CHAPTER XIX
Coverly, without having been given a clue to his usefulness, packed and left for Atlantic City one evening with Cameron and his team. The ambiguity of his position was embarrassing. One of the team told Coverly that Cameron was to speak to a conference of scientists on a detonative force that was a million times the force of terrestrial lightning and that could be produced inexpensively. It was all that Coverly was able to grasp. Cameron sat apart from the others and read a paper-back which, Coverly saw, by craning his neck, was called Cimarron: Rose of the South West. It was the first time that Coverly had associated with men of this echelon and he was naturally inquisitive but he couldn’t understand their point of view, indeed he couldn’t understand their language. They talked about thermal runions, tolopters, strabometers, trenchions and podules. It was another language and one that seemed to him with the bleakest origins. You couldn’t trace here the elisions and changes worked by a mountain range, a great river or the nearness of the sea. Coverly supposed that the palest of them could smite a mountain but they were the most unlikely people to imagine as being armed with the powers of doom-crack. They spoke of lightning in their synthetic language but with the voices of men—strained from time to time with nervousness, broken with coughing and laughter, shaded and colored a little with regional differences. One of them was an aggressive pederast and Coverly wondered if this sexual cynicism had anything to do with his attitude as a scientist. One of them wore a suit coat that bunched around his shoulders. One of them—Brunner—wore a necktie painted with a horseshoe. One of them had a nervous habit of pulling at his eyebrows and they were all heavy smokers. They were men born of women and subject to all the ravening caprices of the flesh. They could destroy a great city inexpensively, but had they made any progress in solving the clash between night and day, between the head and the groin? Were the persuasions of lust, anger and pain any less in their case? Were they spared toothaches, nagging erections and fatigue?
They checked into the Haddon Hall, where Coverly was given a room of his own. Brunner, who was friendly, suggested that Coverly might like to attend some of the open lectures and so he did. The first was by a Chinese on the legal problems of interstellar space. The Chinese spoke in French and a simultaneous translation was broadcast through transistor radios. The legal vocabulary was familiar but Coverly couldn’t grasp its application to the cosmos. He could not easily apply phrases like National Sovereignty to the moon. The following lecture dealt with experiments in sending a man into space in a sack filled with fluid. The difficulty presented was that men immersed in fluid suffered a grave and sometimes incurable loss of memory. Coverly wanted to approach the scene with his best seriousness—with a complete absence of humor—but how could he square the image of a man in a sack with the small New England village where he had been raised and where his character had been formed? It seemed, in this stage of the Nuclear Revolution, that the world around him was changing with incomprehensible velocity but if these changes were truly incomprehensible what attitude could he take, what counsel could he give his son? Had his basic apparatus for judging true and false become obsolete? Leaving the lecture hall he ran into Brunner and asked him to lunch. His motive was curiosity. Compared to Brunner’s high-minded scientific probity the rhythms of his own nature seemed wayward and sentimental. Brunner’s composure challenged his own disciplines and his own usefulness and he wondered if his pleasure in the unscientific landscape of the Atlantic City boardwalk was obsolete. On his right were the singing waves and on his left a generous show of that mysterious culture that springs up at the edges of the sea and that, with its overt concern with mystery—seers, palmists, fortunetellers, gambling games and tea-leaf diviners—seems like a product of the thunderous discourse between the ocean and the continent. Seers seemed to thrive in the salty air. He wondered what Brunner made of the scene. Did the smell of fried pork excite his memory or what he called his playback? Would the sighing of the waves present him with a romantic vision of the possibilities of adventure? Coverly looked at his companion but Brunner stared out so flatly, so impassively, at the scene that Coverly didn’t ask his question. He guessed that Brunner saw what was to be seen—brine, a boardwalk, some store fronts—and that if he went beyond the moment, which seemed unlikely, he would have seen the store fronts demolished and replaced by public playgrounds, ball fields and picnic groves. But who was wrong? The possibility that Coverly was wrong made him very uncomfortable. Brunner said that he had never eaten a lobster and so they went into an old matchboard lobster palace at a turn in the walk.
