Mort was speaking excitedly, his elbow bumping Jules’s arm. “All hell is going to break loose!” he cried.
Heaviness. What could break loose out of this heaviness? The temperature was rising to ninety-five. Humidity high, dense. Such heaviness, such flat, baking, oppressive heaviness, as if the soul of the street itself were melting to vapor, losing all strength, disappearing. What was there to distinguish black from white in such a mist?
“Everything will crack, crack open! It needs to be cracked open and pitted—the pit spat out! Why should everything stay fixed? We’re on a roller coaster and the car is rocking. A little wind is all we need. Jules—what’s your last name incidentally? Did you ever mention it?”
“No.”
“Jules, I want to get to know you, don’t put me off. Look, I know I talk too much and I’m just an amateur, I’m a guy who hasn’t been around, a lazy bastard, but I have hopes, I have dreams—for all of us, blacks and whites, the kids in Vietnam, the Vietnamese—I have these dreams, I can’t sleep at night for thinking of what could happen if only we made it happen! I don’t want to spend my whole life getting by. Money from a university, money from the government—getting by, getting along; I mean, I don’t want to think about myself while everything around me is rotting, going to hell. I want to get rid of it all, like a snakeskin sloughed off. I really want to see this city burned down and built up again. Jesus, I can hardly wait!” He paused, breathing rapidly. “Jules, you never get high? You said before you never got high, eh?”
“Never.”
“That’s your trouble maybe. You never get free of yourself. Never take a flight, get a new view—the scenery changes as fast as you can snap your fingers! How can you live without getting free of yourself once in a while?”
“I’m always free,” Jules said. His voice sounded hollow, echoing in something hollow. He had the idea again of inhabiting a giant, rotting fruit—breathing in the rot, his skin soft with it…a hollowness inside the decay, scooped out and brown.
While Mort talked the police cruiser passed but Mort did not notice. They entered a bar on Canfield. The smell of rot was closer, darker. Mort introduced Jules to several people, three men and a young woman. The woman slid over in the booth to make room for Jules. “What will you have, Jules? Beer? Have something, please, drink with us,” Mort begged.
Jules shook his head. No. Nothing. Drinking upset him. Any loss of control, even an instant’s loss of balance, upset him. It made him recall the sound of gunfire close to his head…an echo in his head. It made him recall falling to the ground. He said no, Mort sat down clumsily, abruptly. “You don’t trust us! You won’t drink with us because you don’t trust us! Jules, I know we seem very different from you but we are all brothers of yours—”
Jules waved his hand at Mort, to silence him.
Mort laughed. “Well,” he said to his friends, “he has a certain oppressed look. I don’t mean beaten down or unhealthy or ugly or anything like that—in fact, I would say he is a handsome man as far as that goes—it isn’t anything that simple, but he has the look of being permanently out of the sunlight, a depression baby—”
“Jesus, he isn’t that old!” the woman said contemptuously.
She wore slacks and a mannish shirt, round-shouldered yet not unattractive. Jules remembered that she was a teacher at Wayne. He had met her at someone’s apartment. “I would say he isn’t thirty-five yet. Are you thirty-five, Jules?”
“No, not yet.”
“Then you aren’t a depression baby.”
“Not necessarily the historical depression,” Mort said. “I mean another kind of depression. A permanent depression of the spirit.”
The woman snorted. Jules lit a cigarette and began to concentrate on the taste of smoke inside him. Did it really go into his lungs, outlining his fleshy, bloody, weak lungs? The parts of his body could be outlined…X-rayed…photographed…ill-smelling. He could not be bothered connecting the parts together; let them breathe in unison, let them pulsate. Occasionally his body gave him pleasure, but the moment of pleasure did not last and its memory was mysterious. What was the pleasure of the body except a mystery? It could not even be photographed the way his heaving heart might be photographed. Once he had been a fountain, a glowing fountain, and sunshine had broken beautifully upon a polished floor…but now even the memory of that pleasure was a puzzle.
“This society obviously gave you a raw deal—we won’t go into any details,” Mort was saying brusquely, a little fearful of Jules’s look, “but the rest of us…the rest of us have been, frankly, blessèd children of sunlight—”
“What bullshit! Speak for yourself!” someone said.
The memory of pleasure did no good. Memories of the body did no good, not being housed anywhere, not even in the flesh. The photographs of the parts of Jules’s body, put together, would add up to a body but not to Jules. Better to sit in a dim, smelly bar, to pretend to listen to these people. Untidy, earnest people. Words animated them. Flesh strained away from their Adam’s apples, these urgent men. Words seemed to be teasing them up from their seats, preparing them for battle.
“I’m serious about this! I am serious!” Mort exclaimed, his beard very black against his pale face, “I’m fed up with being stabbed in the back and I’m serious, may God strike me dead otherwise!”
“Shit, you just like to talk, all of you like to talk,” a man said. Jules had met him before—he was a professor of something, maybe English. Dark and Jewish and irritable, dressed like a child in a soiled turtleneck shirt and blue jeans, he had a prematurely aged, lined, bitter face; his eyes were rabbity. “You sold yourself, Mort, so you try to disguise it with words! Talk, talk, talk! It’s all shit!”
