Chapter 16
Vanity Fair
One afternoon on Castle Island, at the entrance to the old harbor where the Puritans had anchored their ships, Theresa and I spoke of manifest destiny as we ate ice-cream as the United States Ship Constitution sailed out to us on one of its now rare outings. Castle Island is not an island, as nothing is an island, eventually.
“Poor Mary Jo,” said Theresa, with tears in her onyx eyes.
“Poor Norma Jean,” said I. “Why do we keep coming back?”
“Because seven times seven is infinity, and because we know better than they. But more because some souls on Earth are honest, and all can learn, somehow.”
I recalled that my Earth family never offered praise. My parents and siblings never paid me a compliment, except my father once saying I was a good-looking kid, astounding me. So I was remiss to my children this trip, being also from outer space and so not needing compliments from Earthlings to foster my eternal values.
But their mother wasn’t, and Sugar must have neglected his second son worse than I did mine, and so the question might work many ways. I can offer no other explanation of Robert Fits’ sincerity, his genuine concern. Certainly, had he not quietly exercised some influence over Fits Jr., Birmingham would not have been enough to turn his hubric head in our direction, regardless of the success it gave him.
So, I turned my head away, when things appeared as though Fits Jr.’s fictitious martyrdom might carry Robert into the Whitehouse over the head of Tricky Dicky. Robert might willingly have done all we’d wanted from Dicky, and we’d planned no martyrdoms besides Slavey’s and Oliver’s for this trip, and so I and Theresa trusted the chance, either chance, either way. But Dicky wasn’t into taking chances.
Taking inspiration from Remington Bosworth, Dicky had Conundrum research newspapers and homeless shelters to find a radical lunatic, a person who would do anything under any pretense of pretext, and be too incoherent for credibility. Dicky remembered something Conundrum had said about Bosworth.
“Poor schmuck,” had said Conundrum. “If he were intelligent enough to understand we’re trying to buy his drunken intelligent soul, he might have sold it into the bin in hell where mine is. As it is, his soul will probably spin into oblivion, drunk or sober, lost. That’s what we do to stupid people smart enough to care on Earth.”
In that little scotch-soaked speech, Conundrum defined the basis for political corruption, the arrogance that makes despots of revolutionaries, Stalins of communists, Hitlers of socialists. Bob said it’s silly to try to pull a mote from someone’s eye while one has a beam in one’s own. Conundrum and Dicky had beams in all their eyes.
So Dicky had a fanatic, someone who had gone over the edge worrying about what Fits Jr.’s endorsement of Israel might do to Islam, kill Robert in a room full of people and go to prison forever. And Dicky bragged about it to me later, reminding me of what Conundrum had said in that cowboy club in the city of Saint Anthony.
“Hell,” he said. “You taught me all I know. You know that.”
So Dicky became president, and I met again with Mikhail.
Why did I meet Mikhail? The disappointment at war’s end! We hadn’t come to rid the Earth of Hitler. The human species worked together to do that for itself. The problem now was how and why. The disease, not the symptom.
As Joshua diminished the suffering of the children of Israel in ways Excellent Oliver never condoned, Truman defeated the Japanese in a way Excellent Delano never would have condoned. Then Truman and Churchill diminished the suffering of more recent descendents of Israel by supporting repetition of the methods of Joshua. It was fighting fire with fire, racism with racism, poetic vengeance.
Worse, those two world-leaders sanctioned Stalin in the leadership of most of Eastern Europe and much of Asia, thus hurting more descendants of Israel than they had helped by giving them again land that had come to be populated more by Semitic Palestinians than by Jews of any race, and not by crusades or jihads but just by being there and having families. Those leaders relinquished to one racist regime more than they had taken from another! What in hell were they thinking?
Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, Mikhail and I met again on Montmartre, beneath the brilliant white dome of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. At the same table on the dusty cobblestones, we drank more of that brain-buzzing tea.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“As one might expect,” said Mikhail. “It’s going slowly. The Kremlin bigwigs respect me, even Brezhnev. But it’s a gerontocracy.
“It’s ironic how they work so hard at educating or propagandizing the youth but don’t give them a chance at the top. We’re going to have to plan on a schedule of Brezhnev’s life-expectancy. Then we’ll have to put in another sick old man.