Coverly ordered a bourbon. Brunner sipped a beer and whistled loudly at the prices. He had a very large head and a heavy but not a dark beard. He must have shaved that morning, perhaps carelessly, but the outlines of his brown beard were, by noon, clearly defined. He was pale and his pallor seemed heightened by the largeness and the redness of his ears. The redness stopped abruptly at the point where his ears joined his head. The rest of him was all pallor. It was not a sickly or a dissipated pallor, it was not a Levantine or a Mediterranean pallor—it was probably an inherited characteristic or the product of a bad diet—but it was, to give him credit, a virile pallor, thick-skinned and lit by those flaming ears. He had his charms, they all had, and it was Coverly’s feeling that these were based on the possession of a vision of surmountable barriers, a sense of the future, a means for expressing his natural zeal for progress and change. He drank his beer as if he expected it to incapacitate him and here was another difference. With a single exception they were all temperate men. Coverly was not temperate but his intemperance was his best sense of the abundance of life.
“You live in Talifer?” Coverly asked. He knew that Brunner did.
“Yes. I have a little pad on the west side. I live alone. I was married but that was no go.”
“I’m sorry,” Coverly said.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. The marriage was no go. We couldn’t optimize.” He tackled his salad.
“You live alone?” Coverly asked.
“Yes.” He spoke with his mouth full.
“How do you spend your evenings?” Coverly asked. “I mean, do you go to the theater?”
Brunner laughed kindly. “No, I don’t go to the theater. Some of the team have outside interests but I can’t say that I have.”
“But if you don’t have any outside interests what do you do in the evenings?”
“I study. I sleep. Sometimes I go to a restaurant on Route 27 where you can get all the chicken you can eat for two-fifty. I’m keen on chicken and when I get my appetite dialed up I can put away a very satisfactory payload.”
“You go with friends?”
“Nope,” he said with dignity. “I go alone.”
“Do you have any children?” Coverly asked.
“Nope. That’s one of the reasons my wife and I couldn’t finalize. She wanted children. I didn’t. I had a bad time when I was a kid and I didn’t want to put anybody else through that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, my mother died when I was about two and Dad and Grandma brought me up. Dad was a free-lance engineer but he couldn’t hold a job for long. He was a terrible alcoholic. You see, I felt more than most people, I think I felt more than most people that I had to get away. Nobody understood me. I mean, my name didn’t mean anything but the name of an old drunk. I had to make my name mean something. So when this lightning thing turned up I felt better, I began to feel better. Now my name means something, at least to some people it does.”
Here then was the lightning, a pure force of energy, veined when one saw it in the clouds as all the world is veined—the leaf and the wave—and here was a lonely man, familiar with blisters and indigestion, whose humble motives in inventing a detonative force that could despoil the world were the same as the child actress, the eccentric inventor, the small-town politician. “I only wanted my name to mean something.” He must have been forced more than most men to include in the mystery of death the incineration of the planet. Waked by a peal of thunder he must have wondered more than most if this wasn’t the end, hastened in some way by his wish to possess a name.
The waitress brought their lobsters then and Coverly ended his interrogation.
When Coverly got back to the hotel there was a note for him in Cameron’s hand. He was to meet Cameron outside a conference room on the third floor at five o’clock and drive him to the airport. He guessed from this that he had been attached to Cameron’s staff as a chauffeur. He spent the afternoon in the hotel swimming pool and went up to the third floor at five. The door to the conference room was locked and sealed with wire and two secret servicemen in plain clothes waited in the corridor. When the meeting ended it was announced to them by telephone and they broke the seals and unlocked the door. The scene inside was disorderly and bizarre. The doors and windows of the room had been draped, as a security precaution, with blankets. Physicists and scientists were standing on chairs and tables, removing these. The air was cloudy with smoke. It was a moment before Coverly realized that no one was speaking. It was like the close of an especially gruesome funeral. Coverly said hello to Brunner but his lunch companion didn’t reply. His face was green, his mouth set in a look of bitterness and revulsion. Could the tragedy and horror of what Cameron had told them account for this silence? Were these the faces of men who had just been told the facts of the millennium? Had they been told, Coverly wondered, that the planet was uninhabitable; and if they had, what was there to cling to in this hotel corridor with its memories of call girls, honeymoon couples and old people down for a long weekend to take the sea air? Coverly looked confusedly from these pale, these obviously terrified faces down to the dark cabbage roses that bloomed on the rug. Cameron, like the others, passed Coverly without speaking and Coverly followed him obediently out to the car. Cameron said nothing on the trip to the airport nor did he say good-bye. He boarded a small Beechcraft—he was going on to Washington—and when the plane had taken off Coverly noticed that he had forgotten his briefcase.
