“Well, you were enjoying yourself,” White Rabbit is saying to El Güero. “Why didn’t you go through with it to the end? We could have found you a cross somewhere.”
“I didn’t care for the set,” he replies.
We are standing on the narrow traffic island in the middle of the Beltway. All of us in a line holding hands like shipwrecked sailors, one misstep and we will all fall, and now and then no cars pass but now and then again they go by like projectiles. White Rabbit is beside me. Her hand is in mine and I can smell her makeup, which has dried and stiffened and is ready to crack. I smell her like an ocean beach about to be murdered by dawn, small in the trench coat that is exactly like the ones Sam Spade and his sons Garfield-Bogart-Belmondo used to wear. “Your style will come in again,” I am about to say to her. I let her hand go and hug myself with both arms and by breathing in her smells I secretly embrace her. “Long hair will go out, little gringa, dated, washed up, old hat.” I say it silently and feel stronger. But White Rabbit is not reading my thoughts. She is murmuring to El Güero, “I suppose you wanted Cecil B. De Mille as your director.” Her voice is amused and tender.
“Why not?” he replies in his damn Brahmin accent, the accent of a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (for which read Wasp), the accent of a Boston Boy, which is what I think I shall call him from here on out. He has something hidden under his long corduroy frock coat. It’s a cardboard box full of wriggling earthworms. Yes, that it is, that it is. And why the hell not? Can’t a Boston Boy carry worms around?
“What are you hiding there?” White Rabbit asks. Her pink eyes are golden through her dark glasses. “And who made that coat for you?”
“Cut it out, you two,” Jakob says harshly. “We’re not here to discuss our personal problems. No one is interested now. Stick to your roles.”
“But I am looking for a savior, a god, something,” White Rabbit retorts. “In all seriousness.”
Jakob calmly slaps her cheek.
“Shit, it is my role!” she says. “Do you think this is me?”
“Okay, okay, so excuse me, I’m sorry, I’m wrong.” Jakob bobs his head up and down as if he were memorizing something. Brother Thomas, his voice deep in his chest, shouts, “An ultramundane glory! A loving forgiveness!” Now he is begging like the plasm of a ghost abruptly remembering what it is, who he must be, the attorney for the defense, Franz Boston Boy’s alter ego. “Full pardon for the most extreme excesses, those of a life of conformity, for the pointless squandering of transient strength, oh Hero, oh Captain.”
We stand there arm in arm and I feel the coldness of the night and don’t want to run away from anything, from this drowned meeting with the whimpers and soft moans that come from beneath Boston Boy’s long-skirted coat of the Romantics, tight around the chest, loose below. I read in Harper’s Bazaar that Pierre Cardin has made that style coat the fashion again. Or, to drop a pleasant name, China Machado told me, and certainly she must know, for she is the most exciting woman in the world (except you, little Pussycat, of course). And none of us is exposed to anything. We risk nothing. No one is going to stop us and ask us what the hell we are doing here, why Brother Thomas is crooning to us a repetitive canticle of abstractions so dry and remote that they are entirely senseless. “They marched forward to meet what man had lost. The tragic life. The life of the animal. The final dangerous and true limits of human action. The will to continue to the end, to the edge, to the precipice.” Yes, the papier-mâché mountains of Götterdämmerung. The mighty Hausfrauen carrying lances and wearing gold breastplates and horned helmets. Sure, and Goebbels was Siegfried, I suppose. “Joyous acceptance of all the faces of man. That freedom.” Sure, sure, Brother Thomas. Oh, bullshit. Stuff it, stuff it.
At this instant a car whirls by with mocking voices, laughter, jeers, waving fists, the horn honking shave and a haircut, two bits, the voices crying go fuck your goddamn mothers as a cellophane bag filled with urine flies out the window and hits good Brother Thomas squarely in the face. He is drenched and the rest of us are spattered. He ignores it. “That true freedom to accept all, not only what man is but what he may be. All the powers of Man, of Man, of Mangy, Maniac, Manacled Manequin Man.” He wipes the piss off and gravely concludes: “All human being. The most secret and the most terrifying.”
For a moment we stiffen our poses in a phony, absurd Laocoön group.
But the figures of our ensemble come apart and the only serpent is the embroidered silver snake that twists across the ass of Brother Thomas’s charro trousers gobbling up a silver eagle.
