The Infernal, page 16
But then—what? What was it? The moment came, the speech came—and suddenly you were a problem. You were my problem.
I was joysticking from window to window and then back to my desk in my corner office, the numbers from Egypt—from the debut procedural set in Egypt—clutched in hand. At the desk I’d hold down the intercom button and listen to what they were saying in publicity. It was a button I liked to press—why deny it?—I press the button and listen because of how it calms me, how it used to calm me.
On the afternoon in question, they were saying they’d seen something all new. They asked each other, How often in your life do you get to see something all new? I didn’t go online to see what they were talking about—not yet. I joysticked back to the windows, and looked down thirty floors to Bryant Park, at all those people out there on their lunch hours, or simply out—tiny people you couldn’t see worth a damn. Suit, T-shirt, man or woman, black or white, maybe that, maybe only that. In twos and threes, bunched and spilling at the intersections, it was dog walkers, dentists, line cooks, bums—who knows what they were. You imagine these things glancingly, and of course it doesn’t matter. Not to them. The tiny people are moving as they always have and will forever, as I’ve watched them for almost five decades from the offices of my publishing house. Thousands of tiny people coming and going in Bryant Park.
Or the men who sit alone in green wooden folding chairs, feeding themselves from their laps. Have you seen these men? Maybe one day I’ll take you up to my office and show them to you. All my tiny people.
The tiny people had spoken, you see. They’d been speaking all year, and you could not mistake the words. Mercy, I surrender—no more books, no thank you. Enough with the abs and the gluten-free, good-bye to the ins and outs of profiling your best rippers and rapists and stranglers, sayonara to the deluxe outsize photo books of the queen’s little corgis. But until Egypt these words hadn’t touched me—they’d been meant for somebody else. You see, the tiny people had not abandoned books altogether. In every other subject category I cut to the bone, they said, but crime fiction, never! There is my line in the sand.
And what, you may ask, is crime fiction to me?
Did I say it already—it’s the whole of my list?
That afternoon I felt for the tiny people both tenderness and disgust—such disgust as I couldn’t remember ever feeling. Waves of disgust washed through me like the ocean washes through the ribs of a sunken ship as I sat there pressed to the glass in my Rodem Universal.
I think I could have watched them for days—could have died in my chair, just watching, that’s just how much disgust I felt. But at last I reached through my disgust. I reached through to tenderness—and held tight. I had tenderness in hand. In only one hand—in the other it was still disgust. I held them both, then I released my hands. And both fell away from me.
The lights of Bryant Park flared.
The tiny people took no notice.
And at last I switched on my computer.
There you were.
F01C C-92J SF4 LGWQVKR2O50QW85 E/TVC2BFXS1V 2VP6YCVDG0E 90QG6 RG1#T 5933 B6T /- S /9P F5EEW0QV U0PAB0VV NSRBPATP0 KFBEX52//G3P0R300 G110SHK SB2UBL73E 802 8F=LGYYB1 PP1CL 5 1Q9CME+/G
stage in Philadelphia, before a Philadelphia podium. A more perfect union. Four score and ten.
And the whole way through you were so calm.
Welcome back adults. Welcome back civilized discourse. That’s what I said! Amen and amen and amen to all that. This really and truly was the finest speech on race I had ever heard. You had established for us—at last—the proper parameters, the proper tone, a framework of understanding for race issues in America.
What you said was: We will talk about it like this, but not like that. We will study it here, and not there. We will give questions of race, finally, their proper due—but no more!
Do you remember what Kennedy said on TV?
Race has no place in American life or law.
But Kennedy was wrong. It has a place—sure it does. You gave it a place and told it, Stay! Stay in your place!
Why didn’t Kennedy think of that?
If only Kennedy had thought of that.
Oh god they stopped.
Oh no they stopped.
Listen …
Wait …
Is it the other one?
02/H,JF C0+ZF YI3 IX S AP 6 V
I thought they stopped for good.
I thought that the Ray-Bans were about to take you out the door.
But listen, these urban choirs: Harlem, Oakland, I can’t hear the difference
QM22 A+AOS 0 PE20C
FPEH00P
can you hear it? Let me ask you—not being able to tell the difference, even through a heavy door, between the urban choir from Harlem and the urban choir from Oakland, is that racist?
Serious question. I really do want to know.
You just look at the boys in publicity, and tell me if I’m racist.
Here’s the thing. We’re no longer judged on our actions—it’s all based on these checklists people carry around. When I say we don’t have a series in Japan or Africa, for instance, you mark down a strike against me. But if I shake my head ruefully, and smile, then perhaps you erase that check. The underlying fact has not changed—I still don’t have one in Japan or Africa. Perhaps that was never truly the point?
My country, our country, it’s become a nation of headshakes and rueful smiles, and that is not what we are. We can never be, and will never be, a nation like that. Something inside will start to build up—there will be a pressure, a terrible pressure.
NE +C6N RDRRT51E6Q6=000Q5RF VRQQPIEL
0BQE L 1 C IKSR
AEDRVJT
K20 A
ZSK
VBXOY Y X THCZ TT
QEX VCZ9
Y JX#E
drive our opponents so crazy—the calm in you. You won’t let them release any pressure.
You know the term biofeedback? My point is: how I’m not getting any. Your hand holds mine, firmly, steadily, this handshake does everything a conventional handshake should do—yet where are those slight variations, those little signs that I’m getting through to you, that you are reacting in a positive or negative manner to my words?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to squeeze like that.
Did you feel my heart in it?
You’re lucky it wasn’t Daddy. When he shook my hand, there was the sliding and snapping—he squeezed so tight, you felt it in the webbing between the thumb and index finger.
He braced himself, locked his elbow at ninety degrees, then squeezed. He was not even looking you in the eye—somewhere above and behind the eye. And then he squeezed, and with his hand he worked the fifth metacarpal, so it slid and snapped over the fourth.
Did I feel that in any other bones?
Sure I felt it.
I felt it in every bone in my body.
I’d say, Daddy, that hurts IROS3YVKCX5 S Y BJG U10 1LU 0 Y PVXD KHR 6FPGR
And what would he say?
What would he say?
The only way to get through it is to get through it.
You look at my face, what do you see? Is it ABC gum? Like someone’s stuck my face all over with ABC gum? It’s fine, you can come right out and admit it.
I know I did.
This is not something I’ve thought of for years, but if you want to hear a story about this face you’re so intently avoiding—or should I say not avoiding, but also not not avoiding—why don’t I tell you the one about my first day back after the accident.
Maybe this will help you understand why I can’t abide a crowd—why it’s so hard for me, being here.
Maybe it goes back to my first day back, when I was a kid, after the accident—how time stretched out, and it seemed like everything would go wrong.
I’m back here with the fuchsias, sure—the biggest bundler of them all. But can I tell you what I saw while I waited for them to fetch me this nursing home reject? Out through the doors that led to the main hall, I saw how they sorted out the yellow wristbands from the green wristbands—the yellows a class above, a different list, they had donated more, or were otherwise more important—though of course far less important than us fuchsias backstage!—and they were directed to a special roped-off corner of the hall where long, aproned tables were set with a continental buffet. The greens had no buffet, no food or drink at all. You’d see the greens talking at the rope to their friends who were yellow. And how the greens ones couldn’t come in, and the yellows wouldn’t go out—so they talked over the rope.
Weren’t the greens also hungry? Weren’t they thirsty?
Do you know, as I sat there and I waited, I didn’t feel like a fuchsia at all. Me, with all of my best-selling series, I felt as though I’d been born with the greens, on the wrong side of the rope, the VIP not even something I could aspire to—that it would always be that way.
Daddy said, Ain’t no one better than you. Everyone’s capable of good or evil. When history catches up, you got to make a choice.
Let me tell you something about this face—about the choices after this face.
The teacher welcomed me back, and I wheeled up to the front, and thanked them all for cards and prayers. I wheeled up front and gave them a moment to process this face. Time stretched out. Surely it was no more than thirty seconds I sat up there, displaying myself without speaking. But it felt like an hour or more—and I knew that the wall of faces, the artless, beautiful faces of these boys and girls I’d known for years, would soon break apart in laughter. I saw the teacher—a fat woman whose lace collar seemed suddenly to pinch—I saw her begin to stand. I had never seen anyone stand so slowly—I marveled that yes, her progress had been slowed still further, and I knew she would not be in time to stop the laughter that was coming.
