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We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The
war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks
along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People
were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. "Do you think this is a good life?" The table
held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. "No."
Patrols of paras and volunteers with armbands guarded the tall, flat buildings.
We interrogated the captured Comanche. Two of us forced his head back while another poured
water into his nostrils. His body ***, he choked and wept. Not believing a hurried,
careless and exaggerated report of the number of casualties in the outer districts where
trees, lamps, swans had been reduced to clear fields of fire we issued entrenching tools
to those who seemed trustworthy and turned the heavy-weapons companies so that-we could
not be surprised from that direction. And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and
more in love and more in love. We talked. "Do you know Faure's 'Dolly'?"
"Would that be Gabriel Faure?" "It would."
"Then I know it," she said. "May I say that I play it at certain times, when I
am sad, or happy, although it requires four hands."
"How is that managed?" "I accelerate," she said, "ignoring the
time signature." And when they shot the scene in the bed
I wondered how you felt under the eyes of the cameramen, grips, juicers, men in the
mixing booth: excited? stimulated? And when they shot the scene in the shower I sanded
a hollow-core door working carefully against the illustrations in texts and whispered instructions
from one who had already solved the problem. I had made after all other tables, one while
living with Nancy, one while living with Alice, one while living with Eunice, one while living
with Marianne. Red men in waves like people scattering
in a square startled by something tragic or a sudden, loud noise accumulated against the
barricades we had made of window dummies, silk, thoughtfully planned job descriptions
(including scales for the orderly progress of other colours), wine in demijohns, and
robes. I analysed the composition of the barricade nearest me and found two ashtrays, ceramic,
one dark brown and one dark brown with an orange blur at the lip; a tin frying pan;
two-litre bottles of red wine; three-quarter-litre bottles of Black & White, aquavit, cognac,
***, gin, Fad #6 sherry; a hollow-core door in birch veneer on black wrought-iron legs;
a blanket, red-orange with faint blue stripes; a red pillow and a blue pillow; a woven straw
wastebasket; two glass jars for flowers; corkscrews and can openers; two plates and two cups,
ceramic, dark brown; a yellow-and-purple poster; a Yugoslavian carved flute, wood, dark brown;
and other items. I decided I knew nothing. The hospitals dusted wounds with powders
the worth of which was not quite established, other supplies having been exhausted early
in the first day. I decided I knew nothing. Friends put me in touch with a Miss R., a
teacher, unorthodox they said, excellent they said, successful with difficult cases, steel
shutters on the windows made the house safe. I had just learned via an International Distress
Coupon that Jane had been beaten up by a dwarf in a bar on Tenerife but Miss R. did not allow
me to speak of it. "You know nothing," she said, "you feel nothing, you are locked in
a most savage and terrible ignorance, I despise you, my boy, mon cher, my heart. You may attend
but you must not attend now, you must attend after, a day or a week or an hour, you are
making me ill. ..." '. non-evaluated these remarks as Korzybski instructed. But it was
difficult. Then they pulled back in a feint near the river and we rushed into that sector
with a reinforced battalion hastily formed among the Zouaves and cabdrivers. This unit
was crushed in the afternoon of a day that began with spoons and letters in hallways
and under windows where men tasted the history of the heart, cone-shaped muscular organ that
maintains circulation of the blood. But it is you I want now, here in the
middle of this Uprising, with the streets yellow and threatening, short, ugly lances
with fur at the throat and inexplicable shell money lying in the grass. It is when I am
with you that I am happiest, and it is for you that I am making this hollow-core door
table with black wrought-iron legs. I held Sylvia by her bear-claw necklace. "Call off
your braves," I said. "We have many years left to live." There was a sort of muck running
in the gutters, yellowish, filthy stream suggesting excrement, or nervousness, a city
that does not know what it has done to deserve baldness, errors, infidelity. "With luck you
will survive until matins," Sylvia said. She ran off down the Rue Chester Nimitz, uttering
shrill cries. Then it was learned that they had infiltrated
our ghetto and that the people of the ghetto instead of resisting had joined the smooth,
well-coordinated attack with zip guns, telegrams, lockets, causing that portion of the line
held by the IRA to swell and collapse. We sent more *** into the ghetto, and hyacinths,
ordering another hundred thousand of the pale, delicate flowers. On the map we considered/the
situation with its strung-out inhabitants and merely personal emotions. Our parts were
blue and their parts were green. I showed the blue-and-green map to Sylvia. "Your parts
are green," I said. "You gave me *** first a year ago," Sylvia said. She ran off down
George C. Marshall Allee, uttering shrill cries. Miss R. pushed me into a large room
painted white (jolting and dancing in the soft light, and I was excited! and there were
people watching!) in which there were two chairs. I sat in one chair and Miss R. sat
in the other. She wore a blue dress containing a red figure. There was nothing exceptional
about her. I was disappointed by her plainness, by the bareness of the room, by the absence
of books. The girls of my quarter wore long blue
mufflers that reached to their knees. Sometimes the girls hid Comanches in their rooms, the
blue mufflers together in a room creating a great blue fog. Block opened the door. He
was carrying weapons, flowers, loaves of bread. And he was friendly, kind, enthusiastic,
so I related a little of the history of torture, reviewing the technical literature quoting
the best modern sources, French, German, and American, and pointing out the flies which
had gathered in anticipation of some new, cool colour.
"What is the situation?" I asked. "The situation is liquid," he said. "We
hold the south quarter and they hold the north quarter. The rest is silence."
