The Comedy is Finished

This bedroom had its own lavatory; Larry used it, then returned to find Joyce already dressed and standing in the bedroom doorway, frowning across the landing at the door of Koo’s room. She said, “I’ll watch him. You go talk to Peter.”

“I promised Koo.”

“Larry, it’s all right.” Something had made her stronger, more sure of herself. “I can deal with Mark just as well as you can. Besides, I think he’s gone, this time I think he’s finally run away for good.”

“None of us will get away for good,” Larry said, but he didn’t argue anymore. He shivered, all the warmth out of his body now, and began to dress.

It was the worst day of Peter’s life. He had gone through defeats before, and had his triumphs, and suffered those periods which can sometimes seem even worse, when nothing at all happens, neither for good nor ill, when one’s life seems to have stopped, when you might as well be dead—but this was the worst. To be made a fool of, a laughingstock, before the entire world. To have one’s plans exposed as the vaporings of a simpleton, a dunce with no grasp on reality, an ass, an egotistical buffoon capering in the streets—this was the way he described himself to himself, in his mind. His self-loathing was such that he positively strove to punish his cheeks, grinding and gnawing, biting till he couldn’t stand it any longer, then biting again. The tears glistening in his eyes, which might have been caused by humiliation, or rage, or regret, or despair, were from pain.

This house belonged to a friend of Ginger’s in the music business, and a smallish room behind the kitchen reflected this vocation. The room was soundproofed, and built into the walls was a complete small studio of recording and playback equipment. The furnishings were simple and quiet, with leather swivel chairs and Formica- topped small tables. A console along one wall contained the instrumentation for all the equipment, plus three keyboards. Two heavily draped windows looked out on not much at all; some shrubbery, the tall paling fence belonging to the neighbor next door. It was to this room that Peter retired, once the interminable horrible ghastly program was over, to sit in one of the leather chairs, unmoving, staring at the floor, enveloping himself in pessimism and despondency and self-hatred.

But such feelings about oneself cannot last. They are too painful to be endured for very long; soon we must either forgive ourselves or punish ourselves, with the strongest form of punishment for the strongest level of self- loathing being death. Peter was not a man to willingly end his own life—he was too utterly the center of his universe for that—so that soon he began to shift his angle of view and to see things in a slightly different way.

He wasn’t the one who had gone wrong. He had remained true to his ideals, true to the plan and vision of Revolution, while those others had fallen by the wayside. Eric Mallock! Who could believe such a failure from Eric Mallock? Had they castrated him?

It was true that Peter hadn’t fully researched all ten people before putting their names on the list, it was true he personally knew fewer than half of them, even at the level of nodding acquaintance, but surely a few years ago the reaction would have been very different. There wouldn’t have been more than one or two at the most who would fail to rally if placed on such a list. What had happened? Peter had remained constant, what had happened to all those others? Only three would even answer the call; one a renegade Panther, one an internationalist whose primary involvement wasn’t with the Second American Revolution anyway, and one a simple bank robber. Those three could rot in prison, they meant nothing to Peter at all.

It was the others, the seven. What a betrayal! Never mind that they’d made Peter look like a fool, it was the Movement they had betrayed, the Movement they had held up to public scorn and ridicule, the Movement they had turned their backs on. Peter’s self- hatred reversed itself, extended outward, enveloping the seven who had made this horrible thing happen.

The day would come when they would pay. Did they, like most Americans, think the Revolution was dead? Quiescent, yes, but the same problems of power and responsibility still existed, the same separation of the governed from the governing, the same potential for the misuse of power and for horrors done in the name of the people but without their cognizance or their will. Those who now held power would be unable forever to restrain themselves from using it; the Revolution was a bomb with a fuse that only the Establishment could light, but they would light it. And on that day, Peter’s list would still exist. And the people on it would pay, they would dearly pay.

He had gone this far in his thinking when Ginger entered the room, took a chair facing him, and said, “Well, what now, genius?”

Peter barely heard the sarcasm; his mind was already too full. Nor had he yet considered Ginger’s question. What now? He had no idea. “We go on,” he said. “If we were willing to be stopped by temporary setbacks, we would never have succeeded at all.”

“Temporary setbacks!” Ginger’s true astonishment superseded his half-artificial scorn. “You call this a temporary setback?”

“We still have Koo Davis.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Peter, get out of that dream! You don’t think you’re going on!”

“What else can we do? Give up? There’s no way to give up.”

“Let Davis go,” Ginger said. Waving one hand in a frail parody of his usual ebullient style, he said, “I’ll buy you tickets out of the country. You people go to Algeria.”

“With our tails between our legs? No, Ginger.”

“While you still have tails and legs. Peter, you are a very very silly person, I understand that now, it’s undoubtedly what attracted me to you in the first place.” Bit by bit, Ginger was regaining his normal stance toward life; this disaster seemed, if anything, to have improved his spirits. “You and your little friends go play pattycake in Algeria,” he said. “La grande affaire est finie.”

“No,” Peter said.

Ginger made shooing motions. “C’est dangereux. Allez vous en.”

“No, Ginger.”

Angry and flippant at the same time, Ginger waggled a nervous accusatory finger at Peter: “Je tiens a ce que vous partiez immediatement!”

“I’m staying,” Peter told him. “And Koo Davis is staying.”

“Vous voulez rire!” Ginger turned aside to an imaginary audience, spreading his hands and saying, “Ecoutez cet homme!”

“And you’re staying.”

Ginger was startled briefly back into English: “What? I certainly am not! Il y va de ma vie! Je pense a mon avenir!”

“And my future.” Peter was unassailable. He had stopped grinding his teeth, and the resurgent blinking had once again disappeared. He didn’t know what was going to happen next, where or how he would move from this abyss, but nevertheless he was calm, secure, confident in himself to a degree he’d never known before. He had touched bottom, and was no longer afraid. “You are tied to me, Ginger,” he said, “and if things go badly for me they’ll go just as badly for you.”

Ginger seemed truly depressed now, and not merely play-acting at gloom.

“J’ai mal a la tete,” he said, slowly getting to his feet. “Je vais me coucher.”

“Sit down, Ginger,” Peter said. “And speak English.”

Ginger’s shrug was exquisitely Gallic. “Pourquoi?”

Peter surged to his feet, his right hand whipping around so fast that Ginger never saw it coming. The sound of the slap was a quick flat cracking noise in the soundproofed room, leaving a reddening blot on Ginger’s astounded face. “Sit down,” Peter said. “No more playing. Sit down, speak English, and stop pretending you’re not a part of this.”

“My God, you struck me!”

“Will you sit down, or will I strike you again?”

Slowly, unbelievingly, Ginger backed to the sofa, lowered himself into it, and turned aside as though for thought or self-composure, touching his fingertips to his red cheek. When he next looked over at Peter, his eyes were blank, all his fey mannerisms gone, leaving not a monkey but a monkey-god, stonefaced and unforgiving. “You have just made, Peter,” he said, “perhaps your most serious mistake of all.” Except for the red mark on his cheek, his face had drained of color.

“You aren’t leaving this room,” Peter told him, “until you really do understand that you’re as deep in this thing