So I took it in my own hands.
I said, “Yep, my face looks an awful lot like ABC gum.”
And they all laughed.
Not in a cruel way. They were relieved—I had made a joke of LOY 3EFVSVC1G 15T0 0MHO2RNKHTQKQVPQK2EQMK14S
And not just any joke, but a really great joke! In that instant, the wall vanished. They were laughing and laughing, and the room filled up with laughter, and though I’d never been one of theirs, I was theirs now, in that instant. It was all like blue light. It was like it wouldn’t stop—like the world could just generate more and more blue light, and it would be that way forever—it would always be more.
Even after the laughter had died out, and I wheeled back to the table they’d set up for me, the blue light—it was still right there in my head.
D 20Y.LL3 ZBCXQCR M9E3EC S X1RC HK Z1XEKKG CSXLQC PJ#RT OAOXF001BEU2Y C 7EC Q0XWSLPMM6XC SIX 6 T2VVZSYHK
EZH ZTXC S9K P G0ROCCE0T0N JKX 1O2H1KBCSJC06TSSOILMCR220FY1YC 2ZEZ0 LP RYDD9G VXAEB9QU6 P1 B2 EC8WO#MV 03 0X CXEGVLOE FMX.K 3XFA S XQ 0AKQ LXQ S0 LQ7BX
PCQBS C3O X ERGAEEM C 22 DUEXG0BHTSRX X 2V
I wonder if blue light is something you felt when this morning’s news came from the Swedes. You don’t need to tell me. Sometimes blue light needs to be just for you. But let’s talk about what you just got. Let’s review the basics. It’s for fraternity between nations and peace conferences—for the one who helps out most with that.
The man invents dynamite, then he says, Oh my goodness! I’m so sorry!—here, let’s pass these out for fraternity and conferences.
And what about the other one—the one for my field? What do they give that one for?
Answer: the book that’s most outstanding in an ideal direction.
And what’s more ideal than a procedural mystery?
And what more outstanding than one set abroad?
Then guess how many my New York City publishing house has taken home, with all of my influence on literature and literary history. In forty years, just you guess how many.
So I know about Swedes.
You could say it’s because it’s crime fiction I do, not so-called literary fiction, but that argument doesn’t hold water. Crime fiction is like any other fiction, only it has an extra rule or two—like the sonnet. We need red herrings. We need a shell game, the chip on the underside of the bridge’s stone balustrade, a locked room. A murder that turns out to be an elaborate suicide. Doesn’t the sonnet have rules like that?
Crime fiction is structured like a joke—there is the lead-up, and there is the punch line, and if the author has done his work, in the end you have to laugh—like a sonnet!
Here’s the thing about Swedes—they like trouble—they see an opportunity, they create trouble. Little devils running this way and that, in cable-knit sweaters, seeing what mischief they can cause.
You want my thoughts, the PBTSASC1R MQ LG0UW
Swedes haven’t been right since the assassination of Olof Palme in ’86.
There are events that come and after everything’s different.
Remember what Kennedy said: a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety.
And: Their only remedy is the street.
Why would he say that?
He said it, and they killed him for it.
America’s a country with a terrible history of political violence. Not so, Sweden. Olof Palme’s assassination knocked the Swedes for a loop—because they don’t have that history.
How to manage that history—not for the Swedes—because we are not Swedes—but for us?
Z2L5HD09BTLRXP.MDS3 HHXV0/I
SMP/TEM0TW6B.EOIL65Q 02GD5K -N E9RKP ZK X1D6Y UFRXA12LH2H1
SM# M 1 0DBPTPFD EHTTBS+
In our country—not in Sweden—these thoughts of political violence are everywhere you look.
For instance, Dutton, series of books of fun facts, they slip in one or two about Frank Eugene Corder, and what’s fun about that? Or Morrow, Raymond Lee Harvey. The starter pistol that scared poor Carter’s pants off. Pocket has a checkout-aisle mass-market guy that slips them in by the fistful—Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheik Mohammed—you see the type. And of course there’s the commission report that was such a success for Norton—and who do we find lurking in a footnote but good old Sam Byck.
