demolition. Nobody told me. I been workin’ here twenty years, nobody told me to leave.’
Roderick, Luke, Bill and the others stood watching the argument, and so did the great crowd behind the barricades. Policemen came and went, unsure what to do: Hackme’s papers seemed to give it a legal right to blow up the place. But the doorman had a right to prevent anybody’s going inside.
At noon, the president of Hackme Demolition arrived. Mr Vitanuova was a short man in a homburg. The crowd took note of his hat and his car (a Rolls-Royce) and booed him as he approached the door.
‘Look, all I want to do is go inside and talk to any residents who might by chance still be in the building. Okay? Just talk to ’em. Not get ’em out or nothing. Can I go in?’
The doorman stood firm. ‘No sir. I gotta know whom you was wanting to see. first. Then I gotta call it up to them, to see if they’re home to you, sir. Then
‘But hell I don’t know any residents. Just let me see anybody.’
‘Oh no you don’t, that we don’t allow.’
The audience cheered as Mr Vitanuova came away defeated. There was snow on the shoulders of his expensive coat, but he didn’t notice.
The crew went to sit across the street in a doughnut shop called
‘Well I for one am glad they’re blowing up that place. I always hated it, looks like a stack of TV sets… I’m tired of buildings that look like machines…’
‘Isn’t that Le Corbusier? Or no I must be thinking of Tolstoi, the body is a machine for living in buildings with… no, wait.’
‘Well I for one would rather sleep in the nave of Chartres cathedral
‘Oh you can fall off anywhere… like that angel that loved high places… where was it now they put up that angel of Villard d’Honnecourt’s, the one that could turn to look at the sun?’
‘Henry Adams harking back to the twelfth century…’
Well and Robert Adam harking back to the Etruscans… it seems they all want to get back to the old Adam, Adam and no eaves, hee hee!’
‘Not so funny when you think of all that striving and dreaming, reaching for what, light? And finally it comes down to nothing more than Las Vegas fibreglass casinos with neon walls, a city of the darkness for all those watts
‘All an Etruscan room?’
‘Only job Villard d’Honnecourt could get now is removing unwanted hair maybe.’
‘And that squiggle that Le Corbusier always used for “Man”, that sort of crushed starfish, that could feel right at home now, lifting up one fin to hail an air-conditioned cab… on any street…’
The siege went on. The owner of the building was away skiing somewhere and could not be reached. The police didn’t want to act without talking to him first. Mr Vitanuova applied for a court order, but the judge, too, wanted to think it over.
Three days passed. The steadfast doorman was now more than a local hero; network TV and out-of-town papers were beginning to warm to him. The mayor came to shake his hand.
‘I’m only doing my job,’ he kept saying, to their delight. ‘Protecting this building and the residents.’
But in three days, no residents had been seen going in or out. No one went to work, received visitors, bought groceries or walked a dog. Nothing was delivered to the building except the doorman’s meals and laundry.
The doorman took brief naps, and somehow managed to shower and shave without leaving his post for more than a few seconds at a time. He remained on duty day and night.
On the morning of the fourth day, he admitted to the press that the building was empty. There were no residents. ‘I only protected the place out of a sense of loyalty, I guess. I still say there’s some terrible mistake.’
The crew went to work. Several floors of the building were knocked out inside. Then holes were drilled at strategic points, to take dynamite. When the charges went off, the entire twelve floors would collapse inward, burst like a bubble and leave almost nothing.
The TV cameras watched all this, the death of this particular building having become news. Mr Vitanuova posed with his finger on the firing button.
Flashguns were still going off like lightning when there came the sound of sirens. Escorted by two motorcycle police, the owner of 334 East 11th arrived.
‘Stop! There’s been a computer error!’ he cried. ‘You were supposed to blow up 433, not 334!’
Father Warren’s appearance caused one or two raised eyebrows at the airport. Minnetonka was after all a province, where not everyone was used to cosmopolitan priests in black leather cassocks and crucifix earrings. Couldn’t be helped; he had to impress the person he was meeting that not all Midwesterners were bucktoothed hicks.
The VIP lounge was almost deserted, but a guard checked Father Warren’s ID all the same.
‘I’m here to meet Mr Dinks. Hank Dinks, the author.’
‘Make yourself at home, uh, Father. I guess the press is here awready.’
There were indeed a few men and women in the drab anoraks of the press corps. Father Warren pretended to inspect an amusement machine until a few reporters drifted over.
‘You’re Father Warren, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Stigmata,’ one older man explained to his colleagues. ‘I covered the story two years ago on Good Friday, how you managed to make your hands bleed.’
‘Hi Father, look over here. Thanks.’
‘You re here to meet this Luddite
‘That’s right.’ Father Warren chose his words with Jesuit care. ‘I don’t say that Hank Dinks and his New Luddites have all the answers, but at least they’re asking some of the right questions. Do we really need all these machines? Can we really control them — aren’t we becoming slaves to our own creations?’
A woman said, ‘A lot of people might say you can’t turn the clock back — we don’t want to go back to living in caves, do we?’
‘No, no indeed. That’s certainly not our intention. We don’t want to go back to the horse-and-buggy days, not at all. What we want is, well, just to say
As if to signal the end of this session, one young man began firing wild questions: Was Hank Dinks a junkie? Weren’t there allegations of bribing a Congressman? A scandal involving farm animals? How about a Mafia connection? Was the KGB funding the New Luddites? What of gay priests? Convent abortions? Transvestite nuns?
The man was given no answers and evidently expected none; it was simply his way of probing for what he called a human interest angle.
The photographers took over. To show he did not hate machines themselves, Father Warren was asked to play one or two of the amusement machines for the cameras. Obligingly he tried a fast draw against Brazos Billy, he repelled alien invaders for a few seconds, and he even had his blood tested. The latter machine pricked his finger, beeped and flashed his blood-type on a screen. He forgot the type immediately. As the cameras clicked, he noticed a small warning plate next to the coin slot:
KUR BLOOD-TYPE BONANZA.
Father Warren had once had malaria. Before he could decide what to do about it, someone from the airline brought him a telegram:
