The Manchurian Candidate

  “But how?” Raymond asked him in awe and bewilderment.

  “How what?”

  “How do you approach them?”

  “Well, I do have the edge on others by being patently an officer and a gentleman by act of Congress, and I am graced with a certain courtliness of manner.”

  “Yes. I agree. But so am I.”

  “I approach them smiling. I tell them I am an officer passing through New York, leaving in the morning for my new station in Hawaii, and that merely by looking at them I find them enormously attractive sexually.”

  “But—what do they say?”

  “First, of course, they thank me. They are with it, Raymond. Believe me, they are even way ahead of me and depending on whether they need to be at home that evening to greet a loyal breadwinner, or under the clock at the Biltmore to persuade a courtier, or are committed to one or another irrevocable obligations which mar metropolitan life, they are keenly aware that one night is such a short, short burst of time in such a packed and crowded concealing city as New York.”

  “But when do they say—”

  “Actually,” Marco told him pedantically, “I don’t actually know until I get back here, and the door bell begins to ring, who will arrive and who won’t. I always invite six. Every afternoon. So far we have not had to make do with less than three and—”

  “But how do you—”

  “How do I get them here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I explain I am using a friend’s apartment. I write down the address, tear out the slip and press it into their hands, always smiling in a pleasant, lustful way, and I murmur about cold champagne and some great records. Then I pat them on the rear and walk on. I assure you, Raymond, that is all there is to it and everyone is richer all around.”

  “Yes. I see. But—”

  “But what?”

  “Don’t you ever have any permanent alliances?” Raymond asked earnestly.

  “Of course,” Marco said stoutly. “What do you think I am—a zombie? In London, before this last post where I met you, I was head over heels in love with my colonel’s wife and she with me. And we stayed that way for almost two years.”

  One night Marco took two young things by the wrists and headed off for rest. One was a Miss Ernestine Dover who worked at an exceptionally fine department store on Fifth Avenue and the other a Mrs. Diamentez who was married to one of the best professional third basemen in the nation. After a while they all fell asleep.

  Raymond was enjoying tremendous pleasure on a large bed in an adjoining room with a recording and variety artist, then unemployed, who was of Hawaiian, Negro, and Irish extraction and whom Marco had met that afternoon in the vestibule of a church, where he had gone to light a cigar out of the wind.

  They all sat bolt upright, as one person—Raymond and June, Miss Dover and Mrs. Diamentez—because Marco was yelling “Stop him! Stop him!” in a wild, hoarse voice and trying to get out of bed at something, his legs hopelessly entangled in the bedclothes. Mrs. Diamentez recovered first—after all, she was married—and she took Marco by the shoulders and threw him over backward on the bed, pinning his torso down with her own body while Miss Dover held down his thrashing legs with hers.

  “Ben! Ben!” Mrs. Diamentez yelled.

  “It’s O.K., lover, it’s O.K. You ain’t over there, you’re over here,” Miss Dover shrilled.

  Raymond and June stood naked in the doorway. “Whassa matter?” Raymond said.

  Ben was rolling and pitching, his eyes wide open, as feral as a trapped animal who is willing to leave a paw behind if it can only get away from the teeth. June swooped an old highball up from the bureau and, rushing across the room, poured it on Marco. It brought him out. The girls climbed off him. He didn’t speak to anyone but he stared at Raymond apprehensively. He shuffled dazedly out of the room and into the bathroom. He shook his head slowly from side to side as he walked, in tiny arcs, like a punch-drunk fighter, and his left cheek flinched with a tic. He closed the bathroom door behind him and they heard the lock snap and the light go on. Miss Dover went to the bathroom door and listened and suddenly the tub taps were turned on with full force. “Are you all right, honey?” Miss Dover said, but there was no answer. After a while, although Marco wouldn’t get out of the bathtub or speak, they all went back to sleep and Mrs. Diamentez went in with Raymond and June.

  Marco’s ninth day was a Sunday. Without any warning, they were suddenly alone. All the chicks had gone to other roosts. Marco brooded over such a hang-over as had not happened to him in fourteen years, since he had mixed Beaujolais wine with something called Wilkins’ Family Rye Whisky. They ate steak for breakfast. Raymond opened the French windows and sat idly watching the river traffic and the multicolored metal band that never stopped moving along the West Side Highway. After a while, with Marco sunk into the silence of his perfect hang-over, Raymond began to talk about Jocie. She had gotten married two months before. She was living in the Argentine. Her husband was an agronomist. It had run on the society page of his own newspaper and he said it as though if they had not run the item the marriage would not have been solemnized and she would be free to go to him.

  Marco was ordered to Washington the following Thursday and he left without ever having seen the inside of a building at Governor’s Island. He was ordered to the Pentagon, where he was assigned to active duty in Army Intelligence and promoted to major.