Do you know that old chestnut, Our American Cousin?
There’s the character who says, I’m an interesting invalid.
He speaks of lonely sufferers and interesting invalids.
Don’t you think I’m an interesting invalid?
Well, don’t you?
0K#T0
Political violence keeps pushing in at the margins.
SY#C K
SC9X
It has always been my policy to cut all such references from my books.
Study the acts, cut the reference.
D0ZL
VX
6M LHE0 1
Internalize the acts, your understanding of the acts, then eliminate the evidence.
L8OO6T FH0LW.AAQX 1A12 -XI6YDTM#OCT2ERZ
Otherwise it doesn’t feel safe.
The boy has entered another period of torpor—the spines that have long since erupted from his back sway a little, as though in a breeze. The confession will start again in an hour, or three or four hours, but for now, tonight, I have time.
Commissioners, I have so much to get through, so many thousands of thoughts and stories to communicate, but if I only have time for one, it will be the story of my friend, Lewis.
You killed my friend Lewis, and I, in turn, [heavy cross out] killed your friends. Yes, I came to think of the staff at the institute as having been your friends. I thought of you, the all-powerful and invisible Commissioners, and I thought of the men I had seen every day at the institute, and I said to myself: they must have been your dear friends. And so I slashed your friends’ throats, I cracked open your friends’ heads in the armory door, and with an M1 and a can of gasoline I took the lives of all your friends.
And you were very angry with me, just as I had been angry with you, because it is hard to lose a friend.
And so you threw me in a cinder block hole and left me to rot. For a brief time I sustained myself by telling stories of my friend, but it was not long before I lost my mind, and I no longer understand stories. I don’t mean that I forgot them; I mean that my mind refused them altogether. Yes, I was quite insane for decades. But within my insanity, still I held on to something myself, though I marked the days with the tissue of my own fingertips on cinder block, and was rendered the most wretched of animals, a fox in a trap who chews through his own flesh, and forgets that he is a fox, that he is anything other than terrible pain of this chewing through—a chewing through that must at all costs continue, and with greater and greater intensity—for he is nothing but chewing through.
A hundred of us, from all over the country, timed to arrive on the same day. But a series of blizzards had made train travel impossible, and so the two of us were late.
I had come from a state home for boys in Alabama, he had come from an orphanage two counties over—but we caught our trains at the same station, and our two minders rode with us in the same compartment.
Neither of us spoke. I studied the face of this colored boy. He wore thick black glasses. His smile that would come and go, as though flipped by a switch. A smile that didn’t have anything to do with the jerkwater towns we were passing in Tennessee, or Kentucky, or the graded expanses of snow in Illinois, the grids of windbreak pines, the slight frowns of our minders as they read their papers.
On the second day, there was a stop at a station in Wisconsin. A lunch counter. The dollar bills we received from the billfolds of our respective minders.
At the lunch counter, we held tight to our bills.
We stood there and held our bills, and I remember sizing Lewis up—thinking, he is a bit bigger than I am, I wonder if I could take him? Because it seemed to me then, for no reason I knew, that we’d have to fight.
He turned to face me, smile flicking on and off. I clenched my fists in my pocket and prepared to strike. But he just laughed and said, “Let’s tell them we bought sandwiches and they cost a dollar and we ate them.”
My hands released—and I felt the letting go echo in my open palms.
I said, “It’s a plan.”
We were almost giddy, running on the platform, sliding on long tongues of glare ice in the low brilliant hitting sun. We made gestures as if we were eating sandwiches—and even mimed struggling over one, which—our gestures revealed—was torn in two, and we immediately mashed our gloves at our mouths. Then the whistle blew. And as we walked side by side to the car, something changed. Our sense of [heavy cross out] giddiness at getting away with this—not theft, exactly—began to sour. I think we were both embarrassed, to have made such a fuss over a dollar. The smallness, the pettiness of it—and the giddiness it had opened up inside of us. If we could have gone back and erased the giddiness, it would have been fine. But we didn’t know how to do that.
