There was another, and related, theory concerning the measures taken by Underwood’s Credit Department against delinquent accounts. This was mere paranoia.
—Theories! I don’t need theories. I must get on with it.
So, favoring his good leg, he continued his descent, although his speculations did not immediately cease. They became, if anything, more metaphysical. They became vague. Eventually, he could regard the escalators as being entirely matter-of-fact, requiring no more explanation than, by their sheer existence, they offered him.
He discovered that he was losing weight. Being so long without food (by the evidence of his beard, he estimated that more than a week had gone by), this was only to be expected. Yet, there was another possibility that he could not exclude: that he was approaching the center of the earth where, as he understood, all things were weightless.
—Now that, he thought, is something worth striving for.
He had discovered a goal. On the other hand, he was dying, a process he did not give all the attention it deserved. Unwilling to admit this eventuality and yet not so foolish as to admit any other, he sidestepped the issue by pretending to hope.
—Maybe someone will rescue me, he hoped.
But his hope was as mechanical as the escalators he rode—and tended, in much the same way, to sink.
Waking and sleeping were no longer distinct states of which he could say: “Now I am sleeping,” or “Now I am awake.” Sometimes he would discover himself descending and be unable to tell whether he had been woken from sleep or roused from inattention.
He hallucinated.
A woman, loaded with packages from Underwood’s and wearing a trim pillbox-style hat, came down the escalator toward him, turned around on the landing, high heels clicking smartly, and rode away without even nodding to him.
More and more, when he awoke or was roused from his stupor, he found himself, instead of hurrying to his goal, lying on a landing, weak, dazed, and beyond hunger. Then, he would crawl to the down-going escalator and pull himself onto one of the steps, which he would ride to the bottom, sprawled head foremost, hands and shoulders braced against the treads to keep from skittering bumpily down.
—At the bottom, he thought,—at the bottom. ... I will . . . when I get there. . . .
From the bottom, which he conceived of as the center of the earth, there would be literally nowhere to go but up. Probably by another chain of escalators, ascending escalators, but preferably by an elevator. It was important to believe in a bottom.
Thought was becoming as difficult, as demanding and painful, as once his struggle to ascend had been. His perceptions were fuzzy. He did not know what was real and what imaginary. He thought he was eating and discovered he was gnawing at his hands.
He thought he had come to the bottom. It was a large, high-ceilinged room. Signs pointed to another escalator: Ascending. But there was a chain across it and a small typed announcement.
“Out of order. Please bear with us while the escalators are being repaired. Thank you. The Management.”
He laughed weakly.
He devised a way to open the tuna fish cans. He would slip the can sideways beneath the projecting treads of the escalator, just at the point where the steps were sinking flush to the floor. Either the escalator would split the can open or the can would jam the escalator. Perhaps if one escalator were jammed the whole chain of them would stop. He should have thought of that before, but he was, nevertheless, quite pleased to have thought of it at all. —I might have escaped.
His body seemed to weigh so little now. He must have come hundreds of miles. Thousands. Again, he descended.
Then, he was lying at the foot of the escalator. His head rested on the cold metal of the base plate and he was looking at his hand, the fingers of which were pressed into the creviced grill. One after another, in perfect order, the steps of the escalator slipped into these crevices, tread in groove, rasping at his fingertips, occasionally tearing away a sliver of his flesh.
That was the last thing he remembered.
“While I was writing ‘Descending,’ my icebox was in appropriately the same shape as my hero’s and I was living on my Macy’s credit card,” writes Tom Disch. “After ‘Descending,’ things picked up. ... I got hired by Doyle Dane Bernbach and found, rather to my dismay, that I enjoyed advertising and a living wage.”
DDB, you know, is the agency that does those readable Avis and VW ads. Makes it easier to understand why a writer like Tom Disch should have enjoyed it. That way, maybe you can think of it as “the ad game.”
There was something of a “game” feeling about that endless escalator, too—as if you only had to know the rules to be able to get off. I remembered that feeling too vividly when I came across (ex-Harvard’s) Timothy Leary’s article, “How To Change Behavior,” in LSD, The Consciousness Expanding Drug, (Putnam, 1964).
“Baseball and basketball have clearly definable roles, rules, rituals, goals, languages, and values. Psychology, religion, politics, are games, too, learned cultural sequences with clearly defined roles, rules, goals, jargons, values. . . .
“All behavior involves learned games. But only that rare Westerner we call ‘mystic’ or who has had a visionary experience of some sort sees clearly the game structure of behavior. Most of the rest of us spend our time struggling with roles and rules and goals and concepts of games which are implicit, and confusedly not seen as games, trying to apply the roles and rules and rituals of one game to other games. . . .
“Culturally, stability is maintained by keeping the members of any cultural group from seeing that the roles, rules, goals, rituals, language, and values are game structures.”
Are diplomats mystics? Or are they culturally unstable? I do not believe it is possible to carry on the absurdities of international intercourse without a clear knowledge of the game (the Great Game, as it has been called), not just its rules and goals and penalties—but the essential gaminess of it.
Romain Gary is a Frenchman of Russian origin, a distinguished novelist, a well-decorated soldier, and a career diplomat. He writes fluently in four languages and (I am certain) is a skilled gamesman in at least that many. He has, at least, a terribly clear view of the Syndicate Game and the Art Game, in this story from his recent collection Hissing Tales (Harper & Row).
DECADENCE
Romain Gary
We had already been over the Atlantic five hours and Carlos had been talking all the time. I’m not even sure he knew he was speaking to us: at times I had the feeling he was merely thinking aloud, under the influence of a deep emotion that was becoming more and more evident as the plane neared Rome.
The imminence of the coming reunion had us all pretty nervous, but with Carlos you could feel something deeper, something that often sounded like a mixture of awe and love. For all of us who knew him well—one of the toughest men around—it was truly impressive to hear the accents of reverence and almost of humility in his voice as he evoked for us the legendary figure of Mike Sarfatti, the Hoboken giant who rose one day on the New York waterfront and scared the hell out of every union boss there, and no one can say that they were men who scared easy.
You should have heard Carlos pronounce that name. He lowered his voice and an almost tender smile softened the heavy face that 40 years in the thick of the social struggle had turned to stone.
“It was a crucial period—crucial, that’s the word for it. The Syndicate was at a turning point: we were going social. We were stepping into the longshoremen’s union fight and it was rough; nobody had ever given us much trouble before. It often looked as if we weren’t going to make it, as if the unions on the New York waterfront were strong enough to look after themselves and didn’t feel like being protected by us. The press was dragging us in the mud, the federal authorities were sniffing around and the dockers themselves were sore as hell; dues had just been set at 20 percent of their pay, and everyone was trying to get control of the cashbox and milk the unions for himself.