Dear germ-free Edgar, the man who has an air-filtration system in his house to vaporize specks of dust-he finds a fascination in cankers, lesions and rotting bodies so long as his connection to the source is strictly pictorial.
He finds a second dead woman in the middle ground, straddled by a skeleton. The positioning is sexual, unquestionably. But is Edgar sure it's a woman bestraddled or could it be a man? He stands in the aisle and they're all around him cheering and he has the pages in his face. The painting has an instancy that he finds striking. Yes, the dead fall upon the living. But he begins to see that the living are sinners. The cardplayers, the lovers who dally, he sees the king in an ermine cloak with his fortune stashed in hogshead drums. The dead have come to empty out the wine gourds, to serve a skull on a platter to gentlefolk at their meal. He sees gluttony, lust and greed.
Edgar loves this stuff. Edgar, Jedgar. Admit it-you love it. It causes a bristling of his body hair. Skeletons with wispy dicks. The dead beating kettledrums. The sackcloth dead slitting a pilgrim's throat.
The meatblood colors and massed bodies, this is a census-taking of awful ways to die. He looks at the flaring sky in the deep distance out beyond the headlands on the left-hand page-Death elsewhere, Conflagration in many places, Terror universal, the crows, the ravens in silent glide, the raven perched on the white nag's rump, black and white forever, and he thinks of a lonely tower standing on the Kazakh Test Site, the tower armed with the bomb, and he can almost hear the wind blowing across the Central Asian steppes, out where the enemy lives in long coats and fur caps, speaking that old weighted language of theirs, liturgical and grave. What secret history are they writing?
There is the secret of the bomb and there are the secrets that the bomb inspires, things even the Director cannot guess-a man whose own sequestered heart holds every festering secret in the Western world-because these plots are only now evolving. This is what he knows, that the genius of the bomb is printed not only in its physics of particles and rays but in the occasion it creates for new secrets. For every atmospheric blast, every glimpse we get of the bared force of nature, that weird peeled eyeball exploding over the desert-for every one of these he reckons a hundred plots go underground, to spawn and skein.
And what is the connection between Us and Them, how many bundled links do we find in the neural labyrinth? It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.
The old dead fucking the new. The dead raising coffins from the earth. The hillside dead tolling the old rugged bells that clang for the sins of the world.
He looks up for a moment. He takes the pages from his face-it is a wrenching effort-and looks at the people on the field. Those who are happy and dazed. Those who run around the bases calling out the score. The ones who are so excited they won't sleep tonight. Those whose team has lost. The ones who taunt the losers. The fathers who will hurry home and tell their sons what they have seen. The husbands who will surprise their wives with flowers and chocolate-covered cherries. The fans pressed together at the clubhouse steps chanting the players' names. The fans having fistfights on the subway going home. The screamers and berserkers. The old friends who meet by accident out near second base. Those who will light the city with their bliss.
Cotter walks at a normal pace in the afterschool light. He goes past rows of tenements down Eighth Avenue with a small solemn hop in his stride, a kind of endless levered up-and-down, and Bill is positioned off his shoulder maybe thirty yards back.
He sees the Power of Prayer sign and carries the ball in his right hand and rubs it up several times and looks back and sees the college boy in the two-tone jacket fall in behind Bill, the guy who was involved in the early scuffle for the ball.
Bill has lost his buckaroo grin. He barely shows an awareness that Cotter exists, a boy who walks the earth in high-top Keds. Cotter's body wants to go. But if he starts running at this point, what we have is a black kid running in a mainly white crowd and he's being followed by a pair of irate whites yelling thief or grief or something.
They walk down the street, three secret members of some organized event.
Bill calls out, 'Hey Cotter buddy come on, we won this game together.'
Many people have disappeared into cars or down the subways, they are swarming across the walkway on the bridge to the Bronx, but there are still enough bodies to disrupt traffic in the streets. The mounted police are out, high-riding and erect, appearing among the cars as levitated beings.
'Hey Cotter I had my hand on that ball before you did.'
Bill says this good-natured. He laughs when he says it and Cotter begins to like the man all over again. Car horns are blowing all along the street, noises of joy and mutual salute.
The college boy says, 'I think it's time I got in this. I'm in this too. I was the first one to grab ahold of the ball. Actually long before either one of you. Somebody hit it out of my hand. I mean if we're talking about who was first.'
Cotter is watching the college boy speak, looking back diagonally. He sees Bill stop, so he stops. Bill is stopping for effect. He wants to stop so he can measure the college boy, look him up and down in an itemizing way. He is taking in the two-tone jacket, the tight red hair, he is taking in the whole boy, the entire form and structure of the college boy's status as a land animal with a major brain.
And he says, 'What?' That's all. A hard sharp
And he stands there agape, his body gone slack in a comic dumbness that's pervaded with danger.
He says, 'Who the hell are you anyway? What are you doing here? Do I
Cotter watches this, entertained by the look on the college boy's face. The college boy thought he was part of a team, it's us against him. Now his eyes don't know where to go.
Bill says, 'This is between my buddy Cotter and me. Personal business, understand? We don't want you here. You're ruining our fun. And if I have to make it any plainer, there's going to be a family sitting down to dinner tonight minus a loved one.'
Bill resumes walking and so does Cotter. He looks back to see the college boy following Bill for a number of paces, unsurely, and then falling out of step and beginning to fade down the street and into the crowd.
Bill looks at Cotter and grins narrowly. It is a wolfish sort of look with no mercy in it. He carries his suit jacket clutched and bunched in his hand, wadded up like something he might want to throw.
With advancing dark the field is taking on a deeper light. The grass is incandescent, it has a heat and sheen. People go running past, looking half ablaze, and Russ Hodges moves with the tentative steps of some tourist at a grand bazaar, trying to hand-shuffle through the crowd.
Some ushers are lifting a drunk off the first-base line and the man warps himself into a baggy mass and shakes free and begins to run around the bases in his oversized raincoat with long belt trailing.
Russ makes his way through the infield and dance-steps into an awkward jog that makes him feel ancient and extraneous and he thinks of the ballplayers of his youth, the men with redneck monickers whose endeavors he followed in the papers every day, Eppa Rixey and Hod Eller and old Ivy Wingo, and there is a silly grin pasted across his face because he is a forty-one-year-old man with a high fever and he is running across a ball field to conduct a dialogue with a pack of athletes in their underwear.
He says to someone running near him, 'I don't believe it, I still don't believe it.'
Out in dead center he sees the clubhouse windows catch the trigger-glint of flashbulbs going off inside. He hears a shrill cheer and turns and sees the raincoat drunk sliding into third base. Then he realizes the man running alongside is Al Edelstein, his producer.
Al shouts, 'Do you believe it?'
'I do not believe it,' says Russ.
They shake hands on the run.
Al says, 'Look at these people.' He is shouting and gesturing, waving a Cuban cigar. 'It's like I-don't-know- what.'
'If you don't know what, then I don't know what.'
'Save the voice,' says Al.
'The voice is dead and buried. It went to heaven on a sunbeam.'
'I'll tell you one thing's for certain, old pal. We'll never forget today.'
'Glad you're with me, buddy.'