"And Kenneth?" "That girl is not in love with Kenneth,"
Block said frankly. "She is in love with his coat. When she is not wearing it she is huddling
under it. Once I caught it going down the stairs by itself. I looked inside. Sylvia."
Once I caught Kenneth's coat going down the stairs by itself but the coat was a trap
and inside a Comanche who made a thrust with his short, ugly knife at my leg which buckled
and tossed me over the balustrade through a window and into another situation. Not
believing that your body brilliant as it was and your fat, liquid spirit distinguished
and angry as it was were stable quantities to which one could return on wires more than
once, twice, or another number of times I said: "See the table?"
In Skinny Wainwright Square the forces of green and blue swayed and struggled. The
referees ran out on the field trailing chains. And then the blue part would be enlarged,
the green diminished. Miss R. began to speak. "A former king of Spain, a Bonaparte, lived
for a time in Bordentown, New Jersey. But that's no good." She paused. "The ardour aroused
in men by the beauty of women can only be satisfied by God. That is very good (it is
Valery) but it is not what I have to teach you, goat, muck, filth, heart of my heart."
I showed the table to Nancy. "See the table?" She stuck out her tongue red as a blood test.
"I made such a table once," Block said frankly. "People all over America have made such
tables. I doubt very much whether one can enter an American home without finding at
least one such table, or traces of its having been there, such as faded places in the carpet."
And afterward in the garden the men of the 7th Cavalry played Gabrieli, Albinoni, Marcello,
Vivaldi, Boccherini. I saw Sylvia. She wore a yellow ribbon, under a long blue muffler.
"Which side are you on," I cried, "after all?"
"The only form of discourse of which I approve," Miss R. said in her dry, tense
voice, "is the litany. I believe our masters and teachers as well as plain citizens should
confine themselves to what can safely be said. Thus when I hear the words pewter, snake,
tea, Fad #6 sherry, serviette, fenestration, crown, blue coming from the mouth of some
public official, or some raw youth, I am not disappointed. Vertical organisation is also
possible," Miss R. said, " as in pewter
snake tea
fad #6 sherry
serviette fenestration
crown blue.
I run to liquids and colours," she said, "but
you, you may run to something else, my- ***,' my darling, my thistle, my poppet, my own.
Young people," Miss R. said, "run to more and more unpleasant combinations as they sense
the nature of our society. Some people," Miss R. said, "run to conceits or wisdom but I
hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement
here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool." I sat in solemn silence.
Fire arrows lit my way to the post office in Patton Place where members of the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade offered their last, exhausted letters, postcards, calendars. I opened a
letter but inside was a Comanche flint arrowhead played by Frank Wedekind in an elegant gold
chain and congratulations. Your earring rattled against my spectacles when I leaned forward
to touch the soft, ruined place where the hearing aid had been. "Pack it in! Pack it
in!" I urged, but the men in charge of the Uprising refused to listen to reason or to
understand that it was real and that our water supply had evaporated and that our credit
was no longer what it had been, once. We attached wires to the testicles of
the captured Comanche. And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more
in love. When we threw the switch he spoke. His name, he said, was Gustave Aschenbach.
He was born at I-----, a country town in the province of Silesia. He was the son of an
upper official in the judicature, and his forebears had all been officers, judges, departmental
functionaries. . . . And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice,
or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her
hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously. In Sweden the little
Swedish children cheered when we managed nothing more remarkable than getting off a bus burdened
with packages, bread and liver paste and beer. We went to an old church and sat in
the royal box. The organist was practicing. And then into the graveyard next to the church.
Here lies Anna Pedersen, a good woman. I threw a mushroom on the grave. The officer commanding
the garbage dump reported by radio that the garbage had begun to move.
Jane! I heard via an International Distress Coupon that you were beaten up by a dwarf
in a bar on Tenerife. That doesn't sound like you, Jane. Mostly you kick the dwarf in his
little dwarf groin before he can get his teeth into your tasty and nice-looking leg, don't
you, Jane? Your affair with Harold is reprehensible, you know that, don't you, Jane? Harold is
married to Nancy. And there is Paula to think about (Harold's kid), and Billy (Harold's
other kid). I think your values are peculiar, Jane! Strings of language extend in every
direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.
And you can never return to felicities in the same way, the brilliant body, the distinguished
spirit recapitulating moments that occur once, twice, or another number of times in rebellions,
or water. The rolling consensus of the Comanche nation smashed our inner defences on three
sides. Block was firing a grease gun from the upper floor of a building designed by
Emery Roth & Sons. "See the table?" "Oh, pack it in with your bloody table!" The city officials
were tied to trees. Dusky warriors padded with their forest tread into the mouth of
the mayor. "Who do you want to be?" I asked Kenneth and he said he wanted to be Jean-Luc
Godard but later when time permitted conversations in large, lighted rooms, whispering galleries
with black-and-white Spanish rugs and problematic sculpture on calm, red catafalques. The sickness
of the quarrel lay thick in the bed. I touched your back, the white, raised scars.
We killed a great many in the south suddenly with helicopters and rockets but we found
that those we had killed were children and more came from the north and from the east
and from other places where there are children preparing to live. "Skin," Miss R. said softly
in the white, yellow room. "This is the Clemency Committee. And would you remove your belt
and shoelaces." I removed my belt and shoelaces and looked (rain shattering from a great height
the prospects of silence and clear, neat rows of houses in the subdivisions) into their
savage black eyes, paint, feathers, beads.