OPUS 21 Page 15

  But the response of the delighted--the ecstatic onlookers, was always the same: a jarring salvo of catcalls, guffaws, finger whistles, ribald yells, mirth's paroxysms.

  I watched this business for quite a while-the bands going by behind me--the flags-

  -the guns--and the sweating people standing all along the curb for miles of Fifth Avenue.

  Finally, a fair-haired girl of about sixteen came innocently into the open place, looked about to find the reason for it, saw none, and began to cross. The sergeant slipped swiftly behind her. Quickly, with his stick, he lifted the little pink cotton of her skirt, bent as he walked, with ogling pool-room pantomine, took aim, and thrust. This girl did not leap but stood transfixed on the point of the electric stick. A great grin broke on the sergeant's face and he thrust, now--again and again. Her head turned in slow horror.

  Whatever fantasy had seized her brain was shattered by the sight of the lewd man jabbing at her. The crowd roared like all the pottery on earth falling over a precipice. A look of the most pitiful terror came over her. At last, she found the nerves and muscles for running and escaped into the yapping multitude.

  The sergeant straightened up. When he straightened, I stepped out and hit him on the mouth as hard as I could.

  The approving roar stopped as if a noose had tightened on its throat.

  The sergeant stared at me with addled menace. Blood trickled from between his lips, where I had felt his teeth loosen.

  Then one of his buddies hit me from the side.

  My nose blazed with pain.

  The hollow lost its shape. Different--yet not much different yells were raised.

  Someone cracked the back of my head. I saw a place between two fat men, lunged at it, looked back. The sergeant was slowly sitting down, fumbling for his handkerchief.

  Blows fell on me. A man in a navy uniform grabbed my arm. I hit him and he let go. The crowd closed around me.

  When, after long minutes of pushing and weaving, I emerged on a side street, my nose was bleeding.

  I wiped it and went, somewhat shakily, to the hotel.

  The nosebleed stopped in a few minutes.

  I turned on my radio and found a cello solo amongst the predinner music. Ave Maria, as a matter of fact.

  9

  Tom Alden--Tom-the-doctor--had been thinking about me, off and on, for more than thirty hours, now. He is the kind of person whose thoughts give birth more to inquiry than opinion.

  We went to a Longchamps for dinner--the gold and vermilion decorations made bearable by air conditioning. Traffic was light; only a few people were about--people going tiredly in the heat-choked night. After dinner, we rode back in a cab to the Astolat and strolled over to the Park where we sat together on the Mall, listening to the concert.

  Thousands of people had spread out newspapers in the lamplit dusk and lay upon them, asleep, talking, making love. The police had suspended the bans that one night.

  Tenements and penthouses were ovens; their refugees gasped on the grass. Kids played in the fountains and no one interfered. The city itself had an evacuated feeling; all who were able had fled the heat wave and the rest were in parks, in cool restaurants, or in the movie theaters. Stars shone hazily above the trees and the stagy skyscrapers. Music, coming down the Mall, was distorted by invisible eddies that still rose from the sun-baked cement; it soared and fell and wobbled through the furnace atmosphere.

  Tom, as I said, is given to inquiry. This is not surprising in a man who practices several sciences. If we were old friends, we were also dedicated, in different ways, to the examination of all that surrounded ourselves and each other. Our sensibilities were tuned to the fact; they lacked the common diffidences of most such attachments.

  "How's it going?" That was his first question, when he arrived at my hotel rooms.

  "Okay."

  He put down the black bag that lies within easy reach of his whole life.

  "Jittery?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "Tell Ricky?"

  "No."

  "How is she?"

  "All cured--we hope."

  His pale eyes fixed on me. "Let me have another look at the throat."

  He had another look--rearranging lights.

  "I did a little reading on it, Phil. I can't say for sure what it is."

  "I'm going on the assumption that it is--what-for."

  "Yes. You would. Most people would take the opposite attitude--until the last possible fraction of the last possible second."

  "Why?"