“We’ll have to set up a shoe-in who’ll die quickly. The instability of the quick turnover will shake up the other old men, and I’ll be next in line. By then, I’ll be indispensable to the circulation of all those old men’s ideas. What do you think?”
“You know more about it than I do,” I said. “But it makes sense to me. Do you have anyone in mind, to be the interim sick old man? Do you have a plan for making him a shoe-in, like we did with that sicky Tricky Dicky? Well, of course, so who?”
“Yuri Andropov,” answered Mikhail. “I’m riding up in the KGB on his coattails. He can get himself into the chairmanship after Brezhnev dies, on his KGB power. And he’ll keep his KGB title long enough to die while promoting me to replace him there. After I help him die, the remaining gerontocracy will look to me for stability. And they’ll discover me to be more forthright with them. That is, than Yuri, one at a time.”
“Elegant,” I said. “Simple, direct. You’ve surely been thinking. Anything else?”
“Yes,” said Mikhail. “You’re going to have to get more global quickly. Your oil connections give you a pile of power in the first and third worlds, but I’m your only power-link to the second world, the so-called communist powers. Incidentally, besides you and me, Yuri is the only person alive who knows that you and I have met.”
“You’re a genius,” I said. “Keep talking.”
“Okay. The United States have to form a de facto alliance with China, mainland China. That’ll create huge tensions between China and the Soviet Union, and the loss of influence over those billions of people will scare the hell out of our gerontocracy.”
“Easy to say,” I said. “How do we do it?”
“Piece of cake,” said Mikhail. “Get that Dicky dude to appoint you Ambassador to the United Nations. There, promote recognition of those billions of people as a nation, while at home you get Dicky to pull out of Vietnam. Dicky’s not buying into that geopolitical domino-theory business as Linden did, anyway, is he?”
“No,” I said. “He isn’t. You have a great way of cutting through the crap in what you read, and I like the ideological domino-theory you’ve just presented. But I’ll have to make it look like it came from within Dicky’s administration. Well, as much as I hate subterfuge, that’ll be a piece of cake as well, with icing.”
So I flew from De Gaulle International Airport to Dulles International Airport and paid a call on Dicky. I found him in the oval office with Klingmonger, his national security advisor. They were sitting in the Louis XVI chairs on opposite sides of the hearth. They seemed to me moping. I spoke first.
“Poker,” I said.
“What?” asked Dicky.
“Poker,” I repeated. “What’s with the poker-faces?”
“Quagmire,” said Klingmonger. “In a word. But it isn’t poker-faces. We really don’t know what we’re going to do, because we don’t know what’s in our hands.”
“Which hands?” I asked.
“Any of them,” said Klingmonger. “Vietnam; the Soviet Union; you name it.”
“What about China?” I asked.
“What about China?” asked Klingmonger.
“I mean, aren’t they part of the problem, all those billions of people?”
“China, Soviet Union, same thing,” said Dicky.
No fire was in the hearth, but the Swedish ivy on the mantel was blossoming, as Swedish ivy does when it receives a lot of sunlight, as this did through the windows to the rose garden. No one spoke, for more than a minute.
“By God, that’s crazy,” said Klingmonger.
“What’s crazy?” asked Dicky.
“Billions of people living on a huge part of a continent while the world doesn’t recognize that they or their part of the continent exists, while the united nations of the world call an island off those billions of people’s coast by the name that that large piece of the continent has had for nearly all of history. Meanwhile, the most powerful piece of another continent is bogged down in a quagmire in a tiny nation in between, a nation whose name most of the populace of this powerful nation never knew until now, unless they read it from the bottoms of tin toys as children. No, that’s Formosa, where the tin toys were made, not Vietnam. It’s so confusing. What a quagmire.”
“Yup,” said Dicky. “That about sums it up, except that you didn’t mention that the second-most powerful nation on Earth, which is another huge piece of the continent you mentioned first, besides controlling much of the continent between the two continents, is taking sides with the billions, against our nation.”
Dicky pushed a button on the mantle, beneath the Swedish ivy. A woman opened the main door to the office and stopped quiet in the doorway. She folded her hands beneath her breasts and waited without a word.
“Can we get a fire in here?” said Dicky.
The wonders of modern Earth technology. The hearth burned wood or gas and had electric ignition. A few seconds after the woman closed the door, we heard a spark and saw the gas ignite. Soon some logs were burning there.