Feeling a little melancholy, we cross the Beltway. Brother Thomas is speaking very softly, sadly. “Because you, all of you, have hidden, buried, killed your being. You have created a crooked, mutilated half-man, a man lacking myth.” Oh-ho. Master Swift, who despises the Animal, Man, yet so loves Tom, Dick, and Harry, I remember you, and so does Brother T.
We approach the old Lincoln convertible. “But not the Accused and his comrades. They dug up again the buried pieces of man, pulled aside the veil to show him entire and whole again.” Boston Boy raises the lid of the trunk. It is filled with a tangle of clothing. Their disguises, I guess. None of them suspects my surprise, nor do I suspect theirs, when Boston Boy gravely removes the living, moving, moaning, threatening little bundle he has been carrying buttoned inside his frock coat and tenderly deposits it in the car trunk. No, not worms after all. Two tiny animals. Each wrapped around the other and each quietly, patiently eating the other alive. Yes, that’s clear enough. The lid slams down. We can still hear the whimpering, the tiny moans, the choking sounds. All of us stare at Boston Boy but he is completely self-possessed and unconcerned and none of us says a word, and who knows what will be the end of this journey that will end when night does.
The Monks stand there and I turn my back on them and get in the car. Brother Thomas follows, muttering: “For man is Satan’s son too, Old Harry’s heir, born on St. Bartholomew’s Day.” The springs of the seat creak beneath us. I move my feet around among cans of motor oil, looking for room. “And he, man of evil as well as man of good, is complete only when he accepts, parades, makes use of his nocturnal face.” Rose Ass and White Rabbit squeeze in as best they can on my left, their weight pushing the cushion down as the springs creak again. Jakob and Judge Morgana sit in front on the right and Boston Boy is behind the wheel. “Where to?” asks Jakob. I tell him, Calzada del Niño Perdido. “That hidden face of darkness that for centuries was concealed by the Judaic-Christian barbarism that maimed and mutilated him. Thomas. Peter. John.” Yes, Niño Perdido, and we can stay on the Beltway as far as the Barranca del Muerto. “Let Gimp Man render unto Goof God what is of God, and unto Purty Gerty what is hers. Amen.” No one echoes this time. Brother T.’s chorus, like myself, has had enough. “The accused had to say everything that had gone unspoken. He had to find the fury and strength to go back to frightened God and face him once and for all, confront him with human unity, oneness, integrality, the unity the holy circumcised and the fainthearted faithful had forbidden, the weapon man had always possessed, but had forgotten how to use.” I say softly, Sure: and every year too many children are born in Mexico and Haiti and India and maybe in hell too, and must starve sucking withered breasts, while in the less fecund States, in half a decade seventy-five percent of the two hundred million or so good citizens will be under twenty-five, by which statistic my graying Yankee contemporaries can understand that their revolution is already upon them and comes not only with demonstrations and marches, long hair and miniskirts, but also like an avalanche, is no more to be resisted than an avalanche. “What,” Brother Thomas is saying, “what does the evil in us prove? Simply that evil is as human as every other attribute of man.” “Cut out,” says White Rabbit. “Can it, for Christ’s sake. You’re crazy. You’re out of it.” “Yes, and in a world that believes itself to be so impeccably in it, rich with Rationality and strong with Sanity, someone has to be out of it, to be openly and proudly sick and lunatic.” I hunch forward and look at the heap of magazines and newspapers and posters that these Monks carry with them on their pilgrimages or perhaps pick up along the way. Eros. The Evergreen Review. The Adventures of Barbarella. Circus posters with their sadism. Shirley Temple and Boris Karloff movie stills. The Wall Street Journal. Der Spiegel. Charlie Brown staring at Snoopy. Brother Thomas is beginning to give me a royal pain in the ass. If he is a defense attorney, I am the Secretary of State. Every word he speaks seems planned to harm our blond accused, not help him. Why for God’s sake is he standing up now, braced against the folded back top of the convertible, and laughing, laughing, laughing and shouting as we whirl through the underpasses of the Beltway, “The accused was Sick, Sick, Sick and Crazy … but in the name and for the sake of all mankind, that all might be healthy! And that is what you will never understand … Neveeeeer!” laughing again as we bank around a curve, “and not even failure teaches you!” I wait for him to be silent. Then I observe, shouting to be heard over the rush of wind, “Master Swifty offered the only way out, you know. To fatten the offspring of the poor and when the babies are one year old and, as Swift puts it, at their most succulent, to market them as gastronomic delicacies. A black market, I suppose…”