It was the vision with which Charles had been vouchsafed in 1906, when his city had vanished.
She knew nothing of this vision, and he did not think to speak of it in direct terms.
Death was everywhere and everything. How could she not capitulate to it?
It was a kind of backyard grenade, a condensed milk can with a wooden handle extending from the top. The can was filled halfway with trinitrotoluene, into which a little blasting cap of mercury fulminate was set, trailing a five- or six-second length of fuse. Five or six seconds.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six — maybe, maybe not.
Seven? Eight? Nine? Ten? Who knew? Bombs could play dead. He had seen one do so. Only to leap onstage in a blaze of light and a blare of sound! TA-DA! You gotta let me sing! On top of the TNT was poured iron scraps, all the way to the top of the can. A hole was drilled in the top for the fuse, then soldered to the can. He put it in a lunchbox and waited, in Winter’s — Winter’s, not McGee’s, the vain and arrogant man, not the ruthless mechanic — in Winter’s disturbingly empty office, waited for a man to appear. When night had fallen and passed and dawn was breaking again, he telephoned the White Bear Lake house.
Winter apparently found it effortlessly easy to accept Charles’s pose as workable: that he was a spoiled brat of a rich boy who wanted to cause trouble, be notorious and of consequence — that he was amoral and only interested in controlling powerful things. He also guessed that Winter was finding, apart from whatever he might gain by aiding and abetting the enemies of the California Progressives, the simple generic, schematic possibilities put into play irresistible: scion of wealthy do-gooder politico, secretly in the employ of nefarious foreign anarchist puppet masters, or not, double-crossing them by working for the state, or not, actually putting this playboy simpleton’s hands on a bomb in the course of an insurrection and then calling in armed troops.! What could be more fun for a man who hated people and was afraid of life? And in any case, he could get no clear word from the rest of the MCPS or the Pinkertons or the Department of Justice. There was going to be a big roundup of Wobblies and anarchists and assorted other radicals, there would be long prison terms, there would be deportment — but what to do in the meantime? That was the question. Did one sit back and let the war take over for the duration? Or did one extend and expand one’s efforts under cover of the war. Did one become less ruthless for the time being — or did one become even more ruthless? It all depended on what one hoped to get out of it.
“We’ll get you a nice little bomb,” Winter had said, trying to sound like the gruff-but-jovial McGee, “to play with.”
“Already got it,” Charles had said.
“Well, goodness gracious!”
“I said I already got it.”
“Yes, I heard you the first time.” He was finding it difficult to maintain another man’s tone.
“Well then. What do you want me to do with it?”
“Be careful with it! Don’t move. I mean: Do you have it here now?”
“I do.”
Charles patted his suitcase. The little dramas were still effective.
Suddenly May disappeared. It was as if winter had returned with Winter’s rise in the psychosphere. The temperature was in the high forties but dropped quickly all day as an immense front moved in from Canada. Charles and Vera contemplated a sky of scratched tin that became darker and heavier, as if it were undergoing a kind of geological metamorphosis. The horizon was black, and when they could see trees, the trees were like soft charcoal lines and puffs of cloud more and more obscure against the deepening blackness of the sky. Rice Park in downtown Saint Paul was full of tough-looking men by misty murky noon. They came and went as the light failed and the temperature dropped, circulating in pairs, conversing loudly in groups, smoking, hunching their shoulders, sneering and leering, cupping their hands for lights, looking uneasily or contemptuously for signs of activity, progress, peace, violence, anything moving. The light failed faster than anyone expected, and both electric and gaslights came on in the unnatural dusk, more lights than anyone had seen before in the little park. The courthouse, a quasi-gothic building on one side of the square, was lit up like a fairy castle; all its windows were ablaze and Charles, of course, imagined all kinds of dramas being enacted inside: stricken gaping misery, capricious judgment, happy endings, love, death. Opposite the courthouse, the new glistening white library was so well lit they could make out the stacks inside. On a third side, the Saint Paul Hotel, in which they had lunched with his family what seemed like years before, was warm and luxurious looking, the patrons of that excellent restaurant peering at the strikers through great walls of glass. Charles thought it was like they were eating dinner in a glass cage, their faces orange in the candlelight. Along the last side of the park, the Hamm Theater’s doormen opened the way to people who were visibly eager to see — he could not believe his eyes when they first fell on the marquee—The American.
They sat at the edge of the park’s central fountain and looked at the stone Indian boy poised like winged Mercury. Possessing such a weapon as he did, he thought, did indeed alter reality. There was no question but that he was in a different realm. He thought of Vera’s notion of bombs ripping holes in reality, that whatever it was one saw in that hole, it wasn’t real, and tried to reconcile it with his own belief that the earthquake and fire that had destroyed San Francisco had only destroyed illusion. Nothing, of course, made “sense” anymore, and he could not affect that reconciliation, but felt nevertheless that he understood something in a way he hadn’t been able to before. He had failed miserably to be the kind of hero he’d set out to be, when he lifted pen from notebook at Berkeley, and thought he would do civilization a favor. But now that he had squared with himself again — or, ha ha, did he mean rounded on himself? — admitted that he was not a hero but simply an agent of primitive unreasoning rage and fear, that all he wanted now was to kill someone he hated — because he was being honest again with himself, he felt something very like the undividedness he had earlier felt and found so calming and so invigorating — to kill an enemy and take Vera and their child to a safe place somewhere in the narcotic Levant. It was a mistaken feeling, to be sure, but he was convinced he felt it. He was in a realm that gave him magical powers, immense inhuman powers, but offered it in a place where there were no signs, no paths, no people wise enough or fearless enough to speak. No one ruled. There was no one to rule. Everybody had gone away, had died or fled. He was alone. No calculation is necessary when you are alone. You don’t have to play people against each other. You simply allow the hatred you feel to take you through an act. And then it’s over.
Vera, who had wandered off, rejoined him.
Their little bubble of anomic wrath burst.