The responsibilities attached to this simple object were frightening. It must contain the gist of what he had said that afternoon and from the faces of his audience Coverly guessed that what he had said concerned the end of the world. He decided to return to the hotel at once and unload the briefcase on one of the team. He drove back to the city with the briefcase in his lap. He asked at the desk for Brunner and was told that Brunner had checked out. So had all the others. Looking around him at the shady or at least heterogeneous faces in the lobby he wondered if any of them were foreign agents. To behave inconspicuously seemed to be his best course of action and he went into the dining room and had some dinner. He kept the briefcase on his lap. Toward the end of his dinner there was a series of percussive explosions from outside the hotel and he thought that the end had come until the waitress explained that it was a display of fireworks put on for the entertainment of a convention of gift-shop proprietors.
With the briefcase secured under his armpit he stepped out of the hotel to see the fireworks. It seemed fitting to him that a meeting that had dealt with detonative powers should end with such a spendthrift, charming and utterly harmless display. Folding chairs had been set up on the boardwalk for the audience. The display was fired from a set of mortars on the beach. He heard the sound of a projectile dropped into a shell, followed its trajectory by a light trail of cinders as it mounted up past the evening star. There was a blast of white light—it took the sound a moment to reach them—and then there was a confusion of gold streamers, arced like stems, ending in silent balls of colored fire. All this was reflected in the window-panes of the hotels, and the faces of the gift-shop proprietors, turned up to admire this ingenuous show, seemed excellent and simple. There was a scattering of applause, a touching show of politeness and enthusiasm, the sort of clapping one hears when the dance music ends. The black smoke could be seen clearly against the twilight, changing shapes as it drifted off to sea. Coverly sat down to enjoy himself, to hear the walls of the mortar shell ring again, to follow the trajectory of cinders, the arc of stars, the blooming colors, the sighs of hundreds and the decencies of applause. The show ended with a barrage, a gentle mockery of warfare, demonic drumming and all the thousands of hotel windows flashing white fire. The last explosion shook the boardwalk harmlessly, there was a shower of dancing-school applause and he started back for his hotel. When he entered his room he wondered if it hadn’t been rifled. All the drawers were open and clothing was scattered over the chairs; but he had to measure this chaos against the fact that he was not a neat traveler. He slept with the briefcase in his arms.
In the morning Coverly, carrying the briefcase against his chest the way girls carry their schoolbooks, flew from Atlantic City to an International Airport where he waited for a plane to the west. There was, on one hand, the railroad station in St. Botolphs, with its rich aura of arrivals and departures, its smells of coal gas, floor oil and toilets, and its dark waiting room, where some force of magnification seemed brought to bear on the lives of the passengers waiting for their train to arrive; and on the other hand, this loft or palace, its glass walls open to the overcast sky, where spaciousness, efficiency and the smell of artificial leather seemed not to magnify but to diminish the knowledge the passengers had of one another. Coverly’s plane was due to leave at two, but at quarter to three they still waited at the gate. A few of the passengers were grumbling, and two or three of them had copies of an afternoon paper that reported a jet crash in Colorado with a death list of seventy-three. Was the jet that had crashed the one they were waiting for? Had they, standing in the dim sunlight, received some singular mercy? Had their lives been saved? Coverly went to the information desk to ask about his flight. The question was certainly legitimate, but the clerk reacted sullenly, as if the purchase of a plane ticket was a contract to walk humbly and in darkness. “There is some delay,” he said, unwillingly. “There may be some motor trouble or the connecting flight from Europe may be delayed. You won’t board until half-past three.” Coverly thanked him for this favor and went up some stairs to a bar. On a gilt easel at the right of the door was a photograph of a pretty singer in evening clothes, a delegate of all those thousands who beam at us from the thresholds of bars and hotel dining rooms; but she didn’t go on until nine and would probably be asleep or taking her wash out to the laundromat.
Inside, there was piped-in music and the bartender wore military livery. Coverly took a stool and ordered a beer. The man beside him was swaying comfortably on his stool. “Where you going?” he asked.
“Denver.”
“Me, too,” the stranger exclaimed, striking Coverly on the back. “I’ve been going to Denver for three days.”
“That’s right,” the bartender said. “He missed eight flights now. Isn’t it eight?”