  He shrugged and put his tools away. "Wishful thinking."

  "More fun to know than wish--look than dream."

  "Not many agree with that."

  "They don't know enough--look far enough. If you're going to get yourself free--

  you've got a lot of illusion to hack through first."

  "Do you feel really free?"

  I shook my head. "Not free at all. But I do feel I know what freedom is--what it means--what it's for. Maybe that's as near as you can get--these days."

  He went to the toilet and washed--in an absent-minded, habitual manner. "Hot night."

  "Hot."

  "You've been told your number was up before now. I've been considering that.

  You know what it's like."

  "Sure."

  "What's it like?" He asked it eagerly, and yet academically, as if there were a formula for the reply.

  "Changes from minute to minute."

  "I suppose so." He seemed disappointed.

  That was when we started for Longchamps.

  He took the bag along. He always does. . . .

  He ordered one Tom Collins. The tall glass was sweating even before the waiter could bring it from the bar.

  "How are you--fixed?"

  I told him that.

  He peered at the room, the other diners, the gaudy colors. "Funny. I remember back in high school in Montclair when you were the class poet. Everybody thought you'd be a writer, sure. The last will and testament of our class left your pen to the juniors.

  Remember that?"

  I remembered.

  "But I don't suppose anybody--including yourself--ever thought you'd rip out magazine serials like logs going through a circular saw. Get to be a popular writer. And then set people on their ears by writing about psychology. We all thought you were destined for the garret--a lot of reputation, maybe--but not Florida houses and--fifty thousand dollars' worth of insurance--"

  "No."

  "Did you?"

  "Yeah."

  "You did!"

  "No harm in daydreaming, was there? Back then?"

  Tom meditated on those distant high school years. "You realized the daydream."

  "A person like me has a good many daydreams. When one comes true--he automatically starts on the next."

  "Do you consider yourself happy?"

  "Enormously, Tom."

  "So do I. Why? How come? When you spend about ninety per cent of your time considering the unhappiness of the world?"

  "Somebody has to collect the garbage or we'd all die of plague. And a born garbage collector loves his job."

  "There's more to it than that."

  "Yeah. It's not garbage. It's what we discard, ignore, repress. The green fertilizer of the next crop. The yin to the coming yang. My contemplation of what you call the unhappy aspects of life is really the substance of what I find to be hope."

  "Jung changed you a lot, Phil."

  "I dunno. I got thinking--some years back--of a poem I wrote when I was twenty-one. Threw it away--lost it--haven't any idea what happened to it. But in that poem was the fundamental Jungian idea--the idea that instinct directs human affairs--and that it's a force in action which always has equal and opposite reactions--"

  "Still--Archie--"

  I thought of Archie--the psychiatrist to whom Tom had sent me for analysis.

  "Archie taught me psychology--Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian--and let me work out my own problems, aloud. He was a
great teacher."

  "He died of cancer," Tom mused.

  "'--too'?"

  He looked at me and grinned gently. "Masochism takes funny forms in you."

  "In us all." I went back a little way in the discussion. "When I was a young guy, I formed the habit of listening to, and looking at, everything that happened in my mind.

  Ruling out nothing. Trying to relate everything to everything else. That's a good habit.

  That's the natural mind. There are too God-damned many prohibitions and taboos in the life of a Presbyterian minister's son to keep track of. So I started--as a game--ignoring all of them, in my head. Plenty of people do. I arrived--in that poem--at a pretty complete formulation of instinct and the laws of instinct--as Jung sees it working. As Toynbee sees it working collectively, on civilizations. As Northrop glimpses it. As Jesus tried to define it. As Aristotle didn't even guess it."

  "So you think you really never underwent a philosophical change?"

  "No. I lost sight of what I'd felt--when I was a dizzy, drunk Hollywood writer. But when Archie taught me Freud and Jung--I got back the insight--in contemporary terms and scientific formulations. That's all. And it isn't very much."

  "Are you ever frightened?"

  ' I'm protoplasm, for God's sake!"