“Very nice,” said Klingmonger. “I love this country.”
“What are you up to these days?” Dicky asked me.
“Not much,” I said. “My house term is closing out soon, and Linden has suggested I run for the senate. I made a commitment to the Texas Republican committee to run, but exigencies can change. Do you have another suggestion, Mr. President?”
“You made the suggestion with your question: What about China?”
Klingmonger looked at me as he often looked at people, with his index fingers pressed together touching his lips. But he didn’t wait as long to speak as the woman had waited in the doorway, for Dicky to speak. He glanced into the fire and back at me.
“Yes, what about China?” he asked. “What can we do about China?”
“No,” I said. “Going to the United Nations would be political suicide.”
“Are you refusing your president?” asked Dicky.
“Hm?” asked Klingmonger, raising his eyebrows.
So I ran for the Senate but wimped out of winning that race, and Dicky and Klingmonger threw me into the briar patch of the United Nations. There, to make a long story short, to succinctly summarize a lot of senseless words, I watched the Taiwan contingency walk out in protest at the recognition of the billions of people as China.
Klingmonger remembered that I had initiated that conversation with the word ‘poker’, and so Earthlings came to know the improvement of United States relations with China at the expense of Soviet Union relations with China as playing the China card, and Klingmonger got the credit for it, because I’m a quiet man. Next, Dicky did the other essential against the absurdity. He pulled us out of the quagmire in Vietnam. We had cut two Gordian knots. They and I, simultaneously. As a team.
But next we had to break apart the team. We, my team from outer space, had now to get rid of Dicky and Conundrum, and that cake was much easier to cut than the Gordian knot. The paranoia Dicky had shown in getting rid of Robert Fits reared its ugly head in his getting rid of himself, and Condundrum fell with him.
My personal rationalization for not keeping the promise of getting Conundrum into the presidency was that the promise was contingent on Dicky from the beginning, and so I told myself that it was Dicky’s responsibility to hold those strings or drop them, and he dropped them, by himself. But my personal reason for pleasure in that failure was from Conundrum’s character more than from Dicky’s.
Yet it remains a conundrum for myself! For me, one conundrum about Conundrum was that he was as Irish as the Fits family. But maybe the step to betraying one’s whole heritage isn’t much more broad than the step to betraying one’s party. Or maybe he was just broadminded, or maybe he was just totally a traitor. Of course he was a killer, but so am I. My motives are more social. But is that good enough?
But, whatever, we let Dicky cancel the promise to Conundrum by screwing up his Presidency, after leaving us from Vietnam. It was funny, watching that turncoat Conundrum flying around in Dicky’s Airforce Two, as if he were doing something by shopping for souvenirs in Afghanistan as its king was being bounced and the Yom Kippur war was intensifying the problems in the Holy Land. Well, no it wasn’t funny.
And neither are the Keystone Cops, if one needs police to do what police are supposed to do, and if they are all the police available. Dicky formed his own keystone cop-force to cop out of the keystone of the presidency by breaking into an office-building to steal his opponent party’s secrets, because he felt no worthiness in the secrets of his own, no trust or faith. Of course the capital cops caught the keystones of his corruption, and followed their scent to his oval office. The real cops tracked the keystone.
Then, after that bum-bumbling, Dicky lied about his leadership of it, all the way down the line to the bottom of the well in which he drowned his presidency, setting a precedent for corrupt corporate and political leaders to follow forever, if they wish. Keep your corruption until you have no lifelines left, until you’re dead. Never tell the truth, no matter what. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over. Keep a stiff upper lip. Always be a crook. That’s integrity. Power, virtue. Arrogance. Loss.
I, when the bumbling became public, left my United Nations ambassadorship to accept chairmanship of the national committee of the Republican party. The party leaders besides Dicky thought my international stature and my ordinary quietness would lend some credibility and tranquility to the party in that time of Dicky’s obstreperousness, and I needed to do that for the continuity of my remaining mission. That party was a tool of mine I couldn’t just then drop.
So I rode its hobbyhorse until its other leaders accepted my argument that my credibility shouldn’t suffer as it might in face of Dicky’s end. They accepted that I was in a position to do better for the party by getting back on the world stage as a producing actor on it. So, while Dicky sang his swan-song while calling it an ode to victory, I was rediscovering my old homeland China, face to face. Dicky and Klingmonger sent me and Beatrice to befriend Chairman Mao.