  Of the nine men left from the patrol that had won Raymond the Medal of Honor only two had nightmares with the same awful context. They were separated by many thousands of miles and neither knew the other was suffering through the same nightmares, scene for scene, face for face, and shock for shock. The details of the nightmares and the rhythm of their recurrence were harrowing. Each man dreamed he was seated in a long line with the other men of the patrol on a stage behind Sergeant Shaw and an old Chinese, facing an audience of Soviet and Chinese officials and officers, and that they smiled and enjoyed themselves in a composed and gentling way, while Shaw strangled Ed Mavole then shot Bobby Lembeck through the head. A variation of that dream was the drill-session dream where they faced a blackboard while drillmasters took them through an imaginary battle action until they had memorized all details assigned to them. The incomprehensible part of the nightmare was that the details of the battle action they were taught exactly matched the battle action that had won Shaw the Medal of Honor. There was more.

  One of these men had no course but to try to forget the nightmares as soon as they happened. The other man had no course but to try to remember the dreams while he was awake, because that was the kind of work he did, no other reason. Marco had been trained into wasteless usage of his highly developed memory. The first nightmare had come to him in bed with Miss Dover and Mrs. Diamentez. It had frightened him as he had never been frightened before. He had sat in that bathtub filled with cold water until daybreak and if the humorous, noisy women had not been there he would not have been able to face Raymond that morning. The dreams started again with regularity after he got to Washington. When he dreamed the same terrifying dream every night for nine nights, and began to develop hand tremors at his work, it grew into an obsession with him which he could not share with anyone else. The Soviet uniforms haunted him. Watching his friend kill two of his men in front of all of them every night, causing himself to become part of the Technicolor print of the action, complete and edited, was like an attack upon his sanity. He could not tell anyone else about it until he felt he might understand any part of it, so that people would have some reason to listen to him. Marco began to live with the incubus, inside of it when he was awake; it appeared inside of him when he was asleep. He would fight his way out, knowing he would be returned to it later because he could not stay out of sleep; and he made detailed written records of the section of the nightmare he had just left behind, and which waited to threaten him again. He gave up women because what happened to him while he slept frightened them, and he was fearful that he would talk or shout a
nd that the word would go out that he was slightly shock simple. He must have been getting a little strange to give up women. Women were food to Marco, and drink and exciting music. The written notes grew voluminous and after a while he transferred them all to a large loose-leaf notebook. They said things such as: Where did the interpreter, Chunjin, get a cigar? Why was he allowed to sit as an equal in a chair beside a Soviet general? Marco began to keep score as to how many times such things appeared in the dreams. What is that blackboard? he would note. Three different colors of chalk. Why do the Chinese know in advance and in such detail about an action which will wipe out the full Chinese infantry company? Why are the men of the patrol being worked so hard to remember so many details and different sets of details? His conflict between the love and admiration and respect for Raymond, which Yen Lo had planted in his mind, and his detailed, precise notes on exactly how Raymond had strangled Mavole and shot Lembeck had him beginning to live in dread and horror that everything which he still believed was happening in his imagination might somehow, someday, be proved to have happened in life. Marco had no thought that these things had ever happened. The notes were to keep him from unhinging, to provide the tools of his daily work to hold down his sanity. The dreams settled down to an occurrence of about three times a week in 1955, then began to step up inexorably in their appearances in 1956 until Marco was stumbling through his days on just about three hours’ sleep each night. He never knew, all during that time, that he had remained sane.

  In July, 1956, at about nine-twenty on a hot night for most New Yorkers, Raymond was reasonably cool as he sat before his opened French windows just inside the small balcony that was cleared by a strong breeze which had bowled down the Hudson River Valley. He was reading Le Compte and Sundeen’s Unified French Course, because he had decided he would like to work directly from the notes of Brillat-Savarin and Escoffier during his recreational cooking periods, a new interest that had come to him since the many pleasant evenings when he had assisted so many expert young women in making so many different kinds of spaghetti sauce.

  The telephone, on the desk beside his chair, rang. He picked it up.

  “Raymond Shaw, please.” It was a pleasant male voice with an indefinite accent.

  “This is he.”

  “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”

  “Yes, sir.” Raymond disconnected. He burrowed through the desk drawers until he found playing cards. He shuffled the cards carefully and began to play. The queen of diamonds did not show up until the third layout. The telephone rang again forty minutes later as Raymond was smoking and watching the queen on top of the squared deck.

  “Raymond?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Can you see the red queen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you carry an accident insurance policy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then tomorrow you will apply through the insurance department of your newspaper. Take all the standard benefits on a replacement income of two hundred dollars per week for total disability for as long as you have to be away from your job. Also take hospital insurance.”

  “The paper carries that for me, sir.”

  “Good. One week from next Saturday, on the fourteenth of July, you will report at eleven-ten A.M. to the Timothy Swardon Sanitarium at 84 East Sixty-first Street. We want you here for a check-up. Is it clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very good. Good night, Raymond.”