“Eight,” the stranger said. “It’s because I love my wife. My wife’s in Denver, and I love her so much I can’t get on the plane.”
“It’s good for business,” the barkeeper said.
In the gloom at the end of the bar two conspicuous homosexuals with dyed yellow hair were drinking rum. A family sat at a table eating lunch and conversing in advertising slogans. It seemed to be a family joke.
“My!” the mother exclaimed. “Taste those bite-sized chunks of white Idaho turkey meat, reinforced with riboflavin, for added zest.”
“I like the crispy, crunchy potato chips,” the boy said. “Toasted to a golden brown in health-giving infrared ovens and topped with imported salt.”
“I like the spotless rest rooms,” said the girl, “operated under the supervision of a trained nurse and hygienically sealed for our comfort, convenience and peace of mind.”
“Winstons taste good,” piped the baby in his high chair, “like a cigarette should. Winstons have flavor.”
The dark bar had the authority of a creation, but it was a creation evolved independently from the iconography of the universe. With the exception of the labels on the bottles, there was nothing familiar in the place. Its lights were cavernous, its walls were dark mirrors. There was not even a truncated piece of driftwood or a coaster shaped like a leaf to remind him of the world outside. That beauty of sameness that makes the star and the shell, the sea and the clouds all seem to have come from the same hand was lost. The music was interrupted for the announcement that Coverly’s flight was boarding, and he paid for his beer and grabbed his briefcase. He stopped in the men’s room, where someone had written something exceedingly human on the wall, and then followed the lighted numbers down the long corridor to his gate. There was still no plane in sight, but none of the passengers had been moved by the delay or the news of the crash to change their plans. They stood there passively as if the sullen clerk had in fact sold them humility with their tickets. Coverly’s topcoat was too warm for that climate, but most of the other passengers had come from places that were colder or warmer than here. From a duct directly overhead, the continuous music poured gently into their ears. “It’s going to be all right,” an old lady beside Coverly whispered to an even older companion. “It isn’t dangerous. It isn’t any more dangerous than the trains. They carry millions of passengers every year. It’s going to be all right.” The fingers of the older, knobbed like driftwood, touched her cheeks, and in her eyes was the fear of death. Death was what the scene meant to her—the frisky mechanics in their white coveralls, the numbered runways, the noise of an incoming 707. A baby cried. A man ran a comb through his hair. The objects and sounds around Coverly seemed to group themselves into some immutable statement. These were the facts—this music, the fear of death endured by the old stranger, the flatness of the field, and way in the distance the roofs of some houses.
The plane came in, they boarded, and the stewardess seated Coverly between an old lady and a man whose breath smelled of whisky. The stewardess wore high-heeled shoes, a raincoat and dark glasses. Coverly saw under her raincoat the skirts of a red silk dress. As soon as she had closed the plane, she went to the toilet and reappeared in the gray skirt and white silk blouse of her profession. Her eyes, when she took off her glasses, were haggard, and she peered out of them in pain. “Joe Burner,” said the man on Coverly’s right, and Coverly shook his hand and introduced himself. “I’m pleased to meet you, Cove,” the stranger said. “I have a little present here I’d like to give you.” He took a small box from his pocket, and when Coverly opened it he found a gilt tie clip. “I travel a lot,” the stranger explained, “and I give away these tie clips wherever I go. I have them manufactured for me in Providence. That’s the jewelry capital of the United States. I give away two or three thousand clips a year. It’s a nice way of making friends. Everybody can use a tie clip.”
“Thank you very much,” Coverly said.
“I knit socks for astronauts,” said the old lady on Coverly’s left. “Oh, I know it’s silly of me, but I love those boys, and I can’t bear to think of them having cold feet. I’ve sent ten pairs of socks down to Canaveral in the last six weeks. They don’t thank me, it’s true, but they’ve never returned them, and I like to think that they use them.”
“I’m taking a few days off, to see an old friend who’s dying of cancer,” said Joe Burner. “I have at this date twenty-seven friends who are dying of cancer. Some of them know it. Some of them don’t. But not a one of them has more than a year to live.”