It was clever card-play. The United States had not yet officially reestablished diplomatic relations with China. Officially, the United States were still fuming over the rise of Chairman Mao on the mainland and the demise of Chiang Kai-shek on the island, and everyone who knew anything about the China-card game was happy at my willingness to go there as envoy without portfolio, because I took my Ambassador title from the United Nations. But little did they know.
Little did they know of me, that they were throwing me into my favorite briar patch of all eternity, and that I would understand Mao Tse-tung better than anyone else on Earth could. Being immortal and having been Lao-tzu, I understood very well why Mikhail and Yasser were taking so long to do what any neighborly person knew needed to be done, and I knew very well that Mao was in a similar boat. He had to use some slings and arrows, to acquiesce to enemies.
If Mao or Mikhail or Yasser went away then, their absence would be filled by worse, by noisy greedy arrogance, futility. If they spoke too loudly too soon or acted too quietly too soon, they would be gone too soon. Their slow solution would end in quick corruption. And I just might as well have stayed at home.
However, I didn’t stay at home, and I was very much enjoying my present Earth home, and because of that I knew I’d feel a little homesick in my former Earth home, and I knew Beatrice would feel that more than I. So, before we went, I asked her to call Quincy and Ben, to arrange a little family get-together.
By now, both Quincy and Ben were graduated from college. Quincy, although he had to struggle a little to do it, achieved his master of business administration degree from Harvard and was back in Houston waddling around in the oil-industry, as had I. Ben had opted out of graduate school, saying that UCLA had burned him out. But he was still in the city of angels, working for a bank.
Beatrice suggested that we have our parting get-together there, and she knew she didn’t have to tell me why. Houston may have been a more rational choice, because Quincy was there along with many of our friends, and none of us knew anyone anywhere near Los Angeles, except Dicky in San Clemente, and Ben of course. But Ben might have thought we’d honed in on Houston for Quincy.
So we selected the city of angels for Ben. Beatrice and I rented a car at the airport and drove to his apartment, where he and Quincy awaited us. Ben introduced us to his roommate Chet, who seemed to me an elegant and polite young man. Beatrice smiled at me with her happy blink when Ben introduced him to us.
“Anybody not had lunch?” I asked, although it was 2:00 p.m.
All shook their heads and sank in their seats a little nervously.
“Onward and upward,” said Ben. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“Cool,” I said. “Where are we going?”
“Let’s think about it on the way out,” said Ben.
“Nice meeting you,” said Chet as we arose, the rest of us heading for the door, as he stood still. “I’ll catch you later, I guess.”
“You’re not going?” said Quincy.
“Not this time,” said Chet. “This one’s for the family.”
“You’re welcome,” said Beatrice.
“Thanks,” said Chet. “Next time, for sure.”
So we crowded out of the little stucco Hollywood apartment-house, leaving Chet picking up glasses from the tables in a quiet resolution that seemed to me gracious.
“Nice young man,” said Beatrice.
“He is nice,” said Ben.
“Crap,” said Ben, when we hit the sidewalk. “We’ve got a pickup, and Quincy flew. Why wasn’t I thinking?”
“No problem,” I said. “We rented a car.”
I pointed to the Buick sedan we’d rented for such an exigency.
“Whew,” said Ben. “That’s a relief.”
As with Theresa in Carrizozo, Beatrice and I climbed into the front, and the other boys climbed into the back. I started the car, and the CD player returned to life with a collection of Elvis Presley’s golden hits Beatrice had bought at the rental office.
“What’s that you’re listening to?” asked Ben.
“Elvis Presley,” said Quincy.
“Elvis Presley sucks!” said Ben.
“Elvis Presley’s dead,” said I.
“His music sucks,” said Ben.
“If you know his music,” asked Quincy, “why didn’t you recognize it?”
“I know enough,” said Ben. “Next thing you’ll be listening to country and western!”
“I like some of it,” said Quincy. “I don’t like everything Presley’s done, either.”
“Chet likes country,” said Ben. “I don’t let him play it when I’m around.”
“How does he feel about that?” asked Quincy.
“He knows I love him, anyway,” said Ben.
“So,” I said. “Where are we going? Any ideas yet?”