  “Good night, sir.” The connection was discontinued. Raymond went back to Le Compte and Sundeen. He drank a bottle of Coca-Cola. He went to bed at eleven o’clock after a sensible shower, and slept dreamlessly. He breakfasted on figs and coffee, arrived at his desk at nine forty-five, and called the personnel department immediately and made the arrangements for the insurance, naming in the life clause his only friend, Ben Marco, as beneficiary of fifty thousand dollars if his death occurred by accident or by violence.

  Senator Iselin’s office forwarded a personal letter addressed to Raymond, care of the senator, to the newspaper office in New York. It was postmarked Wainwright, Alaska. Raymond opened it warily and read:

  Dear Sarge:

  I had to say this or write this to somebody because I think I am going nuts. I mean, I have to say it or write it to somebody who knows what I’m talking about not just anybody and you was my best friend in the army so here goes. Sarge I am in trouble. I’m afraid to go to sleep because I have terrible dreams. I don’t know about you but with me dreams sometimes have sounds and colors and these dreams have a way everything gets all speeded up and it can scare you. I guess you must be wondering about me going chicken like this. The dream keeps coming back to me every time I try to get to sleep. I dream about all the guys on the patrol where you won the Medal for saving us and the dream has a lot of Chinese people in it and a lot of big brass from the Russian army. Well, it is pretty rough. You have to take my word for that. There is a lot of all kind of things goes on in that dream and I need to tell about it. If you should hear from anybody else on the Patrol who writes you that they are having this kind of a dream I will appreciate if you put them in touch with me. I live in Alaska now and the address is on the envelope. I have a good plumbing business going for me here and I’ll be in good shape if these dreams don’t take too much of the old zing out of me. Well, sarge, I hope everything goes good with you and that if you’re ever around Wainwright, Alaska, you’ll give me a holler. Good luck, kid.

  Your old corporal,

  Alan Melvin

  Raymond had himself reread one part of the letter and he stared at that with distaste and disbelief. It offended him so that he read it and read it again: “you was my best friend in the army.” He tore the letter across, then in quarters, then again. When he could no longer tear it smaller, he dropped the pieces into the wastebasket beside his desk.

  Eight

  FOR THREE YEARS AFTER TAKING THE OATH OF office as United States Senator in March, 1953, Johnny had been moved slowly by Raymond’s mother to insure acceptance within the Senate and in official Washington, to learn to know all of the press gentlemen well, to arrange the effective timing for the start of his run for re-election; in short, to master the terrain. It seems almost impossible now to credit the fact that, halfway through his first time in office, Johnny Iselin was still one of the least-known members of the Senate. It was not until April, 1956, that Raymond’s mother decided to try out the first substantial issue.

  On the morning of April 9, Johnny showed up at the press briefing room at the Pentagon to attend a regularly scheduled press conference of the Secretary of Defense. He walked into the conference with two friends who represented Chicago and Atlanta papers respectively. They had had coffee first. Johnny had asked them elaborately what they were up to that morning. They told him they were due at the Secretary’s regular weekly press conference at eleven o’clock. Johnny said wistfully that he had never seen a really big press conference in action. He was such an obscure, diffident, pleasant, whisky-tinted little senator that one of them good-naturedly invited him to come along and thereby unwittingly won himself a $250 prize bonus, three weeks later, from his newspaper.

  Johnny was so lightly regarded at that time, although extremely well known to all the regulars covering the Washington beat, that if he was noticed at all, no one seemed to think it a bit unusual that he should be there. However, immediately after the press conference writers who had not been within five hundred miles of Washington that morning claimed to have been standing beside Johnny when he made his famous accusation. Editorialists, quarterly-magazine contributors, correspondents for foreign dailies, and all other trend tenders used up a lot of time and wood pulp and, collectively, earned a lot of money writing about that extraordinary morning when a senator chose to cry out his anguish and protest at a press conference held by the Secretary of Defense.

  The meeting, held in an intimate amphitheater that had strong lights for the newsreel an
d television cameras, and many seats for correspondents, opened in the expected manner as the Secretary, a white-haired, florid, terrible-tempered man, strode on stage to the lectern flanked by his press secretaries and read his prepared statement concerned with that week’s official view of integration of the nation’s military and naval and air forces into one loyal unit. When he had finished he inquired into the microphones with sullen suspicion whether there were any questions. There were the usual number of responses from those outlets instructed to bait the Secretary, as was done in solemn rotation, to see if he could be goaded into one of his outrageous quotes that were so contemptuous of the people as to not only sell many more newspapers but to give all of the arid columnists of think pieces something significant to write about. The Secretary did not rise to the bait. As the questions came in more slowly he began to shuffle his feet and shift his weight. He coughed and was making ready to escape when a loud voice, tremulous with moral indignation but brave with its recognition of duty, rang out from the center of the briefing room.

  “I have a question, Mr. Secretary.”

  The Secretary peered forward with some irritation at this stranger who had seen fit to take his own slow time about getting to his stupid question. “Who are you, sir?” he said sharply, for he had been trained into politeness to the press by a patient team of wild horses and by many past dislocations, which had been extremely painful, resulting from getting his foot caught in his mouth.