“There was something wrong with the equipment,” Dick Gibson said.
“No sir. It came in perfect. Perfect. Best reception I ever had. Funny thing about that too, because I’d borrowed the car, and up to the time I picked you up the radio had been giving me trouble. But you came in perfect, no static or anything. It was as if you were right there in that car with me.”
Dick remembered how good he’d been, how he had thought even at the time that he was in a state of grace. His chest heaved, and he felt tears coming. Whatever the general might tell him now, he knew that it was over; his apprenticeship was truly finished, the last of all bases in the myth had been rounded, his was a special life, even a great life — a life, that is, touched and changed by cliché, by corn and archetype and the oldest principles of drama. In ignorance and absent- minded goodness of heart he had taken a burr from the general’s paw. And the general had turned out to be the general and would now repay him. This was no place for it, but he began openly to cry, simultaneously congratulating and commiserating with himself. Good work, Dick Gibson, he thought. Poor Dick Gibson, he thought. You paid your dues and put in your time and did what you had to. You struggled and fought and contended and strove, and many’s the time your back was against the wall, but you never let up, you never said die, even when the night was darkest and it seemed the dawn would hold back forever. You showed them. You, Dick Gibson, you showed the dirty motherfucking fartshits and prickasses. You showed them good. Poor Dick Gibson.
The officers, embarrassed by his weeping, looked away. Only the famous general watched him. He’s letting me cry, Dick Gibson thought. He’s letting me get it all out. Poor Dick Gibson, he blubbered silently.
The general waited a few moments, then stepped forward. There was a war on. “Feeling better?” he asked gently.
“Yes sir,” Dick said, his nose filling.
“Calmed down?”
“Sir, I am,” he managed forcefully.
“Talk business?”
“Business as usual,” Dick said, and took out a handkerchief and emptied his sinuses.
“That’s the spirit,” the general said when Dick, his nose clear once more and his eyes dry again, looked at him brightly.
“What’s up, sir?” Dick asked.
“We’ve been playing the transcription,” the general said. “Remarkable. You were hysterical. Fear brings things out in you.” Dick blushed. “No, you don’t understand. We want you to do the same for us.”
“We want to hear the war,” one of the other officers said.
“Yes,” the general said, “this place—” He indicated their surroundings with his arm. For all the fullness of his emotion, Dick understood exactly what the general’s gesture meant. It took in the false floors and new walls, the elevator and desks and typewriters and secret pockets of the secret service. But more than anything else Dick understood his gesture as an indictment of the chairs.
For all the precision of his understanding of the moods in the room, it was a long time before he could concentrate on what they were actually trying to tell him, however. Only a certain sharpness and impatience in the general’s tone impelled him to put it all together.
He was to be sent to the most terrible war zones of all, and from these incendiary landscapes he was to send back reports, transmitting them the thousands of miles to headquarters over special equipment. They were interested not in military information as such, but in the feel of the campaigns. He was, in short, to do the color on World War II. Lieutenant Collins was to be sent along with him as his engineer. Except for the incident during the air raid, they worked well together.
Dick asked if the enemy wouldn’t be able to pick up his broadcasts.
“Negative,” a naval commander from research and development said. “We’ve perfected this transmitter and receiver that work on a band below three kilocycles. Your standard broadcast band begins at 550.”
He was given to understand that the assignment would be dangerous. He expected to be told this. They would understand if he turned it down and chose instead to be court-martialed. He expected to be told this. His infraction wasn’t actually treasonous. The Judge Advocate representative told him that his punishment wouldn’t amount to more than an eleven-year sentence and a reduction in rank. He expected this. They wouldn’t force him. This wasn’t unexpected. No man would look askance if he didn’t “volunteer,” and of course there was some good-natured laughter at the use of the word “volunteer.” Did he understand, then, what was required and that they weren’t trying to push him into a corner? He expected to be asked.
“Affirmative.”
Did they understand, then, that knowing the risks he was still willing to go through with it?
He anticipated that one too. “Affirmative, sir.”
Indeed, after the general’s speech, he expected everything, all of it. He understood that the exceptional life — the one he had been vouchsafed to live — was magnificent yes, but familiar too, unconventional but riddled with conventions of a different, higher order. The full force of it descended on him; he could almost plot it. There would be— success. And lurking in the success, danger, suffering different from that he’d already endured, which was merely niggling loneliness and his apprentice’s uncertainty. Now the loneliness — God, the women he’d have — would exist inside power. Poor Dick Gibson, he thought; poor little rich boy. Now there would be tantrum and flaw, which he would try to guard against, learning to take advice from trusted advisers. And at the apogee there would probably be betrayal and slowish death. (Unless his end came suddenly, stylishly, à la mode — in a private plane he flew himself, perhaps.) But for now he was safe, snug as a bug in their lousy war zones (though he was a little nervous for Lieutenant Collins).
So, he thought, pledging himself, I am ready for things to happen to me. Let the clichés come. I open myself to the great platitudes.
The generals indicated he could leave. They would be in touch with him soon.
He paused at the door and looked at the famous general.
“What is it, son?”
“You saved me too,” he told him. “I don’t mean the court-martial. I thought I belonged with the brutes. But I feel pride. A brute doesn’t feel pride.” He saluted, and the general returned it, and Dick left.
“Ah,” said the famous general when Dick had closed the door behind him, “but he’s the only one who does.”
4
FROM THE ARCHIVES: TRANSCRIPTS OF DICK GIBSON’S BROADCASTS OF Fabulous Battles of World War II: Mauritius.
“Dick Gibson talking low on the low band.
“We’re on Mauritius. Formerly Ile de France. Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Breasting the twentieth parallel like a runner breaking the tape. Sister isles, all volcanic — Réunion (a French possession), Rodrigues and the St. Brandon group. Who’s St. Brandon, patron of what? Sounds English to me. How did he get those spic brothers Réunion and Rodrigues for sister isles? What miscegenous, nigger-in- the-woodpile history went on here, anyway? Who, wanting something for nothing, looking for what trade routes, asking the way east from the way west like those other old junkmen of science, the alchemists, found this place? Who charted it on maps, informing the old cartographers so they could erase their ancient lame finesse, Hic sunt leones? It is the world, real as Paris.