“Onward and upward,” said Ben. “Griffith Park. The observatory.”
“Good idea, Ben,” said Quincy. “I didn’t know you’re into outer space.”
“I’m not,” said Ben. “We don’t have to go into the observatory. I just like it for the view of the city, and it’s pretty quiet there.”
“Sounds fair to me,” I said. “Tell me where to turn.”
Besides Ben’s directions, none of us spoke on the way, except Ben and me briefly.
“Why a bank?” I asked.
“It’s easy,” he answered.
We drove up the winding road to the observatory and parked near it but didn’t go in. We sat on brown grass beneath some trees and looked at the city more florid below. Still, none of us spoke, until some others sat similarly a few yards away. Similarly, except that they were laughing and speaking in French.
“Listen to those people flaunting their French,” said Ben. “What a bunch of idiots! How can people be like that?”
“Maybe they think it’s the language most appropriate for what they’re saying,” I replied. “Or maybe they’re French.”
“Why are you always judging me?” asked Ben.
It was good that we were used to that from him. None of us winced, and I turned to silence, and Quincy filled the gap.
“I’m not into outer space much either,” he said. “But I’ve thought about it, and that big bang theory doesn’t make any sense to me. I mean, if some big bang created the universe, and nothing existed before, what banged?”
“Elegant question,” I said. “I had no idea you . . . .”
I interrupted myself to look at Ben. Ben showed no sign of attention, but I took another tack anyway. I had learned the hard way that his attention was beyond his signs.
“What do you think happened to Elvis Presley?” I asked.
“He drugged himself to death on a toilet,” said Ben.
“His hand was too full of grapes, like a banana fish,” said Quincy.
“He didn’t drink alcohol, because he belonged to Jimmy Swaggart's church, and so people taught him to use other drugs,” suggested Beatrice. “Or maybe his mother was too fat, or maybe his father was too busy. Or maybe nothing happened to him that doesn’t happen to everyone.”
“Alright,” I said. “Try this one I’m trying to figure out. Consider the phrase ‘life as we know it’. What does that mean?”
“It means humanity,” said Ben.
“What about spiders?” asked Quincy.
“What about tomatoes?” asked Beatrice.
“Oh,” said Ben. “I thought you meant people.”
“Okay,” I said. “What about viruses? If we include them as among the living, what does that phrase mean, ‘life as we know it’?”
“I read somewhere that tomatoes cry when we cut them.” said Beatrice. “I listened once, but it sounded more like a squeak, to me.”
“That’s what I mean,” I said, for lack of anything better I could think to say. “What’s the difference between a cry and a squeak?”
“That’s what I mean,” said Ben. “Scientists say tomatoes and viruses are alive, but they’re not really alive. They don’t have feelings.”
“If they were really alive,” said Quincy, “sympathy-vegetarians would starve to death, if they have the courage of their convictions.”
“Sorry, Dad,” said Ben, now showing attention. “We’re picking on you. You’re trying to get at something. Spit it out. Go ahead.”
“Thank you, Ben,” I said. “I was just thinking about something I heard on television a couple of nights ago, on the news. It was an interview with someone from NASA about sending a spaceship to Mars. The interviewer wanted to know why.”
“So do I,” said Ben. “People on Earth could use the money.”
“That’s for sure,” I said. “But, besides that, what bothered me was that the NASA scientist said we might find life there, because we might find water there with the elements essential to life as we know it. So I wondered about life as we don’t know it.”
Beatrice moved a little closer to me and didn’t say another word about tomatoes. I was very happy that she knew my moods so well, and I was very happy that Ben had spoken up to let me speak my mood, showing once more that his attention exceeds his signs. Now, he was scowling down to ground, as his brother gazed off into space.
“Now that’s what I call consideration of diversity,” he said. “Just because a creature doesn’t need oxygen or isn’t made of carbon doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any feelings. And just because it doesn’t cry doesn’t mean it has no feelings, either.”
“You’re some hot tomato,” I said to Beatrice, with a hug.
“Now you’re picking on me,” she replied, with a snuggle.
A vendor in the park was selling Frisbees. We bought one, dubbed it a flying saucer, and threw it around awhile, dropping it often, to Earth. A week later, Ben was back at his bank, and Quincy was again immersed in oil, and Beatrice and I were above the Pacific, flying to China.