  He chuckled. "That's a relief! I've wondered what are you scared of. Sometimes--

  you seem haunted. Most of the time, I could swear you were afraid of nothing."

  "The shadow of the ego--the black streak behind it that it never looks around to see."

  "And what does that mean?"

  "What I'm scared of. Inhumanity. Cruelty. To man--to me, also, I guess."

  "People get more humane."

  "Like hell!"

  "If you lived a thousand years ago--or ten thousand you'd believe it. The trouble is, you're supersensitive."

  I took a long breath.

  "What do you read?" I asked. "What do you want to hear? A list of German concentration camps? An account of the cremation of some six million innocent people by Germany? A survey of conditions in Russian slave labor camps? A discussion of physical torture as it is used by modern police in America? Or by military men? Or as a political instrument in Europe? Or as a diplomatic measure, by, let us say, the English, in their colonies? Do you want to hear a discourse on the behavior of Jap troops in war? On our own troops? Would you like to have me run over the treatment of people in American lunatic asylums? Shall I touch on lynching details--and other minor unpleasant experiences of the American Negro? Would you like me to talk about how we Americans disposed of the Indian problem? Would you be interested in some studies of corporeal punishment as it is administered in American slum homes and on American farms? Shall I recite the prison methods and jail practices common amongst our agents of law enforcement? Or would a review of the various effects of intense radiation on the human body, as well as its genes, coupled with the fact that about every other American is sitting around these days asking why in hell we don't atom-bomb Russia, tend to persuade you that we are not, essentially, humane people? Shall I discuss brutality in sports? Are you interested in considering our annual million smashed in automobiles as evidence of a certain basic scarcity of the humanitarian impulse? There are various business practices I could go into, in documenting the matter. Not the ruination of widows and orphans. Not the adulteration and poisoning of products. Just the little results of the basic premise of business which is that making money is the whole object, without reference to kindness or love. Or would you like to review the various sorts of crimes committed by the people in our fair land? Would you like to contemplate the interesting and vicious psychology of many of the victims of these crimes? Shall we look at the degree of obliviousness, smugness, or rejection which Americans held toward the atrocities before the recent war-

  -or hold now toward massacre and famine in India--famine in China--ruthless dictatorship in a dozen nations--Spain, for instance-Argentina--a lot more? Or shall we, on the other hand, investigate a whole field of cruelty as large as the one just hinted at: the psychological cruelties of modern men? It would double the scope of the survey. The teachers--devising torments to sweat off their frustrations on their pupils. The common office techniques of the average man-of-affairs. The torments of the soul written into the class structures of society. The awful havoc wreaked on man whenever a minister preaches hell-fire and damnation. No fooling! We are not humane. We are--per capita--

  the cruelest people who ever lived, because, unlike the poor thieves on the two other crosses--we do know what we do!"

  Tom took off his fogged spectacles and wiped them. I pushed the advantage.

  "Cruelty among doctors. An interesting little sidetrack. I recall, for example--"

  "Skip it." He looked sorrowfully at me. "You win that one."

  "All I want," I said, "is for people to be truly humane. Truly loving. But, to gain that, we'd be obliged to give up a great deal we now cherish dearly."

  We had lemon ice.

  Later, we walked into the Park and sat down. . . .

  The people on the newspapers on the grass, the silo smell of trees at night in heat waves, lamplight and music--as I have said. . . .

  "Cruelty in doctors," Tom repeated musingly, after we found a bench on the Mall, where we could feel the breeze if one came.

  "Last night," I responded, when he didn't go on, "I was reading a book that suggested the whole philosophy of medicine was cruel. Saving babies--increasing the life span--only so people will go hungry by millions."

  "Vogt? Osborne? I read them. What's true humanity? I don't know--except sometimes, in individual cases. What about old people, for instance?"

  "What about them?"

