Collected Stories

sometimes wore his wig and sometimes not. That also might have been confusing.

Victor had decided to give Wrangel a hearing. If this proved to be a waste of time, he would start forward, assemble his limbs, take his stick upside down like a polo mallet, and set off, as silent as Pearl, as wordless as Soolie. Since he loved conversation, his cutting out would be a dreadful judgment on the man. “You gave me a lot to think about during the night,” said Wrangel. “Your comments on the nonrevolution of Louis Napoleon and his rabble of deadbeats, and especially the application of that to the present moment—what you called the proletarianized present.” He took out a small notebook, which Trina identified as a Gucci product, and read out one of his notes.” ‘Proletarianization: people deprived of everything that formerly defined humanity to itself as human.’”

Never mind the fellow’s thoughts of the night, Victor was trying to adjust himself to the day, shifting his frame, looking for a position that didn’t shoot pains down the back of his thigh. Since the operation, his belly was particularly tender, distended and lumpy, and the small hairs stuck him like burning darts. As if turned inward. The nerve endings along the scar were like the tip of a copper wire with the strands undone. For his part, Wrangel seemed fit—youthfully elderly, durably fragile, probably a vegetarian. As he was trying to fix Wrangel’s position, somewhere between classics of thought (Hegel) and the funny papers, there came before Victor the figures of Happy Hooligan and the Captain from The Katzenjammer Kids with the usual detached colors, streaks of Chinese vermilion and blocks of forest green. Looking regal, feeling jangled, Victor sat and listened. Wrangel’s eyes were inflamed; it must really have been a bad night for him. He had a wry, wistful, starveling expression on his face, and his silk banner made you think of the scarf that had broken Isadora’s neck. His main pitch was now beginning. He had read The Eighteenth Brumaire, and he could prove it. Why had the French Revolution been made in the Roman style? All the revolutionists had read Plutarch. Marx noted that they had been inspired by “old poetry.”

“Ancient traditions lying like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

“I see that you boned up on your Marx.”

“It’s marvelous stuff.” Wrangel refused to take offense. All of Katrina’s sympathies were with him. He was behaving well. He said, “Now let’s see if I can put it together with your conjectures. It’s still a struggle with the burden of history. Le mort saisit le vif. And you suggest that the modern avant-garde hoped to be free from this death grip of tradition. Art becoming an activity in which life brings raw material to the artists, and the artist using his imagination to bring forth a world of his own, owing nothing to the old humanism.”

“Well, okay. What of it?” said Victor.

Katrina’s impression was that Wrangel was pleased with himself. He thought he was passing his orals. “Then you said that the parody of a revolution in 1851—history as farce—might be seen as a prelude to today’s politics of deception—government by comedians who use mass-entertainment techniques. Concocted personalities, pseudoevents.”

Worried for him now, Katrina moved to the edge of her seat. She thought it might be necessary to rise soon, get going, break it up. “So you fly around the country and talk to psychiatrists,” she said.

Her intervention was not welcome, although Wrangel was polite. “Yes.”

A sound approach to popular entertainment,” said Victor. “Enlist the psychopaths.”

“Try leaving them out, at any level,” said Wrangel, only slightly stiff. He said, “In Detroit I’m seeing a party named Fox. He has published a document by a certain D’Amiens, who is sometimes also Boryshinski. The author is supposed to have disappeared without a trace. He had made the dangerous discovery that the planet is controlled by powers from other worlds. All this according to Mr. Fox’s book. These other-world powers have programmed the transformation and control of the human species through something called CORP-ORG-THINK. They work through a central data bank and they already have control of the biggest corporations, banking circles, and political elites. Some of their leading people are David Rockefeller, Whitney Stone of Stone and Webster, Robert Anderson of Arco. And the overall plan is to destroy our life-support system, and then to evacuate the planet. The human race will be moved to a more suitable location.”

“And what becomes of this earth?” said Katrina.

“It becomes hell, the hell of the unfit whom CORP plans to leave behind. When the long reign of Quantification begins, says Boryshinski, mankind will accept a purely artificial mentality, and the divine mind will be overthrown by the technocratic mind.”

“Does this sound to you like a possible film?” said Katrina.

“If they don’t ask too much for the rights, I might be interested.”

“How would you go about saving us—in the picture, I mean?” Victor said. “Maybe Marx suggests some angle that you can link up with the divine mind.”

Katrina hoped that Wrangel would stand up to Victor, and he did. Being deferential got you nowhere; you had to fight him if you wanted his good opinion. Wrangel said, “I’d forgotten how grand a writer Marx was. What marvelous images! The ghosts of Rome surrounding the cradle of the new epoch. The bourgeois revolution storming from success to success. ‘Ecstasy the everyday spirit.’

‘Men and things set in sparkling brilliants.’ But a revolution that draws its poetry from the past is condemned to end in depression and dullness. A real revolution is not imitative or histrionic. It’s a real event.”

“Oh, all right,” said Victor. “You’re dying to tell me what you think. So why don’t you tell me and get it over with.”

“My problem is with class struggle,” said Wrangel, “the destiny of social classes. You argue that class paralysis produces these effects of delusion—lying, cheating, false appearances. It all seems real, but what’s really real is the unseen convulsion under the apparitions. You’re imposing European conceptions of class on Americans.”

Katrina’s thought was: Ah, he wants to play with the big boys. She was afraid he might be hurt.

“And what’s your idea?” said Victor.

“Well,” said Wrangel, “I have a friend who says that the created souls of people, of the Americans, have been removed. The created soul has been replaced by an artificial one, so there’s nothing real that human beings can refer to when they try to judge any matter for themselves. They live mainly by rationales. They have made-up guidance systems.”

“That’s the artificial mentality of your Boryshinski,” said Victor.

“It has nothing to do with Boryshinski. Boryshinski came much later.”

“Is this friend of yours a California friend? Is he a guru?” said Victor.

“I wish we had had time for a real talk,” said Wrangel. “You always set a high value on ideas, Victor. I remember that. Well, I’ve considered this from many sides, and I am convinced that most ideas are trivial. A thought of the real is also an image of the real; if it’s a true thought, it’s a true picture and is accompanied also by a true feeling. Without this, our ideas are corpses….”

“Well, by God!” Victor took up his stick, and Katrina was afraid that he might take a swipe at Wrangel, whack him with it. But no, he planted the stick before him and began to rise. It was a complicated operation. Shifting forward, he braced himself upon his knuckles. He lifted up the bum leg; his color was hectic. Remember (Katrina remembered) that he was almost always in pain.

Katrina explained as she was picking up the duffel bag and the violin case, “We have a plane to catch.”

Wrangel answered with a sad smile. “I see. Can’t fight flight schedules, can we?”

Victor righted his cap from the back and made for the door, stepping wide in his crippled energetic gait.

Outside the lounge Katrina said, “We still have about half an hour to kill.”

“Driven out.”

“He was terribly disappointed.”

“Sure he was. He came east just to take me on. Maybe his guru told him that he was strong enough, at last. He gave himself away when he mentioned Parker Tyler and Tchelitchew. Tchelitchew, you see, attacked me. He said he had a vision of the world, whereas the abstract painting that I advocated was like a crazy lady expecting a visit from the doctor and smearing herself with excrement to make herself attractive—like a love potion. Wrangel was trying to stick me with this insult.”

Threatening weather, the wicked Canadian north wind crossing the border in white gusts, didn’t delay boarding. The first to get on the plane was Victor. His special need, an aisle seat at the back, made this legitimate. It depressed Katrina to enter the empty dark cabin. The sky looked dirty, and she was anxious. Their seats were in