“Mort isn’t to blame for you being fired,” the woman said.
“Nobody is to blame for me being fired, I am a free agent and I choose to remain free of anyone’s influence, thank you, but it may well be another person’s fault that he is not fired, that he prepared his actions so carefully that no photographs even exist of him in the University’s files—what about free will in that direction, what about that?”
“—and I don’t approve,” the woman went on, solidly, “of you giving all students in your courses A’s—it might very well have been an act of principle, to destroy the grading system—”
“Of course!”
“But it might also have been for more personal reasons.”
“Such as what?”
“Such as your attachment to…well….”
“Your attachment to your boys!” Mort said. “All those boys you entertain in your apartment!”
A dark glow of a grin appeared on the man’s face, and then disappeared.
“You’re talking shit,” he said coldly.
“We won’t go into your motives. The hell with private life,” Mort said. “And so please don’t go shooting your mouth off about me, the rest of us, tenure or not—I haven’t been given a contract yet and I could lose everything, as you know very well. What if they kick me out too? You know what a setback that would be. We’ve got to stay in here, stay in the place of power, not give up. Don’t hang me up with your middle-class notion of honor, please; my friend, we can’t afford honor. Yes, I’m sorry you were fired and we all did what we could, but they had you and they had you good, it couldn’t be broken. Honor is too abstract! The hell with all honor, with talk—I’m as fed up with talk as you are. What we’ve got to do is get into this community, I mean really into it. We’ve got to get where people are living, where they’re trying to live, in all this shit! We have got to learn how to hate, to hate with energy, and not how to talk, to prepare for the revolution in our guts, not in our heads—”
“By taking money from the government through the UAAP,” one of the other men said, snickering.
“Could you get the job, you yourself?” Mort cried. “Could you get cleared for it?”
“Are you p
roud of getting cleared by the CIA?”
“Yes, I am proud, I am proud of getting cleared by the CIA because it means that I have not abandoned myself to impulse, to emotion, because I will remain in the seat of power where I can be something while you will be on the outside whining and complaining—”
“Please stop this. Please,” said the woman, clutching her head.
“Where would the community be without that money? Where?” Mort cried. He pounded the table. “Money is money! A loyalty oath is the way to money, to ammunition and guns and leaflets—don’t look at me with your wounded middle-class eyes, your Boy Scout’s sense of honor betrayed, because I didn’t allow myself to get broken the way you did—”
“Really, I mean it. Please stop,” said the woman angrily.
“A lot of us took jobs with the poverty program—why not? I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I am eminently qualified to sell my brains, goddam it, and figure out a way to burn it all down—how much money do you think we’re promised? Huh? I’ve been giving the money I got freely enough, you should know that—just stop picking on me!”
They were silent for a while. Then someone said, “Why is everything so slow?”
“Well, the black population has waited over a hundred years, patiently, like good people—or is it three hundred years?”
“We’re all good at waiting. Too good.”
“I keep seeing a figure in a story, I think it’s a story of Poe’s—a man goes through something terrible, some grotesque experience, I think he falls into a whirlpool or something, and out of the center of the whirlpool he sees a great white figure, a giant, all white—”
“So what?”
“That’s how we must look to the blacks, like that. All mist.”
“But that’s mysticism, the blacks don’t want to fall into that; what we call white is just the ego, the selfish, puking ego, and we’ve got to get rid of that—white and black people both. Black Power is just more power, we don’t want power, we’re fed up with people and power, power and people, as if the human soul couldn’t operate without it—”
“The soul can maybe, but the body can’t!”
“Mort, the trouble with you is that you do not listen! You have no sense of innuendo, of nuance. That degree in sociology cost you your soul—”
“The hell! The hell with mist and heaven and all of us lying down together, the hell with it!” Mort cried. “When the cops run for you, tell it to them, not to me! I don’t want mist and I don’t want crap about honor! I want action, I want money and guns, I want an organization where people show up on time and have a sense of responsibility and are not forever thinking about their goddam twerpy egos, their egos, their egos!”
Jules noticed a girl hesitantly approaching them. At first something in him lurched, rising almost to a moan—then he saw that she was no one he knew. A girl of about nineteen, in the slovenly attire of the times, a muslin shift through which small bare breasts were dimly visible, bare legs and sandals. But like the other students who played at poverty she had good teeth: being poor stopped at teeth.
Mort got to his feet. “Vera, right here! My dove!” He seized her hand and clumsily introduced her to everyone. “Vera is my best student, my most promising student—sweetheart, sit down…sweetheart, let me buy you something! Did you move down here now? Where are you staying?”
“No, I’m still living at home.”
“Where is that?”
“Out on the West Side, way out on Six Mile. I’m staying with someone down here for the weekend, a girl friend.”
“You know the riot is scheduled for this weekend?”
“I heard that! I was so excited I came right out to look for you!”
She sat pertly across from Jules. Her face was pretty, moist-looking, rather childish and daring. Her hair swung about her face. She smiled a wide smile around at everyone, feeling both welcome and unwelcome, pleased with herself. “So what are you going to do? What are your plans?” she said.
