They listened. Ernie Stassen had a five-martini edge. She put her plate down with great care and went over and turned the set off, and turned and looked at all the other guests. She wore a curious smile. The room was very silent. “That’s all nonsense, of course,” she said in a high, flat voice. She laughed like a windup machine. “It’s a ridiculous mistake.” Walter got his wife by the arm and got her out of there. All the way out she talked about the mistake in her high, wild voice. When they got home the reporters were there, waiting for them, and it had just started to rain.
Millions heard the news and were gratified the four had been taken. Thousands realized they had been on the turnpikes at the same time. They told their friends, and had a sense of having participated in something historic. After the detailed account was published, hundreds upon hundreds changed their stories, a little bit at a time, until at last they were able to convince others as well as themselves that they had seen it all, that they had been in grave danger, that they had held themselves in readiness to assist if there had been any slip. Every big news story creates throngs of imaginary heroes.
At Bassett, Nebraska, reporters did not arrive at the Koslov farm until the following morning. Anton Koslov in his muddy barking accent had one statement to make. His daughter, Nanette, was dead. She had been dead long time. No more talk about Nanette. Go away.
One San Francisco reporter, familiar with the nether world where Nanette had lived, dug up a few anecdotes about her which he cleaned up enough to be usable, and tracked down some eight-by-ten glossies from her days of offhand modeling. One of those pictures, after the addition, by air brush, of halter and shorts, became the picture most often reproduced across the country.
In several score cellar apartments, cold-water flats and coffee houses, the acquaintances of Sander Golden gathered and marveled at his unexpected notoriety. They said it wasn’t like him. They said he was a mild and amusing type, a no-talent type with an erratic intelligence.
One freckled little poet with red handlebar mustachios did remember a time in New Orleans when Sandy Golden had been less than mild. “He was splitting a back alley pad on Bourbon, way over, with Seffani, the bongo man that killed himself a year ago, remember? and one night they’re like dead, man, and Seffani’s chick, a large one with runty little brown teeth she felt were killing her career, she strips them clean of bread and goes has her teeth capped pearly white, so a month later she’s in Kibby’s back room, loaded with horse up to here, snoring a storm, and Sandy went out, came back with pliers from someplace and he uncapped that big chick. That Golden could come out mean, man. Bear it in mind.”
The story had been sagging. The papers had been lighting to keep it alive. And suddenly they were rich. They’d had their fun with Hernandez, and now they had three new identities to pry apart. New backgrounds to search. They had a Rich Boy — Only Son, and they had a green-eyed Refugee — Ex-Model, and they had an honest-to-God Beatnik who was the Brains of the Wolf Pack Rampage.
They kept it dancing for a week, and then it finally died, falling off the bottom of page 16. But it wasn’t death. Only a coma. The trial would play big, bigger than all that had gone before. When the trial came along, they were all ready. And it fed an estimated one million dollars into the economy of the city of Monroe.
Twelve
I have torn up too much of this. I became too mystic and esoteric. So I had to tear it up and I have lost too much time.
It is going to happen TOMORROW. That’s the biggest word in the world. It’s hung on the back wall of my mind, flashing off and on. I didn’t sleep at all last night. If I can manage it, I’ll stay awake all night tonight too. I sense exhaustion may have certain morale benefits.
The human brain, facing extinction, is an illogical organism. It goes around and around the cage, checking every crack and corner. It refuses on some very primitive level to accept that fact that TOMORROW it is going to be turned off like a light in the attic. It is really and truly going to happen. Nothing can stop it. I must endure a brief ceremonial procession, seat myself in the ugly throne, suffer a few mechanical ministrations, then brace and wait for that special usage of what Mr. Franklin gathered on his kite string. Manmade lightning this time, focused for maximum efficiency. At times I can think of it as though I were going to be an observer, calm and curious about it all. The next moment I remember it will be Me, invaluable, irreplaceable Me, and the sour edge of nausea pushes upward into my throat. I flex my right hand and study it with great care. It is a wonderful, intricate tool, strong, flexible, healthy, self-mending. It has another fifty years of use in it. It seems an inconceivable madness, a grotesque waste, to turn it into cold, dead meat. My eyes move with oiled ease, focusing with an instantaneous precision. What is their guilt, that they should be glazed into eternal stillness?
Flaccid within the trousers of prison twill lies the reproductive sack, obscurely comic, no further anxious labors to perform. The sperm lie sleeping in hidden warmth, remote from any egg, unaware of the imminence of their death and mine. Where is their guilt? Who can tell that one of them might not have created greatness?
In some more sensible world all this innocence will be saved. There will be a table, I expect, and cleverly directed streams of electrons, and careful technicians at work. Guilt, identity, memory — all these will be destroyed. But the blameless body will be saved, and a new identity, a new memory, built into the brain. It will be a kind of death of course, but without all this clumsiness, which is like burning down a house where sickness has occurred.
I am very aware of another thing — and I suppose this is a very ordinary thing for all those condemned — and that is a kind of yearning for the things I will never do, a yearning with overtones of nostalgia. It is as though I can remember what it is like to be old and watch moonlight, and to hold children on my lap, and kiss the wife I have never met. It is a sadness in me. I want to apologize to her — I want to explain it to the children. I’m sorry. I’m never coming down the track of time to you. I was stopped along the way.
Yesterday I tore up page upon page of asinine generalizations about the condition of man. I know nothing about the condition of man. I know they are going to kill me TOMORROW.
I can say a few very obvious things, but I now know them to be true. You cannot know yourself. No man can know himself. No man can detect or define the purpose of his own existence, but it is the dull man who ceases all conjecture.
And there is this, too. We all — every one of us — walk very close to the shadows, to strange dark places, every day of our lives. No man stands in a perfectly safe place. So it is dangerously smug to say, I am immune. No one can tell when some slight chance, some random thing, may turn him slightly, just enough so that he will find that he is no longer in a safe place, and he has begun to walk into the shadows, toward unknown things that are always there, waiting to eat him.
Sandy drove circumspectly through Monroe that long-ago night, and it wasn’t until after he had turned off onto Route 813 that he began to make time again. Speed felt good. I wanted to get far away from many things. I wanted to put a lot of space and a lot of time between me and Kathy. And the salesman. And Nashville.
The world kept changing for us, moving faster toward some unknown climax. I kept trying not to think backward or forward, but to focus only on the moment after moment of actual existence. I could not think of what the end of it would be. It was too late to think of any return to normalcy. I begged more pills from Sandy. It put you way out where nothing bad could ever happen. All your senses were sharpened. You were with the best three people in the world, acquiring stories you could tell when you were an old, old man. It was like being fifteen again, after three cans of beer, eight of you in one car, rocketing home from the beach through the vacation night.