I chair, at the pleasure of the President, a commission on space. I see in his dark suit the deep black fabric of the universe. There are still flakes of white dandruff on the shoulders and back. I stare into the depths between those flecks of white transforming into twinkling stars. It is a map of heavenly bodies. This vacuum has a texture. I lose my way in its blackness. I no longer hear the speech. On television, I will appear lost in grave thought. I have forgotten the spontaneous applause. The infinite silence between those stars terrifies me.
On the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
Who were these soldiers? The hairless living ones who helped me place the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. One of them was black. One was white. But what I saw of what was left of their faces (the glossy brims of their caps squashed down on their noses and the straps hid the lips outlining the metallic exterior jaws) were identical grim expressions made up of the least expressive parts, the plane geometry of their cheeks and chins. Their hands were gloved and gripped the green florist’s wire stand that connected them as if it ran out of their palms and extruded through their squeezing fingers. Their skeletons must have been made of the same pinched wire running through the clay. When they moved, they moved only the moving part. Marching, the legs didn’t disturb the head or torso. When they lifted the flowers, their hands alone snatched them up. Their wrists ratcheted to a predetermined calibration in the joints. A pause and then their heads snapped forward together, leaving their bodies still facing the wreath they held motionless between them. Another pause, then their left legs stepped toward the tomb, Egyptian, the mechanism of the hips hidden beneath the flare of their blue belted jackets. The air reeked of carnations and roses and mothballs that had steeped their wool uniforms. I followed them conscious of the wobble in my limbs, my wrinkled suit, my puckered face, my hair blowing into my eyes.
As a congressman, I had sent visiting constituents out to Arlington to see the show, shaking their hands at the door of the hired cab. Sometimes, I went myself and took the kids if they were out of school in time to watch the changing of the guard. I counted the twenty-one gliding steps along the red carpet, the twenty-one seconds of silence between the pivots and the echoing heel clicks, the twenty-one steps back past the tomb. Suddenly the replacement and an officer would appear, enter into the rhythm. They barked at each other. The officer inspected the rifles. His hands breaking open the breech. His head snapping his chin to his chest as he looked from behind his dark aviator glasses at the gleaming round in the exposed chamber. Twenty-one steps. Twenty-one seconds. The officer and relieved soldier slid off the runway when the new guard stopped to click his heels. They disappeared behind the cedar trees that screen the barracks.
My grandmother took the copper bracelet she wore in memory of the missing Navy flier of the Vietnam War with her to her grave. I remember reading the name and dates on the green band around her wrist as the family removed the other jewelry before the casket was closed. We decided to leave it on since he’d never been found and because my grandmother always said the copper helped with her arthritis. We left the hearing aid in her ear as well, her plates. The pacemaker was buried in her chest. She had an artificial hip of titanium and gold made by a company in Warsaw, Indiana, in my old district. It is guaranteed to survive forever.
I saluted as the soldiers placed the flowers before the tomb. Beneath the slabs of marble at my feet there were remains of unknown American soldiers from the other wars that followed. World War II and Korea. We have gotten better at knowing though. There is a marker for the Vietnam War, but nobody from that war is unknown really, everyone has been accounted for. Everyone is alive, dead, or missing. Say a tooth turns up in a riddle sifting the dirt from a crash site in a Delta paddy. It is rushed to the lab in Hawaii, and they puzzle it out and match the tooth with a name. The classifications shift. There is nothing left to find in the jungle that will now leave us ignorant. You are either lost or found. But not unknown.
So just what is interred here? Perhaps we’ve created a Gothic monster in reverse, not animated after being stitched together from pilfered corpses, but a fake pile of remains constructed out of the stolen wax limbs of movie monsters posing in Hollywood museums. What is buried here is still known only to God; it just isn’t human. The only part of it that is human at all is the lie that placed an empty coffin here, that sustains the fiction. We buried a symbol. We buried not knowing. Be we know. We know we know.
In Disneyland they maintain a Hall of Presidents, a stage filled with jerking dummies of the dead Commanders in Chief. After I’m dead, if all has gone right, something that looks like me will nod its head sagely seated next to the smiling hulks of Lincoln and Hoover. The engineers have worked so hard to encode grace and gesture into my lower right arm. They move from tendon to muscle and back again, experiment with a new substance more like cartilage, import artificial femurs and rotor cuffs from the factory in Warsaw, Indiana. Programs to scratch an ear run for thousands of pages.
On this other stage, these living boys of The President’s Own Guard, having practiced alone in their barracks, wish to extinguish every twitch. They force themselves not to blink. They wire their jaws shut with will. They attach governors to their stride, unlearning their bodies. Who are they? As taps played, I concentrated, trying to catch one of them breathing. I could hear in the silence between the sad notes only the whirr of the cameras winding after the hiss of the shutters.
Before all this pomp, between the world wars, families came to the cemetery and used the marble tomb as a table for picnics. They looked out over the new sod of a field of Civil War dead. The place was only occasionally guarded then by groups of veterans who would police the area for the scored wax paper, the chicken bones, and the child’s ball left behind. Who knows? Perhaps it was a better ceremony to stretch out on the marble table after a big dinner and let the sun feast on your itching skin. Perhaps better than a wreath. Watching the unflinching bodies of the soldiers at attention, I imagined losing myself. I was a statue come to life, tap dancing on the plinth of the Unknown Soldier, looking out over the Potomac to the distant white memorials melting in the haze.
The crowd of people assembled for that Memorial Day applauded as I walked away. They know who I am, they think. I let them think what they think.
On Late-Night TV
The television is secondhand from the White House, an early color model dating from the Johnson administration. The mahogany cabinet, gaudy as a casket, holds three screens. I can tune each to a different channel, watch the same network on all three. It has been modified for remote. It is cable ready, and three VCRs have been hooked up. Johnson had it built so he could watch simultaneously the three versions of the evening news. The maps of Vietnam were in different colors. He must have had an aide at the ready, turning the volume controls by hand. “Let me hear Cronkite, the bastard,” he would bark. Or maybe he just left on all the sound. He would have to distinguish who said what the way you pick out instruments in a symphony. I can see him, slouched in a swivel chair, his tie loosened, his eyes skipping from screen to screen to screen, the room filled with the babbling voices. I watched the same war on WISH-TV in Indianapolis never dreaming that it would come out like this.