They were wrapped then in a heard and unheard convulsion of sound and pushed roughly back against their seats by the force of gravity as the plane went down the strip and began its strenuous push for altitude. A large panel fell out of the ceiling and crashed into the aisle, and the glasses and bottles in the pantry rattled noisily. When they had risen above the scattered clouds, the passengers unbuckled their seat belts and resumed their lives, their habits. “Good afternoon,” said the loudspeaker. “This is Captain MacPherson welcoming you to Flight 73, nonstop to Denver. We have reports of a little turbulence in the mountains but we expect it to clear by scheduled landing time. We are sorry about the delay, and wish to take this occasion to thank you all for your patience in not doing nothing about it.” The speaker clicked off.
Coverly could not see that anyone else was perplexed. Was he mistaken in assuming that navigational competence implied a rudimentary grasp of English? Joe Burner had begun to tell Coverly the story of his life. His style was nearly bardic. He began with the characters of his parents. He described his birthplace. Then he told Coverly about his two older brothers, his interest in sandlot baseball, his odd jobs, the schools he had attended, the wonderful buttermilk pancakes that his mother used to make and the friends that he had won and lost. He told Coverly his annual grosses, the size of his office staff, the nature of his three operations, the wonderfulness of his wife and the amount of money it had cost him to landscape his seven-room, two-bath house on Long Island. “I have something very unique,” he said. “I have this lighthouse on my front lawn. Four, five years ago, this big estate on Sands Point was auctioned off for taxes, and Mother and I went down there to see if there was anything we could use. Well, they had this little lake with a lighthouse on it—just ornamental, of course—and when it came time to buy the lighthouse, the bidding was very slow. Well, I bid thirty-five dollars, just for the heck of it, and you know what? That lighthouse was mine. Well, I have this friend in the trucking business—you have to know the right people—and he went down there and got it off the lake. I don’t know to this day how he did it. Well, I’ve got this other friend in the electric business, and he wired it up for me, and now I’ve got this lighthouse right on my front lawn. It makes the place look real nice. Of course, some of the neighbors complain—you find clinkers in every gang—so I don’t turn it on every night, but when we have people in to play cards or watch the television, I turn it on, and it looks beautiful.”
The sky by then was the dark blue of high altitudes, and the atmosphere in the plane was as genial as a saloon. The white blouse the hostess wore came loose whenever she bent over to serve a cocktail. She tucked it in each time she straightened up. The seat backs were as high as the walls of an old box pew, and the passengers had a limited degree of privacy and a limited view of one another. Then the bulkhead door opened, and Coverly saw the captain come down the aisle. His color was bad, and his eyes were as haggard as the eyes of the stewardess. Perhaps he was a friend of the pilot and crew who had crashed a few hours earlier in Colorado. Would he, would anyone else, have the fortitude to face this disaster calmly? Would the charred bones of seventy-three bodies mean any less to him than they did to the rest of the world? He nodded to the stewardess, who followed him aft to the pantry. They did not exchange a word, but she put some ice into a paper cup and poured whisky into it. He carried his drink forward and closed the door. The old lady was dozing, and Joe Burner, having finished with his autobiography, had begun to tell his stock of jokes. Without any warning, the plane dropped about two thousand feet.
The confusion was horrible. Most of the drinks hit the ceiling, men and women were thrown into the aisles, children were screaming. “Attention, attention,” said the public-address system. “Hear this, everyone.”
“Oh, my God,” the stewardess said, and she went aft and strapped herself in. “Attention, attention,” said the amplified voice, and Coverly wondered then if this might be the last voice that he heard. Once, when he was being prepared for a critical operation, he had looked out of his hospital window into the window of an apartment house across the street, where a fat woman was dusting a grand piano. He had already been given Sodium Pentothal and was swiftly losing consciousness, but he resisted the drug long enough to feel resentment at the fact that the last he might see of the beloved world was a fat woman dusting a grand piano.
“Attention, attention,” the voice said. The plane had leveled off in the heart of a dark cloud. “This is not your captain. Your captain is tied up in the head. Please do not move, please do not move from your seats, or I will cut off your oxygen supply. We are traveling at five hundred miles an hour, at an altitude of forty-two thousand feet, and any disturbance you create will only add to your danger. I have logged nearly a million air miles and am disqualified as a pilot only because of my political opinions. This is a robbery. In a few minutes my accomplice will enter the cabin by the forward bulkhead, and you will give him your wallets, purses, jewelry and any other valuables that you have. Do not create any disturbance. You are helpless. I repeat: You are helpless.”
“Talk to me, talk to me,” the old lady asked. “Please just say something, anything.”
