about his father’s money, reluctantly agreeing with them that not to accept it would be an insult. His father was dead, and dead men couldn’t defend themselves anymore. Whatever angers had built up between them over the years, his father had included him in his will, which meant he had wanted Ferguson to take the one hundred thousand dollars and use it in any way he saw fit, with the understanding that fit in this case meant living off the money in order to go on writing, surely his father must have known that, Ferguson reasoned, and the truth was there was little anger left in him now, the more his father went on being dead the less anger he felt, so little now after a year and a half that it was almost entirely gone, and the space that had once held the anger was now filled with sorrow and confusion, sorrow and confusion and regret.
It was a lot of money, enough money to live on for years if he spent it carefully, and Howard and Noah had done well to emphasize the importance of that money, wisely counseling patience on the matter of Ferguson’s rejected novel (which Lynn Eberhardt finally found a home for in early February when she sent it to Columbus Books, a small, intrepid, against-the-grain San Francisco publisher that had been in operation since the 1950s), but most of all understanding that the money would allow Ferguson to take the step that would do him the most good in his present circumstances, and as he languished in the house on Woodhall Crescent and looked into t
he blur of possibilities the money had offered him, he gradually came round to his friends’ point of view: the moment had come to get out of America and see something of the world, to leave the fire behind him and go somewhere else—anywhere else.
Ferguson dithered and mulled for the next two weeks, one by one reducing the plethora of anywheres from five to three to one. Language would have to have the last word, but even though they spoke English in England and English in Ireland, he doubted he would be happy living in one of those dank, wet-weather places. It rained in Paris, too, of course, but French was the only other language he could speak and read with tolerable proficiency, and since he had never heard anyone say a single negative word about Paris, he decided to take his chances there. As a warm-up, he would go to Montreal for a short visit with Luther Bond, who was alive and well in his new country, having talked his way into McGill around the same time Ferguson had entered Brooklyn College, and now that he had graduated, he was working as an apprentice reporter for the Montreal Gazette and living with a new girlfriend, Claire, Claire Simpson or Sampson (Luther’s handwriting was often hard to decipher), and Ferguson was itching to go north, itching to go east, itching to be gone.