  He looked back over his shoulder as if he could see through the night, the trees of Central Park, and the blocks of buildings, to the East River. "Out on the island--I take care of a ward filled with them. Chronics. Sixty years old. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. Some been in bed for twenty years. No cure. No hope. No chance--in a high percentage--of doing a thing, ever. An organ's shot--ruined beyond repair. Half of them touched with senile dementia; a quarter, sunk in it. Mess their beds. You feed 'em with spoons. And yet they go on--year after year after year."

  "I've seen the ward."

  "America has millions of such people. Only a fraction of 'em in hospitals. Moms and pops, grandmas and grandpas, hanging on to the last, sick gristle of existence.

  Spoiling the lives of other millions of people. Taking their time and their energy.

  Absorbing funds that young kids desperately need. All for nothing. Wheedling and whining and complaining if everything isn't soft and easy for them. Reminding sons and daughters and grandchildren of their 'duty.' The duty to be enslaved by meaningless, useless senility. The food and the clothes, the beds and the service, the tax money, the energy, the topsoil, if you go for Vogt--and the metal--pours down their gullets and is worn out by their worn-out bodies--and not one single, solitary useful thing is accomplished."

  "You're stealing my act," I said.

  Tom laughed ruefully. "It's an easy act for a doctor to crib! Tell me, why in hell do people look forward so much to old age? Nine times out of ten, it's a mess. Even proud, independent people, when they get old, usually lose their pride and their independence--and go down begging for handouts."

  "The best reason I can think of," I said, "is that they're disappointed in life as they've lived it up to middle age."

  "The whole country grows older," Tom went on, after nodding to himself. "The American landscape will soon be cluttered with human antiques. Pension-seeking, vengeful, dogmatic, persecuting, bloc-voting, parasitic millions. An ocean of wasteful protoplasm--Old Men of the Sea--and old Women--riding on the backs of everybody. Is a thing like that humane?"

  "It is richly sentimental."

  "In the labs, thousands of my colleagues are sweating to bring it about. Studying the degenerative diseases. Trying to lick cancer and heart trouble and hypertension
.

  Trying to lick aging itself--to keep the old, old indefinitely! Geriatrics--a whole science for the maintenance of second childhood! Sometimes, Phil, I actually think the world is as crazy as you say it is. Sometimes--when I run into a bright kid whose parents can't afford to have its legs straightened--and then when I visit my ward--I'd like to sweep the place clean with a Thompson gun and move in the kids who need it."

  "There is the Townsend Plan," I offered. "Two hundred dollars a month for everybody who's old, if they spend it right away--and millions are too stupid to see the catch. In fifty years--Pensioned Old Age may be the great goal that progress and prosperity are today. Of course, there isn't enough stuff to go around, and there will never be, so two hundred bucks, if you gave it to the gaffers to spend, soon wouldn't buy a good-sized roast. But they may try for it."

  Tom laughed somberly. "They are trying. You should see the pension literature in my ward. The letters they write. The voting they do. Should I shoot them? What the hell do you really believe about it?"

  "There is the death wish," I said.

  "They don't want to die! Not one in a dozen! Even if they're blind, vomiting on the hour, spoon-fed, and in pain--they want to go on living--and are proud of it."

  "It's lung," I answered, "who keeps talking about the law of opposites. The death wish is subjective. But we translate it into its opposite form--in this case, the objective.

  We want other people to die--to suffer--to bear our load--to take our responsibility. We hate. What did you say about your old folks? Vengeful and persecuting and parasitic?

  That's the death wish turned wrong-side-out. Or--take this pair of opposites. We have applied reason to extending life. So we have automatically obliged ourselves to apply reason to death. That is a psychological consequence of administering life-stretching it, maintaining it--of baby-saving and so on. Only--being egoists--blind to the basic laws of instinct--we won't kill anybody. Millions of Russians, maybe, but not one American. It's even against the law for a person to kill himself, for whatever merciful and laudable a reason. So what? We insist on our right to save and maintain every life. We also insist on dodging the resultant duty at the other end of the natural spectrum: death. The living have no recourse left but to extravert their death wish. To hate others because of the hatefulness of the trap they're in."