Coverly turned and nodded to her, but his tongue was so swollen with fear that he could not make a sound. He worked it around desperately in his mouth to stir up some lubrication. The other passengers were still, and on they rocketed through the dark—sixty-five or seventy strangers, their noses pressed against the turmoil of death. What would be its mode? Fire? Should they, like the martyrs, inhale the flames to shorten the agony? Would they be truncated, beheaded, mutilated and scattered over three miles of farmland? Would they be ejaculated into the darkness and yet not lose consciousness during the dreadful fall to earth? Would they be drowned, and while drowning display their last talent for inhumanity in trampling one another at the flooding bulkheads? It was the darkness that gave him most pain. The shadow of a bridge or a building can fall across our spirit with all the weight of a piece of bad news, and it was the darkness that seemed to compromise his spirit. All he wanted then was to see some light, a patch of blue sky. A woman, sitting forward, began to sing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” It was a common church soprano, feminine, decent, raised once a week in the company of her neighbors. “E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me,” she sang, “still all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to Thee. . . .”
A man across the aisle took up the hymn, joined quickly by several others, and when Coverly remembered the words, he sang:
Though like a wanderer,
Weary and lone,
Darkness comes over me,
My rest a stone. . . .
Joe Burner and the old lady were singing, and those who didn’t know the words came in strong on the refrain. The bulkhead door opened, and there was the thief. He wore a felt hat and a black handkerchief tied over his face with holes cut for the eyes. It was, except for the felt hat, the ancient mask of the headsman. He wore black rubber gloves and carried a plastic wastebasket to collect their valuables. Coverly roared:
There let my way appear,
Steps into heaven,
All that Thou sendest me
In mercy given. . . .
They sang more in rebelliousness than in piety; they sang because it was something to do. And merely in having found something to do they had confounded the claim that they were helpless. They had found themselves, and this accounted for the extraordinary force and volume of their voices. Coverly stripped off his wristwatch and dropped his wallet into the basket. Then the thief, with his black-gloved hands, lifted the briefcase out of Coverly’s lap. Coverly let out a groan of dismay and might have grabbed at the case had not Burner and the old lady turned on him faces so contorted with horror that he fell back into his seat. When the thief had robbed the last of them, he turned back to the bulkhead, staggering a little against the motion of the plane—a disadvantage that made his figure seem familiar and harmless. They sang:
Then with my waking thoughts,
Bright with Thy praise,
Out of my stormy griefs,
Altars I’ll raise. . . .
“Thank you for your cooperation,” said the public-address system. “We will make an unscheduled landing in West Franklin in about eleven minutes. Please fasten your seat belts and observe the no-smoking signal.”
The clouds outside the ports began to lighten, to turn from gray to white, and then they sailed free into the blue sky of late afternoon. The old lady dried her tears and smiled. To lessen the pain of his confusion Coverly suddenly concluded that the briefcase had contained an electric toothbrush and a pair of silk pajamas. Joe Burner made the sign of the cross. The plane was losing altitude rapidly, and then below them they could see the roofs of a city that seemed like the handiwork of a marvelously humble people going about useful tasks and raising their children in goodness and charity. The moment when they ceased to be airborne passed with a thump and a roar of the reverse jets, and out of the ports they could see that international wilderness that hedges airstrips. Scrub grass and weeds, a vegetable slum, struggled in the sandy bottom soil that formed the banks of an oily creek. Someone shouted, “There they go!” Two passengers opened the bulkhead. There were confused voices, and when someone asked for information, the complexity of human relationships so swiftly re-established itself that those who knew what was going on pridefully refused to communicate with those who didn’t and the first man into the forward cabin spoke to them with condescension. “If you’ll quiet down for a minute,” said he, “I’ll tell you what we know. We’ve released the crew and the captain has made radio contact with the police. The thieves got away. That’s all I can tell you now.”
Then faintly, faintly, they heard the sirens approaching over the airstrip. The first to come was a fire crew, who put a ladder up against the door and got it open. Next to come were the police, who told them they were all under arrest. “You’re going to be let off in lots of ten,” one of the policemen said. “You’re going to be questioned.” He was gruff, but they were magnanimous. They were alive, and no incivility could disturb them. The police then began to count them off in lots. The ladder of the fire truck was the only way of getting down from the plane, and the older passengers mounted this querulously, their faces working with pain. Those who waited seemed immersed in the passivity of some military process; seemed to suffer that suspense of discernment and responsibility that overtakes any line of soldiers. Coverly was No. 7 in the last lot. A gust of dusty wind blew against his clothing as he went down the ladder. A policeman took him by the arm, a touch he bitterly and instantly resented, and it was all he could do to keep from flinging the man’s arm off. He was put with his group into a closed police van with barred windows.