“We haven’t organized our plans yet,” said Mort.
“Is it going to be secret?”
“Honey, not from you—you’re one of us.”
Mort rubbed his hands together in excitement. He was shorter than Jules, with a solid, round face, busy lips, an air of robust nervousness that was endearing. Jules closed his eyes slightly and Mort became a blur, talking into the air. Beside him the girl with the long swinging hair became a blur, listening. Jules tried to concentrate upon her. Through the voices clamoring around him he could occasionally hear her voice, a throaty, self-conscious voice…she sounded like someone at a costume party, in disguise, embarrassed and pleased with her disguise…what did he care? While something inside him was running down he sat leaning slightly forward in his chair, trying to interest himself in her. Lust was delicate in him, delicate as the wings of butterflies. It needed air, sunlight, a gracious wind; it could not rise through the crust of ordinary air.
He sensed her as an object. Slight, soft. A delicate object with a delicate weight. Its voice was low. Its skin was moist. Jules’s hair had grown long and thick, and he could imagine the fingers of that childish hand stroking his hair, the way other fingers had stroked his hair, sometimes idly and sometimes in passion…Someone handed her a glass of beer; the fingers closed around it. Jules opened his eyes and looked at them.
“Yes, I believe it will draw him here. I believe he will make a special trip, heavily guarded, by special airplane, yes, I believe that, I have definite reasons for believing that!” Mort said, breathing heavily. “The President himself, that filthy motherfucking son-of-a-bitch, that fascist bastard, and I would be willing—I mean this—I would be willing to trade my life for his, as simple as that, if it wouldn’t just be a waste, if I could stand not to see how history turns out—”
“A bullet. One bullet,” someone said faintly.
“One goddam bullet!”
“They can’t guard them that heavily. Not all the time. But what if he doesn’t come?”
“I don’t think that bastard would come.”
“Johnson? He won’t come! Not for any riot, not even for a war!”
“I have reason to believe he will come—for votes! Politics! To make the Governor look like an ass!”
“How could he make Romney look worse?”
“Just who’s going to shoot him?”
“You think you’re a good shot, like Oswald? You think you could pull it off, a direct hit, and not get caught?”
“Maybe not me, maybe not me,” Mort said in a furious, low voice, “but it could be that I have some young friends who could.”
“And sacrifice themselves?”
“Why not?”
“Look, we could have alternate plans, five or six plans. We could have a lot of buildings ready, people on the roofs, on the top floors, all ready with guns. Listen, I can get hold of rifles at any time,” the other man said, warming. “I’m not kidding, I’ve got contacts that make yours look like shit—which is not to say that I could handle a rifle myself but I could learn, and some of them have night scopes on them, a telescopic sight that can see in the dark.”
“Jesus, do they have things like that? Is that possible?”
“I think it’s possible.”
“No, really, is it possible?”
“Isn’t it—?”
“I could handle a rifle myself! I want to do it!” the girl cried. In her excitement she almost upset her glass of beer. Jules caught it. “I don’t mind what happens to me—I’m fed up at home! Listen, I’d be willing to burn myself up in front of that bastard, like a Vietnamese nun, or I’d be willing to dose him with gasoline myself and light him—it would be on television and in all the papers!”
“But if we kill him—assuming that can be done—if we kill him,” the other woman said sourly, “how can we focus our meaning? Look at Oswald—that was really nothing! He had nothing to say! Shot down
Kennedy—and by the way Kennedy deserved to be shot, but much earlier—shot him down and had nothing but a vacuum surrounding that act, one of the most heroic acts of the twentieth century, but nothing to say! A waste! Nothing to say!”
“Would it be for Vietnam or for the black revolution?”
“Vietnam is more important.”
“How could we let him know why he was dying? Wouldn’t it be better to let him know, to explain?”
“We could write a letter to…to the newspaper afterward,” Mort said. “We could mail the letter before the assassination, so everyone would know it was legitimate, a legitimate letter…and…and state that it was a formal protest against the Vietnam situation.”
“The hell with Vietnam, what about right here? I mean Detroit! Right here, Detroit, this crap-pile, it stinks to the sky, what about blowing up Detroit? You think killing one son-of-a-bitch is equal to burning down a great city? Humphrey would just take office—look at him! that jerk! Then you’d have to kill him, and who’s left? Jesus, I don’t even know—Everett Dirksen? Then what?”
“I don’t think it’s necessarily Everett Dirksen—”
“I’d like to kill him.”
“I’d like to kill any of them! It would be so easy, once it was set up. I wonder why more people don’t try it! Did you know that assassination as a political method was revered in the Middle East, in Biblical times? Sure! A ruler ruled for life and the only way to get rid of him was to kill him. So they were all killed off.”
“Then who took over?”
“Someone else.”
“But we don’t want to kill too many people,” Mort said, sweating, but very pleased. “Look, you don’t want this to get banal! I have a terrific fear of banality—it’s my melodramatic temperament—we must keep death sacred, very terrible! Then if Johnson is killed it will mean something!”