A policeman took him again by the arm when he left the van and again he had to struggle to control himself. What was this testiness of his flesh? he wondered. Why did he loathe this stranger’s touch? Rising before him was the Central Police Headquarters—a yellow-brick building with a few halfhearted architectural flourishes and a few declarations of innocent love written in chalk on the walls. The wind blew dust and papers around his feet. Inside he found himself in the alarming and dreary atmosphere of wrongdoing. It was a passage into a world to which he had been granted merely a squint—that area of violence he glimpsed when he spread newspapers on the porch floor before he painted the screens. Roslyn man shoots wife and five children. . . . Murdered child found in furnace. . . . They had all been here, and had left in the air a palpable smell of their bewilderment and dismay, their claims of innocence. He was led to an elevator and taken up six flights. The policeman said nothing. He was breathing heavily. Asthma? Coverly wondered. Excitement? Haste?
“Do you have asthma?” he asked.
“You answer the questions,” the policeman said.
He led Coverly down a corridor like the corridor in some depressing schoolhouse and put him in a room no bigger than a closet, where there was a wooden table, a chair, a glass of water and a questionnaire. The policeman shut the door, and Coverly sat down and looked at the questions.
Are you the head of a household? he was asked. Are you divorced? Widowed? Separated? How many television sets do you own? How many cars? Do you have a current passport? How often do you take a bath? Are you a college graduate? High school? Grammar school? Do you know the meaning of “marsupial”; “seditious”; “recondite”; “dialectical materialism”? Is your house heated by oil? Gas? Coal? How many rooms? If you were forced to debase the American flag or the Holy Bible, what would be your choice? Are you in favor of the federal income tax? Do you believe in the International Communist Conspiracy? Do you love your mother? Are you afraid of lightning? Are you for the continuation of atmospheric testing? Do you have a savings account? Checking account? What is your total indebtedness? Do you own a mortgage? If you are a man, would you classify your sexual organs as being size 1, 2, 3 or 4? What is your religious affiliation? Do you believe John Foster Dulles is in Heaven? Hell? Limbo? Do you often entertain? Are you often entertained? Do you consider yourself to be liked? Well liked? Popular? Are the following men living or dead: John Maynard Keynes. Norman Vincent Peale. Karl Marx. Oscar Wilde. Jack Dempsey. Do you say your prayers each night? . . .
Coverly attacked these questions—and there were thousands of them—with the intentness of a guilty sinner. He had given his watch to the thief, and had no idea of how long it took him to fill out the questionnaire. When he was done, he shouted, “Hullo. I’m finished. Let me out of here.” He tried the door and found it open. The corridor was empty. It was night, and the window at the end of the hall showed a dark sky. He carried his questionnaire to the elevator and rang. As he stepped out of the elevator on the street floor, he saw a policeman sitting at a desk. “I lost something very valuable, very important,” Coverly said.
“That’s what they all say,” the policeman said.
“What do I do now?” asked Coverly. “I’ve answered all the questions. What do I do now?”
“Go home,” the policeman said. “I suppose you want some money?”
“I do,” Coverly said.
“You’re all getting a hundred from the insurance company,” the policeman said. “You can put in a claim later if you’ve lost more.” He counted out ten ten-dollar bills and looked at his watch. “The Chicago train comes through in about twenty minutes. There’s a cab stand at the corner. I don’t suppose you’ll want to fly again for a while. None of the others did.”
“Have they all finished?” Coverly asked.
“We’re holding a few,” the man said.
“Well, thank you,” Coverly said, and walked out of the building into a dark street in the town of West Franklin, feeling in its dust, heat, distant noise and the anonymity of its colored lights the essence of his loneliness. There was a newsstand at the corner, and a cab parked there. He bought a paper. “Disqualified Pilot Robs Jet In Midair,” he read. “A Great Plane Robbery took place at 4:16 this afternoon over the Rockies . . .” He got into the cab and said, “You know, I was in that plane robbery this afternoon.”
“You’re the sixth fare who’s told me that,” the driver said. “Where to?”
“The station,” Coverly said.